Page 93 of A Love Most Fatal

I wanted to keep my hands off her, but it’s a short and futile battle as I grip her biceps and make her turn towards me.

“That’s just it. I don’t think that at all. I did at first, but you keep being wonderful, the best woman I’ve ever met, and everytime I thought you were evil or deranged, you’ve proved to be just the opposite.”

“And my life? I’m not going to just get another job, Nate. This isn’t a temporary thing you can save me from, this is forever for me. For my kids.”

“I wouldn’t ask you to,” I say, and I realize for the first time that I mean it. These thoughts have been living in my mind where I tried to pretend they weren’t real, nestled in beside my very real feelings for Vanessa. She pulls away from my grip and stalks to the other side of the room, once again putting distance between us that makes me feel like I’m floating alone on a raft in the middle of the ocean.

Vanessa worries her hands together and chews on the inside of her cheek. She halts her pacing and meets my desperate gaze.

“I need you to be very clear about what you’re saying,” Vanessa says, and her voice isn’t confident, but nearly shaking. Timid.

I just want to keep touching her, I want to hold her against me—showing my feelings would be easier than speaking them, but I know that wouldn’t be enough, so I take a big breath and try.

“Maxim is a better choice. He’s perfect for you,” I start. “But I want you to choose me instead.”

Vanessa’s lips part, her brown eyes betraying her shock at the admission.

“I know I’m not strong, I barely know how to fight, and I throw up when I see blood, but I can learn. I’mlearning. Mary’s lessons—she’ll teach me how to defend myself better, I can keep working at the school, or I can do accounting for you, I can learn whatever you need, I’d learn for you.”

“And the bad stuff? What about when I have to bring a criminal into our home? Someone unsavory in the basement,where I will have to do horrible, unsavory things? What about when I come home with blood on my hands?”

I swallow down the dry lump in my throat, really wishing I’d thought to bring a water bottle. “I’ll help you clean them,” I say, my mind straying to the night of the gala, her own blood dripping into the kitchen sink. “You have your reasons, and they’re always good. You aren’t some monster killing for sport, I know that now.”

“This isn’t—” Vanessa takes a clarifying breath. “I can’t date you, Nate. It’s all or nothing with me. It’s marriage and a fleet of little babies who will have to see and hear and do very difficult things when they grow up. I can’t just date someone until they get tired of the bad business and shitty coworkers.”

“I know that,” I say, though she’s right to think that I haven’t thought as far down the road as our children having blood on theirownhands. I only know what our private nights look like. I don’t know what being together for real, in the light of day, would look like in practice—in the reality of a marriage, a life together. It terrifies me. “And I still want you.”

“You’ll change your mind,” she says, and her eyes are welling with tears that I want to wipe away with my thumbs. “You can’t want this.”

I do step closer now, anxious to touch her and hold her and kiss all over her face, put hickeys on her neck so everyone knows she’s mine.

“I don’t understand it either,” I admit. “But I want you all the time. Forever. And I can’t keep pretending that interviewing these men doesn’t make my blood boil imagining any one of them touching you, standing by you, putting a baby in you. There’s not a man on this planet good enough for you, not me, not even the Russian, but I want to try.”

I don’t reach out to her, but we are close enough now that she has to look up at me beneath her big black lashes.

“Let me try,” I whisper.

“You would hate it here.” Her quiet voice breaks and a tear spills over. “This place is a graveyard.”

I cringe remembering how cruel I was when she brought me here, how she opened her home to protect me, and I spent the better part of a week telling her how wrong she was for it.

“I thought I would hate it. I really tried to, but there’s nothing rotten about this place, or your family, or you.”

She groans, more emphatic now. “But the night of the gala,you said?—”

“I lied, Vanessa!” I press on even with the cracking of my voice. “I lied. You scared the shit out of me, and I was falling in love with you, and I thought you could never be with me, and I lied.”

Vanessa says nothing, her face searching mine like a crossword, tears still tracing lines to her chin.

I step closer still and she doesn’t flinch when I swipe my thumbs across her cheeks.

“I do, I do. I love you.Please,” I whisper, but I don’t even know what I’m begging for. “Please.”

She must get the message though, because she grips the collar of my sweatshirt and pulls my mouth down to hers.

That does it.

We are mouths and hands and limbs—a cacophony of sensation. I press Vanessa against the wall, pouring a moan into her mouth while she grinds against me until she pulls back and mutters “bed” into my ear.

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