He leaned forward until Vincent met his eyes. “I know that Jean-Baptiste is like a father to you,” he said. “But I charge you, Vincent Delacroix, with relaying this information to your kindred. Otherwise, when the time comes and the battle begins, their blood will be on your hands.”

THIRTY-TWO

WE SAID OUR GOOD-BYES TO THEODORE, PROMISING to update him on events in Paris, and then walked back to the hotel in silence. Vincent was deeply disturbed by what Theo had told him, and I could tell he was going over every detail of the conversation. “Are you okay?” I asked as we entered the hotel lobby.

Vincent squeezed me to him and kissed the top of my head distractedly. “Yes. I mean, no. It’s just hard to imagine Jean-Baptiste hiding something like this from us for so many years. It makes me feel like I never really knew him.”

“He was just trying to protect you all,” I said, playing devil’s advocate, but not really feeling it.

“I know. But the way he did it, and the fact that he’s been offering the enemy his protection without informing us . . . I just don’t understand.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, taking both of his hands in mine, and searched his face until he met my eyes.

“No, I’m sorry,” Vincent said. “You don’t need to worry about this. And I can’t do anything about it until I get back to Paris. But you need to sleep if we are leaving first thing in the morning.” Vincent leaned down and lightly brushed his lips against mine, awakening a million tiny butterflies inside me. “I’ll walk you to your room.”

I smelled them before I turned on the light. Lilacs. A huge spray of white lilacs in a vase on my bedside table. Their beauty and perfume transformed my plain hotel room into a scene from a Pre-Raphaelite painting. I looked up at Vincent. A mischievous smile stretched across his lips.

“How did you do this?” I exclaimed. “I’ve been with you all day.”

“I passed a note and some money to the front desk earlier,” he confessed, looking exceedingly proud of himself for pulling off the subterfuge. “You’ve told me you love the scent of lilacs. I thought it might bring you sweet dreams tonight, since I won’t be able to hover around whispering Pablo Neruda poems to your subconscious mind.”

I took a deep whiff of their clean floral fragrance. Vincent leaned on the door frame, beaming with pleasure. “Do you want to come in?” I asked.

He shook his head and gave me a crooked smile. “I didn’t rent a room for nothing. I haven’t forgotten the south of France and your reasonable but maddening request to wait. And in the light of that: You. Me. Beds. Bad idea. I’ll just take these”—he scooped up a couple of paperbacks from the bag—“and be on my way. Anything to keep my mind off the whole Jean-Baptiste saga until I get back to Paris and can actually do something about it.”

“What will you do?” I asked, not really caring anymore about Jean-Baptiste. All I could think about was Vincent standing there with his tousled hair and broad shoulders half in and half out my hotel room. My body was thrumming with a mixture of resolve not to tempt him too far and desire to throw myself upon him before he could get away.

“I haven’t decided yet,” he responded, rubbing the back of his neck worriedly. Obviously Vincent’s thoughts weren’t on the same level as mine. Or else he wouldn’t even be able to speak right now, much less strategize. I knew the decision I had made in the south of France wasn’t going to hold much longer.

“Well, good night.” I threw my arms around his neck and gave him a long, slow kiss. In it was all of the day’s emotion, both the miracles and the mundane.

I almost lost Vincent, and now I had him back. And not only him, but my life. My former life from before I pushed it away. And now my past and my present were joined and I was beginning to feel complete.

Vincent seemed to understand the meaning behind the kiss. It was in his smile as he touched my face and then my hair with his fingertips. It seemed to cost him as much effort as it did me to pull apart, because after one last hasty kiss he practically sprinted out of the room, pulling the door shut behind him.

I changed into an oversize T-shirt and sat on my bed, turning things over in my mind: the way I had almost lost him. And could again. The fragile nature of human life: One minute we’re here and the next we’re gone, like my parents. And the desire to be closer to Vincent. To love him with more than my heart and mind.

My feelings from that morning returned full force. My resolution to actually do something if I was able to get Vincent back. I had told myself I was ready. That it was time. Now that it was possible, did I still feel the same? I realized that, yes, I knew what I wanted. This time I was a hundred percent sure.

I grabbed the vase of lilacs and my room key, and hoped no one would see me sprinting with the flowers down the hallway in my T-shirt and undies.

Up one flight of stairs and I was there, standing nervously in front of Vincent’s door. I knocked. He opened, a bemused expression on his face. “To what do I owe this surprise visit?” He looked at the lilacs and then back to me, confused. “You decided you didn’t like the flowers?”

I pushed past him into the room and placed the flowers on a low table. “I don’t want to be apart from you anymore,” I said.

Vincent smiled sadly and closed the door behind him. “I know exactly what you mean,” he responded. “Five days as a wandering soul, unable to touch you and thinking it was permanent . . . I feel like never letting you out of my sight again.” He threw himself down on the bed and patted the spot next to him. “You can stay here tonight.”

“No, I mean I don’t want to be apart from you. I want to be with you. Really with you.” I had to force myself to say the words. My voice shook because I was afraid he was going to say no. That this wasn’t the time. That we should wait until things had calmed down.

But I had made up my mind. We were going back to Paris the next day, and Vincent and his kind would be facing a danger that could possibly destroy him. Again.

He propped himself up on his elbows and sat there for the longest time, watching me with an expression that I couldn’t read. “If you’re still too weak, we can be careful,” I offered, wondering if that’s why he was hesitating.

Grinning, he shook his head, and pushing himself up from the bed, he walked to me. With only inches separating us, he looked into my eyes. It felt like he was reaching deep inside my mind, furthering the connection between us. Heart. Mind. And then body. It was the next step and it was now.

Vincent’s lips curved up slightly. He leaned down just as I reached up, and we met in between, our lips touching first and then the rest of us, pressing deliciously against each other, pulling the other as close as possible, needing, giving, weaving a tapestry of our bodies. Of our selves.

THIRTY-THREE

I AWOKE TO THE SENSATION OF VINCENT’S LIPS on my forehead, and opened my eyes to see his face above mine. “Bonjour, ma belle,” he said in his low sexy voice.

I squinted around, not knowing where I was for a moment, and then the hotel room came into focus around me. Oh my God. I was in Vincent’s bed. And it was morning. I had spent the night in Vincent’s bed. And last night we had . . .

My skin lit with a fiery flush, and an unstoppable smile possessed my face. I leaned forward and, letting the covers drop, threw my arms around Vincent’s neck and squeezed him against me.

He laughed and pulled back so he could look me in the eyes. “Was that hug for last night?”

“I love you,” I answered.

He pulled me back to him and whispered, “And I adore you, Kate Beaumont Mercier. With a love I never thought I could feel. With all my soul and every inch of my body. Which, by the way, is now marked by you forever.”

“What do you mean?” I asked. He turned to show me a bluish tattoolike mark on his shoulder. “What is that?” I touched it, mesmerized.

“Isn’t this where you pressed the lock of my hair into my clay doppelgänger?” he asked.

I looked more closely. The mark had a circular pattern to it and was the size of . . . “It’s my thumbprint!” I exclaimed, holding my thumb next to the mark.

Vincent grinned. “That’s what I thought. Very cheeky of you; you not only brought me to life, but you marked me permanently as yours.”

I grabbed him and pulled him down to the mattress. Perching above me, he leaned forward to place an extra soft kiss on my neck just beneath my ear. I shivered and said, “You are mine.”

“I’ve got no argument with that,” he conceded, smoothing my hair back from my face with his thumb. “But I do have the very unfortunate news that in exactly twenty minutes we are meeting your grandfather in the lobby.”

“Hmm, grandfather,” I said. My brain suddenly left the deliciousness of being in bed with Vincent and was gripped by more unpleasant things. Like how I was going to pack and dress in under a half hour.

With lots of running and leaping about, I somehow made it, and in twenty minutes we were climbing into the back of Theodore’s limo. Bran did a repeat performance of the gaping-out-the-window routine that he did on the way in. Papy busied himself with transferring all of the photos he had taken of Theodore’s collection the previous day from his camera to his laptop. I laid my head on Vincent’s shoulder and dozed off, waking as we pulled up to the airport’s private plane terminal.

As we assembled on the sidewalk, I saw Jules step out of the passenger side of a car parked in the drop-off lane in front of us. He headed straight for Vincent with an expression like his best friend was the last person in the world he wanted to see. “Vince, man. We have to talk,” he said, and the two of them walked a short distance away.

Papy and Bran made their way into the terminal with the luggage, but I didn’t follow them. I had a terrible feeling in the pit of my stomach as I watched Jules explain something and Vincent stumble back a step, as if Jules had just stabbed him in the gut. Jules kept talking, folding his arms tightly across his chest, as if he too were in pain.

I looked over at the car that had brought Jules. The bardia driver was just sitting there with the engine idling: What was he waiting for?

I walked in their direction. Something was very wrong.

“You’re being an idiot!” Vincent suddenly yelled, and thrusting his hands into his pockets, he stalked off, slamming the revolving door to the terminal so hard with his shoulder that it ground to a halt before starting back up with a metallic screech. Jules just stood where he was, watching me approach with a pained expression.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“I’m not going back,” he said simply.

“You’re staying here in New York?”

He nodded.

“But why?”

Jules massaged his temples. “Something’s come between me and Vincent,” he said.

I stared at him, confused. “Well, I’m sure you can work it out.”

“No, actually we can’t work it out, Kate,” he responded, gritting his teeth. “There is no possible way of working it out. The only way to salvage this is for me to walk away and leave you two to . . .”

“Leave us?” I asked, incredulous. “What does this have to do with me?”

He lowered his head, breathing shallow breaths. Holding himself together. When he looked up, pain was written across his face as clearly as if it were spelled out in giant letters.

“Do you really have to ask me that, Kate? Can’t you tell?”

“No,” I said, and then suddenly understood. My mouth dropped open, and I shook my head in denial. Jules was my friend. He couldn’t be in love with me. He had a dozen beautiful girls at his beck and call. Girls who weren’t attached . . . to his best friend. “You can’t . . . you can’t be leaving your kindred for . . . me.”

He sighed and looked toward the gray winter sky, as if praying for something to swoop down and carry him far away. When he looked back at me, his eyes were glassy. He reached forward to take my hand.

“Kate. I’ll say it like this. Vincent is my best friend. There’s not a person in this world I’m closer to. But for the past year, I have betrayed him in my heart every single day because I want for myself what he loves the very most.”

I squeezed his hand tightly to fight the numbness paralyzing me. My eyes stung, but no tears came. “I don’t know what to say, Jules. I . . . I don’t . . .”

“I know you don’t feel the same, Kate. That you never have. Never will. And I would rather not live with that reality being pushed into my face on a continual basis. Because, believe it or not, though I die for people on a regular basis, I’m not a masochist.”

His sad smile hit me like a fist. “Oh, Jules,” I said, and threw my arms around his neck.

“There’s nothing else to say,” he murmured, pressing his face into my hair. And then he let go, walked to the waiting car, and drove away without looking back.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

We were halfway across the Atlantic Ocean and Vincent hadn’t said a word. He wrapped his arm around my shoulders, pulled me to him, and kissed the crown of my head.

Leaning my head against his shoulder, I said, “I’m really sorry about Jules.”

Vincent sighed. “Half of me hates him for falling in love with you. And the other half thinks, ‘How could he help it?’”

He pushed my hair back from my face. “What I can’t believe, though, is that I honestly didn’t see it coming. We could have talked it out before it got to this. But I thought that Jules was flirting with you just like he does with any other pretty girl.”