I stared at his receding figure, stunned. He was going to leave me? Just leave me? After I'd given him blood and had the most erotic experience of my life, he was just going to leave?
"Hey!" I bellowed. "Alec? You're leaving me?"
He stopped, and I knew, just knew, he was sighing.
I apologized for taking more blood than I should. I didn't berate you for reviving me. I made you hum. What more do you want from me?
I bit back my pride and ran after him, trying to follow the same path he took around the rocks. "Well . . . geez, I don't know. I just think that you kind of owe me, you know?"
He turned, his expression dark with anger. "For bringing me back to awareness that I am doubly damned? " He made a low, sweeping bow, his mind filled with bitterness. "Thank you for tormenting me as no one else has done."
"I didn't mean to . . . you didn't want to be woken up?"
"No."
"Why not?"
He gestured around us. "If you had the opportunity of slipping into unawareness of this torment, would you not choose to do so?"
"No. I'd choose to leave."
The look he gave me was filled with scorn. "There is no way out."
"Of course there is. If there's a way in, there's a way out. Am I going to be a female vampire now because of your mark?"
He just stared at me for a couple of seconds, then took me by the wrist and pulled me after him as he headed to what I thought was the north. "If your sister is a Beloved, you must know that it doesn't work like that. The marking I referred to is the mental connection we have. It is one of the seven steps of Joining, which is wholly impossible given that my Beloved died six hundred years ago, but understandable given the amount of blood you gave me."
"Well, I don't know about this marking business," I said, carefully locking away the thought that reincarnation might very well mean his Beloved was alive and kicking, and damned close to jumping his bones again despite her desperate attempt to stay away from him, "but as for the other, I don't know that much about you guys. Jas went off to live with Avery, and . . . well, I'm not very comfortable around him. Or his brothers. Plus there's the fact that Jas has been trying to fix me up with Avery's youngest brother, Daniel, and I - "
The word Alec snarled wasn't at all polite, nor was the face he turned on me as he gripped me with both hands. But what was most intriguing was the hot spurt of jealousy that I could feel rip through him.
He was jealous? Of me? Why did that delight me so much?
I am not jealous.
No? So the thought of me having sex with Daniel does nothing - Alec!
His tongue was there in my mouth again, his thigh shoved between mine, his fingers working my zipper down again. Mine! he snarled into my head.
Oh, I am so not yours!
You are. You gave yourself to me.
We had sex, Alec. That's all. Get over yourself. Oh, holy mother, do that again first, though. Hooyeah!
Another shout from the distance, somewhat louder, brought sanity back to us. Alec removed his hand from my underwear, his eyes burning with passion as he rezipped my jeans.
"That 'mine!' crap? It's so not happening. I don't like possessive men," I told him.
"At this moment, love, I don't particularly care what you like," he snapped, grabbing me by the hand and hauling me after him.
"Where, exactly, do you think you're taking me?"
"Away."
"Away where?"
"Just away. You didn't wish to be left behind, so you're coming with me."