Blood Born: Cora's Choice #2 Read Free Page A

if we are?” he asked, leaning closer. “Animals made to need you. It is what I am, not what I choose.”
    Dorian brushed my cheek with a fingertip. I rocked slightly at the touch, my mind ablaze with his madness even as I intellectually rejected everything that he had said. His head angled down towards mine, his mouth so close that I could feel his breath.
    He stopped, his lips a hairbreadth from mine. “And I never take anything that is not offered to me,” his whispered.
    Then he pulled back, leaving me dazed and panting, the truth of his words piercing me to the core. I pushed up, swinging my legs over the edge of the bed and sliding to the floor, trying to cover my agitation as I twitched my nightgown straight.
    “ You can’t do that,” I said. “It’s not right. Who could refuse you?” Even if it meant death....
    “ Cora, I am telling you how things are, not how I would like things to be,” he said, not moving from his chair. “I want to put an end to all this death.”
    A monster with a conscience, then.
    Oh, well, that makes it so much better, Cora, I told myself acidly. The lion that weeps for the lamb.
    “ So the screening,” I said.
    “ It was very real.” His eyes bored into me with the intensity of his words, the need for me to believe him. “I have poured millions of dollars into my research, attempting to lower the casualties, to identify those who will live. You are the first success.”
    “ How could you possibly know that I would be one in one hundred, then?” I demanded. “How could you quote me statistics if you really had no clue?”
    “ It was an estimate,” he said, “based on the conversion rate of the general population and the number that we could exclude from consideration. We knew for certain that all those we exclude have no chance of survival. Simple mathematics dictates the likelihood among those that remain.”
    “ You accepted me on a guess,” I said. I should have been more outraged. I was angry, still. But overriding that was the fact that I was not only alive but cured. He had offered me a chance and been brutally honest about my odds. He had just hidden...everything else.
    And that everything was a whopper.
    I pressed on. “And what were the other requirements, other than that I had to be terminally ill and pass the blood test?”
    “ That you be female,” he said flatly. “And an adult young enough to withstand the conversion.”

     

Chapter Three
    A n adult female. Oh, God. My unnatural reaction to his every touch, the throbbing need that drove me to comply to every demand.... It wasn’t just me, then, at least not entirely.
    “ So it’s...like that ...for you, too?” I asked.
    “ Yes,” he said. “Oh, yes. The hunger that comes upon us is very comprehensive.”
    “ Is it like that every time?” I pressed. “With everyone?”
    His eyes were shadowed. “There seems to be a correlation between the likelihood of successful metabolic conversion and the level of arousal.”
    Damn. Damn, damn, damn, damn. I fought the heat rising in my cheeks and retreated to the other side of the bed, away from him and his clinical dissections.
    “ So I survived,” I said, turning back around to face him and folding my arms over my breasts. “What now? Do you send me packing off home again, cured but not-quite-human?” The thought of never seeing him again sent a sudden jolt of panic, unexpected and frightening, coursing through me.
    “ Do you think, after all the trouble I took to find you, that I would just...send you away?” he asked, standing from the chair.
    He looked even taller and darker halfway across the room, taking up far more space than his frame gave any justification for. The light in his eyes was sharper now, and in it I could see need—need and something more, a kind of desperate hunger that I feared to name, something that was more than physical that he kept caged deep inside.
    I found it difficult to breathe , afraid of that caged thing. No