"Not only can't I touch you, I'm not even supposed to think about you for the next thirty years?"

"That's how long it will take for you to gain full control of your powers. You should be able to master the basics in a few weeks."

She bridled at his overly patient tone, and snapped back, "So then you'll stop jumping around like water on a skillet, afraid to come anywhere near me?"

His expression didn't change, but she felt a chill wind brush across her mind. She instantly regretted taking out her anger on him. The situation might be driving her half mad with frustration, but he was suffering just as much.

"I'm trying to keep you safe," he reminded her.

"I know. I'm sorry. This is hard for you, too." She sighed, and wrapped his jacket's arms tighter around herself. They continued the walk in silence.

When they reached the apartment, Desmond headed straight for the kitchen and pulled a medicine bottle from the refrigerator. She watched with mingled fascination and horror as he boiled a pan of water to warm the liquid, then turned and faced her.

"Now that you know what I am, there's no reason to hide this. Is there?"

"No." She recognized his challenge, his subtle insistence that his needs could frighten her into leaving him. She hadn't backed down from a challenge yet, and she wasn't about to start now. "Let's stop p.u.s.s.yfooting around the issue, and cut straight to the point. You're a cursed immortal. I'm not."

He dropped the bottle into the pan with a clatter, turning to look at her. She'd gotten his attention.

Good.

"Now, as I see it, there are only three possibilities," she continued. "You can become a normal human being, we can leave everything the way it is now, or I can become like you. Let's take the easy option first. Is it possible for you to turn back into a normal human being?"

Desmond stared at her, opened his mouth to reply, and then just blinked. Chuckling, he shook his head. "You're remarkable, do you know that? I think you took all of five minutes for recovering your wits before you were back to being the sc.r.a.ppy little terrier, worrying the truth out of your story."

"Oh, thanks. Every woman longs to have the man she loves call her a dog."

"You know that's not what I meant, dear heart. Don't get your hackles up." He laughed, and reached out to draw her closer for a conciliatory kiss. His hand stopped just short of her jaw as he realized what he'd meant to do, and he stepped back, out of reach. All traces of humor were gone from his voice when he added, "To answer your question, no, I can't become a normal human being, not without killing all the neukocytes in my system. And the only way to do that is to kill me."

"That's not an option, then." She didn't want him to even consider the possibility that the best way to protect her would be by eliminating the danger, in this case him. "How about the other extreme? Could I become like you?"

"You wouldn't want-"

"That's not what I asked. I asked if it was possible."

He considered for a long moment, before admitting, "I don't know. Philippe has been trying to reconstruct his grandmother's curse for over a hundred years, but hasn't finished it yet."

Rebecca blinked, sidetracked by this new information. "Philippe's grandmother was the Voodoo priestess? She cursed her own grandson?"

"Why not? Her curse killed her daughter. She died in childbirth. My father committed suicide immediately after, I a.s.sume because he felt her death."

Rebecca hesitated, but she had to know. "You said you drank blood, before the researchers created their potion. Did you ever... kill anyone?"

"Yes."

She clutched the table behind her, and refused to back away from him. Then she watched his eyes mist with remembered pain, and she only wanted to soothe him. She held onto the table to keep from going to his side. "The first death was an accident," he said quietly. "A blood sacrifice got out of hand. I vowed that it would not happen again, that I would take no more than what a person was willing to give. After that, I haunted battlefields, offering easy deaths to those dying in pain."

"Did you feel their pain?"

"Yes. Giving them peace helped me as much as it helped them." He smiled sadly. "Of course, I was the only one who survived the experience. Later, I worked the night shift in a hospital. I would bring the newly dead to the morgue, with an unauthorized stop on the way. It was easy to convince the coroner to overlook the evidence. For over a hundred years I've surrounded myself with death so that I could live."

"A hundred years?" With everything else he'd told her, she'd forgotten he'd also said he'd been born in 1853. The rare first editions of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells lining his study supported that claim, but viscerally, she couldn't believe Desmond was that old. She examined his features from a table length away, but found no hint of lines or wrinkles, not so much as a single gray hair marring the luxuriant waves of black surrounding his face. She flexed her fingers, remembering the feel of every inch of his exquisite body. There had been no signs of aging, no sagging or wrinkles, anywhere on him. Only firm, muscular flesh.

She clenched her hands by her side, fighting not to reach for him. Imagining the feel of him, skin slick with pa.s.sion, his body hot with desire, she felt an answering flame kindle within her. But she could not touch him. She must not reach for him. Her fingernails dug into the palms of her hands as she tightened her fists.

"Does that upset you?" He must be shielding his mind from hers. Without his telepathic powers, he misinterpreted the cause of her tension.

"No. I don't care that you're over a century old. You don't even look thirty." Her face flared hot then cold as she realized what that meant for the future. "Actually, it does upset me. I bet you looked a lot like you do now, a hundred years ago."

He nodded. "Much the same."

"Uh-huh. And a hundred years from now, you'll still look pretty much like this?"

"Yes."

"You know what I'll look like a hundred years from now? I'll be dead."

"Rebecca-"

"Even twenty years from now, you'll look thirty, and I'll be pushing fifty. In forty years, I'll be seventy.

You'll still be thirty. Do you see a problem with this? The lines in that famous poem are 'Grow old along with me, the best is yet to be,' not 'Watch me grow old, the good times are gone.'" She bowed her head, closer than she'd ever been to admitting defeat. "Maybe you're right. Maybe it is best if I go."

"Go? I never said anything about you going."

"Well I can't stay here. Don't you see what it would be like? Day after day, night after night, denying ourselves the most casual of touches, not even thinking of each other in case that triggers a vampire response. Celibacy is one thing, but you're asking for monasticism. I'm not cut out to be a saint. I know I can't do that. I don't see why we should suffer through the agony of trying." She pushed herself away from the table.

He also stood, and stepped forward as if to stop her from leaving the kitchen. "But given the other options-"

"I know which one I'll take." Despite everything he'd said, she couldn't believe in an all-powerful, irreversible curse. They could find a solution, but only if he believed it could be found. Stepping around the table, she caught him off guard, and pulled his head down for a heated kiss. She opened her heart, her soul, and her mind to him, pouring her love through the kiss, desperation shattering any thoughts of restraint.

He wrapped his arms around her, drawing her tight against him, even as his mouth claimed hers in searing response. He kissed her with all the hunger in his soul, trembling with the restrained pa.s.sion he fought to contain. His mingled fear and desire coursed through her, scalding her thoughts with the heat of his emotion.

He jerked his head back, breaking the kiss and breaking their contact. She barely felt the cold air ofthe kitchen on her skin as he pushed her away, devastated by the chill left behind in her lonely, solitary thoughts.

"d.a.m.n it, Rebecca! You know better than to do that."

"Yes, I do. And so do you. But that wasn't enough, was it?" She advanced on him, forcing him to walk backwards across the kitchen as he tried to keep a s.p.a.ce between them. "And knowledge will never be enough to keep us apart. Because what we feel for each other is too strong to be denied. You're the other half of my whole. We can not be separated. And any attempt to keep us apart is doomed to failure."

He rubbed a hand over his face. He was as physically perfect and healthy as ever, but his resigned expression and dull eyes made him seem old and broken. "You may be right. In which case, you'll have to leave."

"No!" Rebecca clenched her fists. Her strategy had backfired. Now she'd have to work doubly hard to convince him of her real intent.

"It's for your own good," he told her. The dreaded phrase snapped her already strained self-control.

"My own good?" She stalked across the kitchen, knocking the chairs out of her way. "And who are you to decide what is best for me? Who are you to decide what I should do? Is it because you don't think I'm a mature adult, capable of making reasoned decisions on my own? After all, you've had over a hundred years of acc.u.mulated wisdom and experience, compared to my few decades."

Desmond held out his hands, trying to placate her. At the same time, he backed away, glancing nervously from side to side. "Rebecca. Darling. You're overwrought."

"Overwrought? Overwrought! Next you'll tell me I'm overreacting."

"But you are."

"Really?" She stopped and struck a casual pose, leaning back on her elbows against the counter.

"Then by all means, enlighten me. Somehow I'd gotten the impression that you wanted me to rip out my heart and stomp it into the ground, on the theory that this would make me happy. But if I'm wrong, I'm willing to listen. So talk."

Desmond cleared his throat, unsure of what to say. She'd taken his words and twisted them, making them into something completely opposite of what he'd intended. Of course he only wanted her happiness.

But she had to see that her only chance for happiness lay in being separate from him, no matter how much the separation hurt him.

She tapped her foot, reminding him that the time she was allowing him for explanations was fast running out.

"Can we start by listing what we agree on?" he asked hopefully. Maybe if he could figure out where her reasoning had jumped the track, he could get them back in accord.

"Sure. We agree that there are two possibilities for our future: stay together or split up."

"Rebecca, I'm not asking you to leave because I want to be rid of you. That's the farthest thing from my mind. I love you. I adore you. Which is why I can't risk your life this way. I would live with you for the rest of your life, if you would let me. But you're the one who insisted you couldn't do that."

"But what kind of a life would it be without you?"

"Any life is precious. And it needn't be forever. After you've mastered your mental control-"

"You said that would take thirty-five years! You want me to wait until I'm a senior citizen before coming back to you? At that point, making love to you would probably still be fatal. I'd have a heart attack from the unexpected activity."

An invisible fist punched through his chest and squeezed his heart. He couldn't draw a breath, and couldn't hear past the high-pitched whine in his ears. Time had once again played him for a fool. His beautiful, pa.s.sionate wife would leave, never to return. Even if she came back after she'd honed her mental skills, it would be another woman, bearing her name and her time-ravaged face, who returned to him. His darling Rebecca would never come back.

He shook his head, forcing himself back to the here and now. "The important thing is that you'd be safe. You'd have a life, even if it didn't include me."

"You just don't get it, do you?" She closed her eyes, and screwed up her face in concentration. Andthen the waves of mental images. .h.i.t him.

Rebecca, returning to her apartment. A series of friends and acquaintances, each of whom she tried to mentally reach out to, searching for the connection she'd found with him. Each failure made her that much more bitter and alone. She funneled her energy into her work, producing probing and insightful articles and reports. Until she started to report things known only to the people she interviewed, that her burgeoning telepathic gifts had pulled during the interview. Unable to tell the difference between the two types of hearing, she exposed secrets her subjects intended to hide. People no longer wanted her to interview them. After a few complaints and threats of lawsuits, her editors no longer trusted her reports.

Her career started a long decline, culminating in her expulsion from the most disreputable of the tabloid rags. Her beautiful chestnut hair had turned gray from the constant stress, and her pixieish face had turned pinched and drawn from worry. Harsh lines scored her countenance, and her clothing hung from her emaciated body. She returned to her apartment, now a dingy walkup in a dangerous part of town, and tried to drown her sorrows in the alcohol that blunted her too-sharp perceptions. Then she walked into the bedroom and opened the nightstand drawer, reaching inside for the gun she kept there....

He broke their mental contact, opening his eyes to search her pale white face. She met his gaze with her direct gray stare.

"Do you-" His voice broke, to his chagrin, and he started again. "Do you really expect it to be like that?"

"Yes. Or worse. You said your curse would kill me if you admitted you loved me. Well, even if I leave, it will. The knowledge that I loved and was loved, and threw it all away, will eat at me until I can't bear to go on."

He righted one of the chairs she'd knocked over earlier, and sat down. He wanted to protect her, to keep her safe, and to ensure her happiness, even at his own expense. But he'd thought returning her to her previous life would carry no risks. A cold dread snaked through his stomach.

"There's a way to prevent that. If you returned to your old life exactly the way that you left it, with your mental powers dormant...." He swallowed and looked away, unable to even finish the suggestion. But if saving her required sacrificing her memories and love of him, he would do it.

"Pretend the last few weeks didn't happen?" she whispered in stunned disbelief. "Wipe them out of existence, along with everything that happened during them? Destroy our love, as if it never was?"

"If that's what it takes to protect you-"

"Then the cost is too high."

"But-"

"No."

They stared at each other, stalemated. Not for the first time, she had him completely at a loss for words. Finally, she broke the silence.

"You keep saying you want to protect me. That's sweet, and very n.o.ble of you, but you forgot to ask me one very important question. You never asked if Iwanted to be protected. And Desmond, I don't.

I'm a fighter. I don't want to sit on the sidelines where it's safe. I want to be playing the game."

He sighed and rubbed the back of his neck where a tension headache was forming. Everything she said made sense, but- "I can't do it. I can't risk taking your life. It goes against everything-"

"You said you'd never take anything that wasn't freely offered, didn't you?"

He nodded, unable to answer. There was only one reason she'd ask that question now, and he had the irrational hope that if he didn't speak, she wouldn't either. He was wrong.

"Then I offer you my life, freely and without hesitation." Her eyes hardened into chips of granite. "But I refuse to let you take my hope. I refuse to let you take my dreams."

"Rebecca, please. Reconsider."

"No. I've made my position clear. What are you going to do about it?"

He stared into her eyes, searching for any sign that she might weaken. Two chips of diamond glittered back at him. She would not be moved.

He loved her more in that instant than he ever had. And she was right. He couldn't live without her. He would have to keep from infecting her. If he failed, he would watch her die in his arms, knowing he'd caused her death. She'd given him no other choice.

"What am I going to do about it? What can I do?" He sighed. "I'm going to love you. Forever."

He held out his hand. Without hesitation, she placed her hand in his. He opened his thoughts to her, unconcerned when she stepped closer and wrapped her arms around his neck. He was not projecting any feelings of bloodl.u.s.t. His mind was too filled with the wonder of her love.

Chapter 19.

HAND IN HAND, they walked into Desmond's bedroom. The bedroom that belonged to both of them, now.

Desmond stopped in the middle of the room, and turned Rebecca to face him. "I love you."

Now that the words had been said, he could not stop himself from repeating them. He slowly opened her blouse, pausing after each b.u.t.ton to kiss the newly revealed flesh, and to tell her again that he loved her. By the time her blouse and bra had fallen to the floor, she was flushed with pa.s.sion and swaying beneath his touch.

Her fingers fumbled with his shirt, and he shrugged it off. They embraced, chest to chest and cheek to cheek, as he stroked her silken back, and she trailed feathered caresses up and down his spine.

She nestled closer, lightly kissing his ear, and whispered, "Mmm. This is nice. And you thought we couldn't touch."