chose her family, her sight over Tucker? Then she would leave him without a mate and with the knowledge that his mate had fallen in love with him? Could he survive that pain?
Mary made a rough sound in her throat and Tucker stopped playing abruptly. “Are you okay?”
“Yes,” she managed, swallowing hard. “How long until sunrise?”
“Just under three hours. Then I guess I’ll be spending the day in the storm cellar until we leave for the final stretch of the trip.”
“I’ll spend it with you.” Loath to think about the final anything with Tucker, she held out her hand to be helped off the bed, giving him no choice but to touch her, though she could sense his hesitation. As if he sensed her determined mood, but didn’t quite know the cause. “Will you take me for a walk?”
His big fingers jolted slightly against hers, before firming, holding her hand in a protective grip. “Of course,” he said dryly, guiding her to the door.
“You sound…funny.”
They walked side by side down the hallway, but it must have been narrow, because her hip kept brushing his upper thigh. “It’s just that on the way here, I was thinking…this felt kind of normal. Bringing home a girl to meet your father. Spending the night in separate rooms—”
“Why?”
“Ah, it’s just a tradition, I guess. A sign of respect. When you’re an unmarried couple, you sleep apart under your parents’ roof. Especially if the girl’s father is in residence. Then you sleep your ass on the couch or wake up to a shotgun in the face. Come to think of it, I think most of this knowledge is coming from romantic comedies I watched in the nineties. Watch your step. There’s two of them.”
Mary smiled. “I still like it. Especially that you felt normal.”
A breeze coasted over her face, telling her they were outside. Before she could even shiver, Tucker had draped his jacket around her shoulders, taking her hand again. “Then I thought, if this was normal and we were a human couple, we’d probably sneak out in the middle of the night to be together.”
“And here we are.”
“And here we are.”
“What would we do on this sneak out? If things were normal. And I was just a girl you were bringing home to meet your father.”
“Oh…” Somehow, she could picture him rubbing at the back of his neck. “I’d probably give you an amateur astronomy lesson. Try to impress you.”
She grinned. “I’d totally buy it.”
“In that case, just overhead is the famous squirrel fight constellation. There are nine stars…arranged exactly in the shape of two squirrels trying to get the same nut. It’s Greek.”
No walls sent the sound of her laughter echoing back, so she pictured a wide-open space. “Tell me what everything looks like.”
“Pretty dark. The moon and stars are the only light, except a little spilling out from the house. We’re in a field that goes on for about two acres, before you’d hit the trees. They’re probably turning orange for fall about now. The grass you’re walking on will be knee-high in the spring, but right now it’s kind of laying low from being scorched all summer. We’re just in the wide open, really. Swallowed up in the night.”
“I want you to make love to me.”
His hungry energy ripped through her. “Oh Jesus Christ. You didn’t even warn me.” They stopped walking and his hands settled on her shoulders. “Absolutely not, Mary.”
The desire spilling off of him practically had her panting. “I know what you’re thinking. That I’m offering myself out of guilt. Because I’m your mate and I might be leaving you—”
“Whoa whoa. Might be?” Tucker’s hands dropped away from her shoulders like forty-pound stones. “God, Mary, you can’t be thinking of changing your plans. This is why I kept it from you.”
“Tucker…I’m scared.”
That brought him up short, his sudden alertness raising the hair on her arms. Her vampire did not like it when she was fearful—and she would have felt bad for using his protectiveness against him if it wasn’t true. She was scared. “Why?”
“I wasn’t scared to marry Hadrian before, because there has only ever been isolation and solitude for me. Anything was better than that. Don’t you understand? So I was just running toward it with open arms, ready to make any tradeoff necessary to bring my family back together. But now there’s you. I’m not alone or isolated now. I have something to lose.”
“I can’t give you what he can,” Tucker ground out.
“Stop telling yourself