“I got one. The others got away. Maybe I could have gotten them too, if I’d kept going after them, but I didn’t want to get too far away from you.” He knelt beside her. “I need to look at your shoulder.”

“I’m not hurt as badly as you are. I’ll live,” she said, although she let him ease the edges of her top away from her skin. “I was sitting here thinking. You know, I was always the good twin. Bailey was the one who took risks and broke the rules. Now she’s off having adventures in Jamaica.”

“Not at the moment, she isn’t. She’s in LA, helping your mom look for you.” He wore a fierce frown as he inspected her wounds.

With a wave of her hand, she dismissed his words. “Okay, but you know what I mean. Normally, she’s the one who goes off to have adventures. Me, I always followed the rules. Bailey was the spare, but I was the heir. I had to look after things and be responsible. I’m even in the family business. Mom always wanted me to work in admin on the other side of the camera, but she never complained too much. At least my job has been fun.”

“Come here.” Easing one arm around her waist, he lifted her to her feet.

She tried to pull away from him, but he wouldn’t let her. “You’re hurt too. I don’t want to lean on you.”

“Tough,” he told her. “I can take it.”

Keeping his arm tight around her, he held her steady as they walked back to his cell and their meager supplies. Then he urged her to sit again.

“You think it’s okay to take the time?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said. “Our lives have changed for the better. Anthony’s dead, I’m free to act, and most of the ferals are gone. Everything we do down here is a calculated risk, but we need to regroup before we set out.”

“I can’t argue with that,” she muttered.

“Besides, Justine doesn’t know most of her ferals have been staked,” he told her. “If she comes, we’ll hear her whistle long before she gets here, and we’ll have time to get ready for her.”

While he talked, he unbuttoned her top and pulled it open.

They both looked down at her lacy bra, which showcased the full curve and shape of her breasts. She was a C-cup, and she liked pretty underwear.

Now half the bra was streaked with blood. The Vampyre’s talons had missed her bra strap, so structurally it was still functional, but the creamy, delicate material was ruined.

With the tip of one forefinger, he gently traced the skin at the top edge of the bra. “A pity,” he said. “It was pretty.”

“I have other pretty bras,” she said with a small shrug.

He rose to his feet to get the grocery bag. Then he looked around the cell until he located pieces of the T-shirt Justine had torn off him. He picked through the bits of cloth until he finally decided on one. Opening one of the bottles of water, he soaked the rag and carefully sponged her wounds. “This isn’t very clean, I’m afraid. The only other cloth we have is the blanket, and the wool would be too rough on your torn skin.”

“Infection is pretty low on my list of concerns right now,” she told him.

“It isn’t low on my list. The ferals have filthy talons. Their bites are filthy too.” She hissed as her wounds stung, and the skin around his eyes crinkled into a wince. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right.” Grimacing, she turned her face away.

“Were you going somewhere?” he asked quietly.

“What do you mean?” She hissed again as he cleaned out the longest, deepest cut.

“With your story.”

He was trying to distract her from what he was doing. Deciding to cooperate, she took hold of his thick wrist until his gaze lifted to hers.

“All my life, I was the good girl, the responsible one. You were my walk on the wild side, and I truly loved it. I loved you. I had so much damn fun with you. You were all I could think about, even when I had to go on site to Singapore to finish shooting that awful movie. Remember that?”

Reluctantly, one corner of his mouth pulled up. The half smile creased his lean cheek. “The movie wasn’t that bad. Didn’t it win an Academy Award for special effects?”

“It was terrible,” she said with emphasis. “It took forever to film. I couldn’t sleep without you, and the director was always mad at me because I kept forgetting my lines. If I could have gotten out of my contract, I would have, and to hell with my professional reputation. I hated every minute of it.”

He finished washing her wounds, eased the edges of her top together and carefully buttoned it up again. “Where are you going with this?”

She took another fragment of his T-shirt and a fresh bottle of water and began to work on him, washing the dirt and the blood from his chest and shoulders and cleaning out the wounds that hadn’t healed.

She gave him a crooked smile. “I was consumed with you. The mere thought of going on a date with someone else was irritating and distasteful to me. Yes, I was asked out a couple of times, but I didn’t have the time, not physically and not emotionally, and I certainly didn’t have the interest. I don’t know where you got your information from, Julian, but I didn’t cheat on you. Not even with a kiss. Not from the moment you walked up to me at my mom’s house, the night of the Masque.”

He bowed his head, and while he didn’t say anything, for once he wasn’t rejecting her outright or snapping at her, but he was actually listening intently to everything she said.

She told him softly, “I just wanted to tell you all of that, and this time, I didn’t want to make it about me or how you hurt my feelings. I wanted to make it about you. You deserve to know that I thought you were worth it. I can only imagine how I would have felt if someone had convinced me that you had cheated on me, and I’m sorry you had to go through that. That’s all.”

He took her hand with the washcloth and held it, as he studied it. Silence pounded in her ears with the rhythm of her own heartbeat. Then, with a gentle squeeze on her fingers, he eased her hand into her lap and turned away.

Okay, then. She hadn’t really expected anything else.

It had taken twenty years and serious exhaustion and blood loss, but at least now she felt like she had said what she needed to say to him without shouting or fighting. Over the last several hours, the message had grown into something more generous and honest than she would have believed possible.