She looked up until she found his eyes. “You couldn’t trust me to stay with you of my own free will. You didn’t really believe there was enough between us. The only way to keep me was to take my will away, even my memories.” Something caught in her throat, she set her jaw and stared at him, clenching her fists until nails cut palms.
Luke met her eyes with such steady defiance that it took all her determination to meet it. His face was bleak in the shadows. “I didn’t take your will, Joey,” he said, utterly without inflection.
“What name do you give it then, this ‘influence’ of yours?” she flung at him. The flame of anger burned the words like kindling and rose higher.
He was cold, ice meeting her fire. “I didn’t take your will,” he repeated, eyes glittering. “I only made you forget your fears, and…”
“Forget?” She tossed her hair so that it whipped her face. “Forget everything but you. What’s the difference, Luke?”
Their gazes locked. His pupils had expanded, leaving a narrow green-gold rim. “There was no compulsion,” he said, too quietly. “I don’t have that power.” Suddenly he moved, advancing on her so quickly that she pressed back into the sofa and braced herself for attack. It didn’t come.
“What you felt, Joey,” he breathed, crouching before her, “was real.”
“How do you know what I felt, Luke?” she said, trembling at his nearness. “Or could you read my mind as well as control it?”
For the first time she saw the icy calm of his expression flicker. His hands reached out and hovered inches from her arms where they clasped her knees. “I know you were happy, Joey” He challenged her with his eyes. “Can you deny that?”
Joey drew breath and choked on the denial she wanted to fling at him. Her vision blurred with the struggle between anger and honesty. She wanted to reject him, reject his quiet, cutting, deadly certainty.
“The happiness you felt—we felt—was real,” he whispered, his fingers brushed her wrists and left a trail of heat in their wake. There was nowhere left for Joey to retreat.
She threw up a wall of words. “And the dreams—did you give me those, too?” The memory of them made her treacherous body tremble. “Did you violate me that way so that I would come to your bed like those other women?”
He froze, all of his muscles going taut. The shock wave of his reaction reached her through the half-severed bond. “No,” he said, his voice stunned. “No, I gave you no dreams.”
His eyes flickered away at some inner vision. When they came back to her, they were very bright. “I, too, had those dreams, Joey,” he said slowly. “From the first time I met you.” His fingers tightened on her wrists. “Those dreams came from within us, out of what we are.”
Joey tried to drag her arms out of his grasp, to cover her ears and blot him out, but he held her too tightly. “Not by my choice,” she cried. With every ounce of courage and anger she possessed, she held fast against him. “I wasn’t allowed to choose—not any of this! I didn’t want it. I didn’t want it!”
The fragile cord that connected them knotted with pain that made her gasp. His hands slid up her shoulders. “It’s because of what we are that it happened, Joey. The bond between us was forged in our blood—in your blood. It’s not a matter of wanting. It’s something far more powerful—”
“Are you saying,” she said with sudden, bitter calm, “that it’s all some sort of animal instinct, some kind of mating urge? Nothing more than that?”
He jerked back as if he had been struck. “No. More than that, Joey, much more than that…”
“Then what is it?” she whispered hoarsely. “What is it, Luke?” Suddenly there were tears, and she tried to pull free again to scrub them from her face. She saw him through a haze of moisture, remembering how vulnerable she had made herself when she had believed all of it was real. She had told him the one thing she had been afraid to say ever since her parents had been torn from her life, given a part of herself she had never dared give to anyone. And none of it had been real.