“I’m not afraid to touch another person,” he snapped.

He was getting frustrated, but I was frustrated, too, with the sense that there was some truth just out of my reach. “But you’re obviously not happy. So why not leave? What keeps you here?” My roommate Mei-Ling was a diminutive ninth grader and she’d managed to escape. “Your blood kin aren’t even on the island with you. I don’t get it. Why do you even stay?”

“A man must do as a man must do,” he said mysteriously.

“That didn’t stop Carden.” I’d said it dismissively, intending the words only as a sting to myself, but I saw instantly how they stung Ronan instead.

“You are in over your head with that…him. I’d think that you, Annelise, more than anyone would strive for better than what he offers you. I tell you, a man does as he must, but Carden McCloud is no man.”

His anger, so quick and sharp, startled me. “And you are?”

He reached out, resting his hand in the dirt at my hip, leaning closer. “I am.”

My breath hitched. I stilled, waiting to see what would happen next.

He raised his other hand, slid it around my neck.

What was happening? Was this a lesson? Had I offended him—did he think I was accusing him of being afraid to touch a girl, and now he had something to prove?

His hand was warm and gentle gliding over my skin, and my scalp tingled as his fingers laced through the hair at the back of my neck. He leaned closer still, until I could no longer see his features clearly. Only impressions of Ronan filled my view. The dark stubble. His full mouth. A fringe of black lashes on lids half-closed. Those features had once rocked my world. Once, in a Florida parking lot, they’d been enough to convince me to get into a car with a stranger.

And now? Now Ronan was no longer a stranger. He’d become so familiar to me. Somehow, Ronan had become all I had.

How I missed Carden and the comfort he’d given me. I longed for connection. I missed my friends. All of them, they’d been so dear to me, and yet here I was, alone, aching, steeped in desolation and uncertainty. Carden had vanished. My friends were lost to me.

Everyone was gone, but Ronan was here. Right here.

Would it be so bad, so wrong, to seek just a little bit of comfort with him?

I leaned in to him, testing. He didn’t move. Was this solace that he was offering? Was it more? I leaned closer, and he still didn’t move away. My heart began to pound. All my fear and desolation and abandonment…it all catalyzed, becoming this need I felt now. Ronan was going to kiss me, and even if he was using his hypnotic touch, I’d take it. I’d take him. I just wanted to feel him, because somehow I knew. He wasn’t using his powers. This was just a touch—the touch of a guy on my skin.

Then suddenly…cold air.

I opened my eyes—when had I closed them?—and saw he was staring at me, his gaze so heavy and dark.

“I can’t,” he said. His jaw was tight, and it was like he had to grit out the words.

And then he was gone.

I stared after him, even though I couldn’t see anything in the darkness. Breathily, I asked the universe, “What the hell was that?”

I collapsed onto my back, grinding my fingers into my hair as I stared up at the sky. My heart was still skittering in my chest, my pulse as shallow as the air in my lungs.

Holy crap.

I guess I no longer reminded him of his sister.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

I plopped onto the sand, panting for breath, clutching a hand at my side. I hoped the pain was just a stitch from my run and not the beginnings of the blood fever.

Okay, fine…so maybe it wasn’t as dire as all that.

Check that—emotionally, it was pretty freaking dire, but physically? I was feeling some discomfort, but nothing crippling, not yet. Just…a needful sort of thirst. I thought back to last term. I couldn’t go through that ordeal again, through the pain of separation and the early stages of breaking a bond.

Carden. He was the opposite of stupid Ronan. I didn’t get stupid Ronan at all—lurking, popping up at unusual times, almost kissing me. When Carden had wanted to kiss me, he’d kissed me. He was so easy, so predictable…

Until he was no longer easy and predictable.

Was it me? Was I just lame with guys? My vampire had been gone for too long now. Either something had happened to him—which I honestly thought I’d have felt—or he’d simply…bailed.

But he couldn’t just dump me, right? Logically, I knew: We had a bond. So whether he really wanted to be with me or not, physically he had to come back at some point.

And there was the crux of it. I wanted someone who wanted to be with me.

Someone who liked me. Maybe loved me.

I thought of the difference between my parents. When my mom had been alive, presumably she’d wanted to be with me because it gave her joy. My memories of her were vague, but they were happy—we’d both been happy—and it wasn’t such a leap to deduce that she’d wanted to spend time with me. As opposed to my father, who’d kept me around merely because he was obligated.

Was that what I’d become to Carden? An obligation? All those words he’d said. Dove shmove. All of it meaningless crap.

“Stupid,” I muttered, stretching into the ache. My train of thought was stupid. This situation was stupid.

I felt stupid. I’d been too smitten to sense what’d been going on in Carden’s head our last night together. While I was experiencing the most amazingly special night of my life, he’d already checked out. He fed me over and over that night because he’d known all along that he’d be leaving.

Sure, eventually he’d come back. He’d saunter back one of these days, grinning all Carden-like, feeding me again, just enough to sustain our bond. And then he’d probably turn around and saunter right back out.

All that intimacy I thought we’d shared for all those weeks…did none of it count? Had it been my imagination?

Hey, at least the guy had done me a solid and overfed me. Because of his foresight, I’d had minimal physical symptoms since he left. Though this pang in my side made me wonder just how long I had until the blood fever set in. One month? One year? A decade?

How long would he be gone anyway? I couldn’t last forever—minimal physical symptoms wasn’t the same as no physical symptoms.

I shaded my eyes, staring out to sea. We didn’t get much sunlight on this rock, but what we did get irritated vampire eyes, and I’d purposely taken my run smack-dab in the middle of a Saturday afternoon. Lately, 12:01 had become a favorite sight on my digital watch.

Though why I’d chosen to run in the shadow of the damned Needle, the chimney rock formation that Carden could scale and leap from like he was some kind of superhero, was beyond my understanding. Or maybe it wasn’t—maybe this particular workout spot had been an entirely intentional choice. Because, let’s be honest: I wanted to think about Carden. Duh. I wanted him to appear, as he had so many times, coming from out of the blue to nestle next to me in the sand.

The thing with Ronan had upset me, and I just wanted everything back the way it’d been before. But if Ronan was going to be all weird and Carden all gone, then that left me with nobody.

Waves slapped and churned against the base of the Needle. Had I really thought Carden’s head might bob into view, that he might spring from the water, clambering up the side as I’d seen him do before? I decided I was like that rock—alone in the middle of a bleak sea, pummeled by waves…until stupid Carden had climbed me and then leapt free.

“Jeez.” I had to laugh at myself—I really hated my own drama sometimes. “Pathetic.”

I stretched on an exhale, grabbing my toes, pulling hard, folding myself over my aching belly. I inched my fingertips lower on the soles of my feet, wrenching my torso lower, daring my hamstrings to quiver and burn. Daring the pain to wipe out everything else.

“You’ll snap in half,” a male voice said from behind me.

I sprang up on a startled yelp. Josh. “I’ll snap you in half if you scare me like that again.” I glanced around, looking behind him, but he was alone. “Where’d you come from anyway?”

He cupped his hand over his eyes. “I had a Trainee thing. At the keep.”

Sure you did.

“I was looking for you earlier,” he added. The sun wasn’t that bright, but he kept his hand shielded over his eyes, like he was in pain.

“You all right?” I remembered the rogue vampire I’d fought—that Carden had fought for me—and the eerie pale eyes, hidden behind sunglasses, that’d betrayed his ancient years. The older the vamps got, the more sensitive to light they became. It made sense that Trainees would be no different. “Shouldn’t you wear, like, a hat or something?”

“Nah, I’m good.” He plopped next to me on the sand. “It’s just your radiant beauty, it blinds me, yeah?”

I laughed and picked at my sweaty shirt. “The only thing I’m radiating is sweat.” I was lonely and uncertain, but Josh and his easy, Aussie good humor always made me smile. It didn’t hurt that he was pretty cute, too, in a scruffy sun-kissed beach-boy way.

He clutched a hand to his heart. “She denies my compliment.”

Wait…was this real flirting or playful friend flirting? If my tense interactions with Ronan were any indication, I had no clue how to tell the difference between the two.

“Easy, sailor.” I really looked then, reconsidering him. Not as a friend, or as someone I’d gotten to know, but as a guy. Honestly, by that point, I was just that angry at both Carden and Ronan. If they were going to blow me off, then I’d feel free to look at other guys, dammit.

I looked at him, and though I saw the appeal, I didn’t feel the appeal. No butterflies or any of that other good stuff. Sorry, mate, I thought. Maybe in another life.

“Hey, a boy can try,” he said, still doing the flirty thing.

“And a girl could get the wrong idea.” Feeling a mite uncomfortable, I erected the barest of shields between us. Carden had warned me not to trust Josh—not to trust any of them. Though, clearly, I should’ve taken the advice and not trusted Carden.