Halfway across the country, a black-haired man stared out the window of an eastbound 747. In the darkness, he saw a pretty face framed by straight blonde hair. For a moment, he relived what he’d thought to be love. Regret and guilt darkened azure eyes. In fact, when he'd told Holly he loved her, it had been true. Love had many shades, shapes, and facets.
Monogamy for my kind is impossible.
A lesson hard learned. The battle against his nature—against self—was lost, and he was weary of the war that had raged inside for far too long. A vampire's very nature is to kill.
“May I get you a drink?” The flight attendant, a delectable redhead, gazed at him with mahogany eyes.
If you only knew.
He smiled and shook his head. “No thank you.”
Tristan had taken a dangerous risk by refusing to erase their last night together from Holly's memory. The steadfast disbelief in his kind, fostered by The Vampyre, more or less insured that if Holly Pritchard recalled the dead woman and the blood, she'd dismiss it as a bad dream. Before he had eased her to sleep and carried her to her apartment, he'd placed a powerful mind block on any recollection of what she'd seen in his bedroom and the intimacy of their only Kiss. If visions surfaced, her head would hurt and the memory would disappear with the pain.
To explain his sudden exit, Tristan had implanted a suggestion that they'd argued and she'd stormed out of his place, shouting that she never wanted to see him again.
He studied his translucent nails. Damn. He hadn't intended to hurt Holly. He hurt but there was no remedy for it. He'd planned to break up with her before she caught him taking a victim. For several weeks, his demons had been beckoning him home.
Tristan rested his forehead against the window, his thoughts shifting to the woman who understood his needs and accepted what he was. The woman he truly loved. The woman he'd fled for fear of falling in love.
“Carol,” he whispered, willing her to hear.
Tristan McLachlan was going home to his Black Swan.