I turned to him. “No. That she’s not going to leave until it’s over.”

Worry filled his eyes; he was going to say something I didn’t want to hear. “Rachel—”

“By the Turn, I’m hungry. I hope she hurries up,” I babbled.

“Rachel, please. Just listen?”

I closed the console and eased into the seat. This conversation would happen whether I wanted it to or not. Breath slipping from me, I looked at him, to find his haggard face determined.

“I didn’t know you were alive,” he said, panic in his eyes. “Al said he had you.”

“He did.”

“And you never answered your phone. I called. God knows I did.”

“It’s at the bottom of the Ohio River,” I said flatly, thinking he was a wimp for not calling the church. Then I wondered if he had and Ivy simply hung up on him.

“The paper said you died in a boat explosion saving Kalamack’s life.”

“I almost did,” I said, remembering waking up in Trent’s limo, having passed out after I pulled the man’s freaking elf-ass out of the freezing water.

Nick stretched a swollen hand across the consol between us, and I jerked out of his reach. Making a frustrated sound, he put an elbow on his closed window and looked at the nearby semi. “Damn it, Ray-ray, I thought you were dead. I couldn’t stay in Cincinnati. And now that I find you’re alive, you won’t even let me touch you. Do you have any idea how I mourned?”

I swallowed, the memory of the budded red rose in the jelly jar vase with the pentagram of protection on it lifting through me. My throat tightened. Why did it have to be so confusing?

“I missed you,” he said, brown eyes thick with pain. “This isn’t what I had planned.”

“Me neither,” I said, miserable. “But you left me long before you left Cincinnati. It took me a long time to get over you lying to me about where you had been, and I’m not going back to the way things were. I don’t care that it wasn’t about another woman. Maybe that I could understand, but it was money. You’re a thief, and you let me believe you were something else.”

Nick slumped into a defeated stillness. “I’ve changed.”

I didn’t want to hear this. They never changed, they simply hid it better. “I’m seeing someone,” I said, my voice low so it wouldn’t shake. “He’s there when I need him, and I’m there for him. He makes me feel good. I don’t want to return to how things were, so don’t ask me to. You were gone, and he—” I wiped a hand under my eye, embarrassed that they were wet. “He was there,” I said. He helped me forget you, you bastard.

“You love him?”

“Whether I love him or not isn’t relevant,” I said, hands in my lap.

“He’s a vampire?” Nick asked, not moving one inch, and I nodded.

“You can’t trust that,” he protested, long hands gesturing weakly. “He’s just trying to bind you to him. You know that. God, you can’t be that naive! Didn’t you just see what happened with your scar? With Ivy?”