Ivy silently pulled her shirt over her head and put the new one on. The music from the shop next door thumped like a heart, and I glanced around the moderately busy, trendy mall store. No one had rushed to help us after Ivy glared at the first woman who said hello, and for that I was grateful. How on earth was I going explain to Ivy that the past year had been a waste of her time and that she was never going to get her teeth in me again? Even if our auras had blended? At the very least, she’d get mad. And then leave. And then Jenks would kill me. Maybe if I ignored everything, it might go away. It sounded like a good idea—which meant it wasn’t.

The dressing room door squeaked as Ivy came out. Her expression was hopeful as she posed for me, and just that faint glimmer of softer emotion in her eyes turned her beautiful.

“Damn, girl! You look great!” I said enthusiastically, thinking she would look good in anything with the faint, hesitant smile she now wore. The top hung perfectly on her, and the black lace stood out in sharp contrast to her pale skin. “You have got to get it. It was made for you.” I nodded to further my approval. It was the perfect vampire tease of lace and skin. I couldn’t get away with wearing it, but Ivy? Oh, yeah.

Ivy looked down at the black lace barely covering a few key places. A glimmer of silver and red showed where her belly button ring was, and her hand rose to her neck to hide the low scar Cormel had put there. I couldn’t help but wonder who she was thinking of as she murmured, “It’s nice.”

Nice, nice, nice, everything is freaking nice. I didn’t watch when she turned and went back into the dressing room. “You’re not getting anything?” she asked over the door as the ripping sound of Velcro tore through the pounding music. “This is the third shop and you haven’t even tried anything on.”

Reclining in the soft leather, I looked at the ceiling. “Budget,” I said simply.

Ivy’s silence brought my gaze down, and I saw her looking at my neck, a painful self-recrimination pinching her brown eyes. “You don’t trust me,” she said out of the blue, and her motions, mostly hidden behind the door, stopped. “You don’t trust me, and you’re ashamed of me, and I don’t blame you. You had to hurt me to get me to stop. I’d be ashamed of me, too.”

Tension jerked through me and I sat upright. Two nearby shoppers turned toward us, and I stared blankly at Ivy. What in hell?