Passion For Hire (Passion #5) by J. A Melville Page B

yell a lot. I want you to take me to meet your son and don’t screw up your face at me.” She snapped when he did exactly that. “Why can’t you see that I’m not the enemy? I want to help you; I want to be a part of your life. If you won’t be my teacher or my happily ever after, at least let me be your friend. Please.”
    “You are impossible woman. Why can’t you take no for a fucking answer? I don’t need your help; I don’t need anyone’s help. I’ve survived just fine all this time. The only help I need from you is to keep your damn mouth shut. If you care anything for me you will never reveal what you know. My father is very strict with his few rules about how we behave as vampire. The one rule he has that is punishable by death for disobeying him, is killing someone. I fucked up and I took too much blood. I killed him, or I might as well have. I tried, god knows I tried.” His voice broke before he reined in his emotions facing her again. “I tried to save him; I tried to save him from a life of this living hell. I tried to change it with witchcraft but it didn’t work. I’m not a powerful warlock. I’m nothing like my mother. She’s powerful and she’s done some amazing things, but I can’t do that. I fucked up. I fucked up and nearly took his human life, and then I fucked up when witchcraft failed to bring him back to life as a human again. I had to change him but he’s different. I don’t know why, I don’t know how it happened but he’s not like my family or me.” He met Faith’s eyes again. Their beautiful blue depths were fixed on him, her expression mirroring his pain. God, she was so sensitive, so sweet. She felt sorry for him? He wasn’t worthy of her concern and he didn’t want her pity.
    He was nothing. He was a failure as a vampire, a failure as a warlock. He only had one thing he knew how to do and that was giving women the kind of sexual experiences they needed or wanted. It made him a lot of money but it meant he would never be able to be like his father or his brothers. He could never have that one woman who loved him and that he could hold in his arms as he slept. He could never love a woman because he could never stop doing what he did. He had to care for Lucas and his mother. He’d ended Lucas’s life and committed him to an eternal sentence as a vampire, but not even a proper vampire, he was only half one, a kind of hybrid.
    Lucas had never seen the outside of the home Adrian bought to keep them in. He’d been kept a prisoner since he’d been turned so both he and his mother relied on Adrian to take care of them. Lucas predominantly needed blood to survive but he could also eat some human food occasionally too. Although he seemed surprisingly accepting of his fate, Adrian couldn’t let him loose and he didn’t have time to educate him on the ways of being a vampire. Not to mention he didn’t have the tattoo to allow him to walk in the daylight. Lucas had found out the hard way that although he was only half vampire and wasn’t sensitive enough to sunlight to potentially burst into flames, he still couldn’t handle exposure to the sun for longer than a few minutes.
    Adrian couldn’t even trust his son around Katherine so the two were locked away separately until he was there to make sure Lucas didn’t give into his basic instincts and attack her.
    With all that it took to care for them daily and the pressure on him to do so, not to mention the burden of his secret and the crushing weight of his guilt, he had learned to keep himself switched off from everyone, even his own family. He had fucked up, so now he was determined to pay for his mistakes by living a double life. That was until Faith turned up and suddenly all that he knew, all that had become a way of life for him in his sorry existence was now under threat.
    When he turned to her again, those incredible vibrant eyes of hers were watching him. She walked towards him and he tensed up, not wanting her