I shifted under his hot lips. Craving and yearning like never before. It was as if death had given new life to my need for Lucian. As if I hadn't needed him enough already. I frantically returned kiss for kiss hungrily accepting and surrendering to his own unabashed assault on my senses.

" Enough! " He tore his lips away from my own to pant down at me seemingly as worked up as I in our little marathon kissing session.

"Leave us!" He commanded to the other occupants of our room without tearing his eyes away from my own.

I gazed back at him with pure longing and love for him.

" You did this on purpose, " he didn't lose a moment in dropping the accusations. Like a splash of icy water the sensual heat that had engulfed me snuffed out completely.

" You wanted to bloody die. As if I would allow you to escape me that way," he said hardly.

Wells of tears flooded my eyes and drenched down my cheeks but he was not done yet. He was in a rare spat determined to have out with all his pent up rage on my account.

"Do you even have a clue? A bloody inkling to the extent I go through day in day out trying to keep you out of harms way? What would happen to you, I ask you, what would happen if I had died instead. Tonight. .What would you have done?" He asked the question that didn't need asking.

" I would die too," I said simply. It was inevitable. I couldn't live with him but I couldn't live without him even more. Death had been the only answer for me. It always has been. It still was.

"You would have, " he murmured agreeably. "Just as I would have died if you had not survived."

I shook my head at that unable to accept that. He sighed defeatedly down at me. His head dropped to my shoulders. In a slight shift to his lower body I found myself in the enviable position of being draped across by my beloved. His frame enveloped me. His touch gentle and tender. A total contrast to his earlier words and what he said next was even more out of bounds.

" My father wants you dead," he whispered unhappily not looking at me. Then abruptly he turned nailing my bewildered gaze with his own molten ambers.

" He has always wanted you dead. You being my scion is the only thing that has kept you alive all these years," he said tenderly gazing down at me with an expression I had never seen on him before.

I shook my head in bewilderment not understanding what he was getting at.

"You must have guessed by now I was never exposed to any contagion. I was born a vampire. As was my father and his before him. We are of an old line. An aristocratic lineage among Vampires. The more fanciful of us consider us royalty," he said with a quiet seriousness that I found disturbingly... sexy.

"My mother is one of us too. Dad wants me to toe the line and marry into aristocracy. I feel differently," he said with a minor shrug.

I felt so many eager questions stumble over each other in a need to spill forth across my lips. But instead I remained silent unwilling to interrupt this revelation that I have never known was possible.

"We were friends from young you and I. I got into scrapes with you and we were always just together. I understood you and you understood me. Like no one else I have ever met. You always know what to say and when to say it," he said looking down at me searchingly as if trying to decipher how it was I did what I did.

That was impossible. Especially when I did nothing.

"That night when I appeared at your driveway. I was not myself. I was under the influence of Qoa."

I gasped at what he said. Qoa was a drug. A poison that targeted vampires. It was rare and expensive. Deadly even. Or so I thought.

"I was unharmed," he said reassuringly swiftly placating my rising fear. " I am immune to Qoa. It does nothing but enhance my capabilities. Qoa is only dangerous to those vampires that came about from the contagion. Not those born like me," he explained slowly.

I nodded my head in understanding.

"In my heightened state I felt an unusual urge. One I couldn't understand but it was that urge that lead me to your driveway and the rest you already know, " he said matter-of-factly.

I shook my head again. I didn't know. I didn't know the rest. It was the rest that I needed to know.

" Lucian? " I looked at him imploringly.

He sighed then gritted his teeth as if what he had to say hurt him in the saying. "As you already know I was drawn by your love. But what you don't know is that it my own love for you that recognised yours for me."