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He said it so seriously that she had to laugh.
“What am I up to? Really, Graeme? I think I should be asking you that question. You’re the master of games, not me.”
Dropping her arms, she moved to the bedroom door and held it in preparation to slam it behind him. “Why don’t you go check your electronics again, wild man, because I don’t have time for your moodiness right now.”
The change in him was instant, but then it only began to coincide with hers.
Mating Heat.
She’d been burning for him for two days. The need for his touch was growing like an addict’s need for a fix.
She wondered if she could find a twelve-step program to fix it.
She doubted it. Her luck simply wasn’t that good.
Surely to God there was a cure rather than just some stupid hormonal treatment to aid in the symptoms. Because she had news for him, she simply wasn’t in the market to try another therapy.
She’d had enough of those as a child.
“My moodiness?” he
asked carefully, his expression tightening, his eyes narrowing on her warningly.
She couldn’t help rolling her eyes. “Haven’t you figured out that expression and that tone of voice really don’t work on me? The days of blind obedience are over, Graeme. They’ll never return.”
“You’re no longer a child, Cat,” he scoffed. “Blind obedience was never what I wanted. Yet you seem determined to keep us in the past, where every act, every response, is either black or white, when you know damned good and well our lives never existed on such a plane.”
“You mean a plane where I could trust you?” she asked archly, her grip tightening on the door. “You’re right there. We never existed in that place, I just thought we did.”
“For someone with exceptional photographic memory and an aptitude for logic, you can be amazingly nearsighted and surprisingly illogical,” he accused her as his expression pulled into lines of disapproval. “I taught you better than this, Cat. Why don’t you use some of those incredible gifts I know you possess for something other than hating me?”
The slam of the door wasn’t a shock. Even as her muscles bunched and the hiss of fury left her lips she threw it against the door frame with a powerful flip of her wrist.
“Because you’re so deserving of my hatred?” she retorted, knowing it wasn’t hate she felt.
She’d known that all along. She’d never hated him, not for a single moment. How much easier her life might have been if she could.
“In the eyes of a child, perhaps,” he agreed. “But you aren’t a child, Cat. Even at twelve you were no child, any more than Judd and I had the option of claiming such innocence. You knew when I disappeared that I hadn’t been taken by that death squad, just as you knew a transfusion of your blood would have dire results. You ignored what you knew.”
“You were dying!” she screamed, overwhelmed by the lash of remembered fear at the sight of his wounds and the blood he had lost. “I couldn’t lose you.”
But she had lost him.
He stood there, just staring at her, his gaze heavy and somber. And knowing.
She had known the transfusion would enrage him. She’d overheard Dr. Foster telling him never to risk it without taking precautions. She hadn’t known what the precautions were, but she’d seen the injection he’d received before getting a transfusion from her after an experiment Dr. Bennett had performed had gone wrong.
“To you, it was worth the risk,” he guessed, his voice incredibly sad. “That risk exploded out of my control.”
“Because I infected you?” she sneered.
Stalking to the other side of the room, she rubbed at her arms, the ache for his touch nearly unbearable now.
“I won’t fight with you over things you refuse to see.” He breathed out, the sound fraught with weariness, or sadness. “I can understand your anger, Cat. I can even understand hatred. Your refusal to acknowledge what you knew then and now, I refuse to accept.”
He refused to accept it?
He’d done everything possible to isolate her, to strip her of friends and loyalties, and he thought she should just accept it? Acknowledge what he thought she should know?
