Page 72 of Don't Bite the Botanist
Maybe that was the problem. She’d never told him she loved him. And maybe it was crazy since they’d barely known each other a couple weeks, but she’d been falling since the first moment she looked into his slate gray eyes. Three hundred years meant she had encountered a lot of men, and not a single one even gave her stomach a flutter. Ethan, on the hand, made her feel like she had a belfry full of bats inside her.
She couldn’t lose that feeling.
She couldn’t losehim.
Tressa slid her ass off the table and went over to the silvercooler in the corner of Baylin’s room. Snagging a blood bag, she sank her fangs in and sipped it slowly as she mulled over her options.
Really there weren’t that many. She either gave him space or she didn’t. But really, what she kept hearing was, she either risked her mate’s life to potentially save her relationship, or…
She tossed the empty pouch in the trash. “Call Derrick,” she told her cousin as she grabbed a few more bags from the cooler.
“Come again?” Baylin asked, narrowing his eyes at her pilfered supplies. “Why do you need Derrick, and why are you guys always stealing my blood bags? Can’t you go to the cellar and get your own?”
“Nope,” she said. “I have a plane to catch.”
Maybe she was about to make the biggest mistake of her life. Maybe she was about to ensure her mate never spoke to her again. Maybe she shouldn’t have been such a dumbass by preventing Saiden from going after Ethan when he initially offered…
So many maybes, and she was definitely questioning the insane logic that led to that last one.
She made a lot of bad calls when it came to her mate, but one thing was for certain: if she left him alone, he was a sitting duck for Renata.
And Tressa wasn’t about to wait around in the safety of the compound to see if he survived or not.
Pausing in the doorway, she tossed a glance over her shoulder at Baylin. “I don’t care if Ethan ends up hating me for the next five centuries. He’s my mate, Bay. I won’t risk his life. If he needs space to decide how he feels about me, I’ll give it to him. I’ll give him space for the rest of eternity. But not until after that bitch is dead and I know he’s safe.”
“You know,” Derrick said through the plane’s headset, “I don’t mind that you guys basically use me as your own personal air Uber, but could you look a little less mopey about it?”
“You’re one to talk,” Tressa pointed out, and Saiden snorted at her side.
“She’s not wrong, cousin,” Saiden said. “Being away from Cora always sets me on edge, and Tressa may or may not have fucked things up with her mate forever. What’s your excuse, huh? Why have you been such a sourpuss lately? I spilled blood on your Armani jacket yesterday, and you didn’t even blink.”
The sigh that came through the headset was loud even without vampiric hearing. “It was a Tom Ford, actually, and I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Do you need a little pick me up?” Tressa asked, moving from the back seat to the co-pilot chair.
“Nah,” Derrick said. “Appreciate the offer, but I don’t need your mood mojo to make me feel better. I sort of deserve to feel like shit right now.”
Tressa studied her cousin, taking in his tense face and the laser focus he maintained on the controls. It was strange, considering Derrick could fly a plane in his sleep. In fact, if she believed his story, he’d once spent a week in Milan with a supermodel and had passed out at thirty thousand feet after testing just how much liquor a vampire needed to get truly smashed. He said he’d woken up to a half-naked woman screaming as the plane was nosediving through the clouds, but it hadn’t phased him for a second.
Granted, notall of Derrick’s stories were real—or at least she hoped they weren’t—but his ease in the cockpit was not an exaggeration.
“If you say so,” she muttered. “As long as you’re on your game when Renata shows up.”
He scoffed. “Oh, I’ll be on my game. I might not have Saiden’s super special spidey sense, but—”
“Donotcall it that,” Saiden snarled.
“Why?” Derrick asked, glancing back at him with a genuine look of confusion. “You let Cora use that term.”
“That’s because Cora is my mate.”
Derrick thumped his chest. “And I’m family.”
“You’re a jackass that I can’t seem to escape.”
“A jackass who has saved your life how many times now?”
“And you never let me forget it.”
