Kiss Across Chaos (Kiss Across Time #10) - Tracy Cooper-Posey Page 0,62
to absorb the fact. It added an extra dollop of guilt to the pile already steaming in his gut. Aran perched on the opposite arm of the sofa to the end where Taylor sat and considered her.
Why had she hugged Jesse and not him?
Why did that bother him so much? He’d stayed away, yes. But he hadn’t ghosted anyone. He’d stayed in contact. Called and texted. Not regularly, it was true, but…
It really had been over a year since he’d seen the family. He came back to that sad fact with a jolt.
And somewhere in between the last Thanksgiving he’d attended and today, he’d stopped thinking of the woman sitting at the end of the sofa as his mother. She was Taylor in appearance and in his mind, the woman who had captured the love and devotion of two of the oldest vampires still marching the earth, men who’d survived innumerable dangers, wars and disasters, who refused to suffer fools and who had belonged to no one but themselves until shortly before Aran had been born…
He loved all three of them but had no illusions about his fathers. They were shaggy old wisdom bound in eternal, deceptively youthful flesh. That was probably why they raised his hackles within minutes, no matter what the conversation.
Aran always felt completely inadequate, talking to his fathers. His mother, though, never seemed to judge him, no matter what.
Yet she was studying him now, and not smiling. “We missed you at the solstice dinner.”
“I thought you were a historian and good at keeping records? I’ve missed more than one. Thanksgivings, too.”
“Yes, but I thought I’d ease into that.”
“I wasn’t ready.”
“To be in the same room with us?” Her tone was cool.
“Something like that.”
Taylor’s gaze didn’t waver. Then, suddenly, she smiled. “Did I ever tell you how small Veris and Brody made me feel, when I first got to know them?”
Aran could feel his jaw loosening. “You?”
Taylor nodded. “It’s all that history behind them. It oozes from their pores when they speak and react to anything. You can almost smell it. And there was I, a history professor, who knew nothing compared to their first-hand experiences.”
Aran rubbed his jaw. “Yeah, it’s something like that.” In fact, he thought Taylor had come closer to putting her thumb precisely on what unsettled him the most when he was around his parents, for Taylor gave off dazzling wattage of her own. “I got tired of feeling humble and stupid,” he added.
Taylor considered that with a small nod of her head. “You know that feeling is purely in your own head, don’t you?”
“Yeah, but that doesn’t stop me feeling it.”
“But it does stop you from coming home…” she concluded with an unhappy little sigh.
Aran shifted uneasily on the sofa arm. “Well, I’m home now.”
“Not quite,” Taylor pointed out. “Although Veris will ask you to come back to Canada with us. You should say yes.”
“I should?” He could feel the resistance building in him.
“Jesse will want to visit, and it will cut down on my return jumps there and back.”
“Jesse visits a lot.”
“She doesn’t mind feeling humble,” Taylor said, with a small smile. “Her tolerance comes from her military training and having superiors telling her how high to jump, I suspect. And she likes listening to stories, which endears her in Veris’ and Brody’s eyes.”
“Now you’re just rubbing the guilt in,” Aran growled.
She looked surprised. “I’m not, actually. Not intentionally, at least. Jesse is family, Aran.”
The knowledge was clear in his mind that Taylor was in some way trying to warn him. She was referring to the fact that she had found them in the same location on the timescape. Had she extrapolated from there? Did she suspect that they were…whatever they were?
And Aran was back to the knotty problem which had been gnawing at his middle for weeks. It reared its head way too often, lately. Every time he looked at Jesse, it hovered in the back of his mind.
What was she really thinking? She had always been completely and utterly independent, to the point where even sharing her thoughts was unnecessary, in her eyes.
How would this sudden public fuss impact her? Would she finally lose interest in anything but her writing? Aran had been braced for her to move on. Was this what would end it?
Whatever “it” was.
He’d grown adept at choking out any hint of hope in his thoughts. He starved his imagination and just…waited. “Jesse will hate all the media attention.”