Broken Promise Read online

  Copyright © Tracy Cooper-Posey

  Smashwords Edition

  About Broken Promise

  While Nial, Winter and Sebastian are on their honeymoon, Nial relates the story of how he once lied and broke his promise. In his own words, Nial describes the horrors of war, and the tangled ideals of loyalty, while revealing the conflict he feels over the long existence of a vampire and the much shorter but sweeter life of humans – especially one of his most favourite humans, Sebastian.

  A short story filled with anger, remorse...and love.

  WARNING: This romance contains two hot, sexy alpha heroes. There is explicit and frank sexual language. It includes a single heart-stopping sexual scene between the aforementioned sexy heroes. Don't proceed beyond this point if hot love scenes offend you.

  No vampires were harmed in the making of this story.

  ___

  This is a Blood Drops book. Blood Drops are short and novella length stories featuring the characters and situations in the Blood Stone series. Droplet sized morsels for your reading pleasure.

  The Blood Stone series:

  Blood Stone 1: Blood Knot (#1 Best Seller, Fantasy Romance)

  Blood Drops 1.1: Southampton Swindle

  Blood Drops 1.2: Broken Promise

  Blood Stone 2: Blood Stone

  Blood Stone 3: Blood Unleashed

  Blood Stone 3.5: Blood Drive – Blood Stone Boxed Set 1

  Blood Stone 4: Blood Revealed (Upcoming)

  These are continuing characters and storylines. Reading the series in order is strongly recommended.

  Praise for the Blood Stone Series

  Intriguing plot and fresh vamp world to explore. I can only hope and pray that Tracy plans on continuing and making this a series of some kind, because I would love to read more about this world she created. A Reader

  Tracy Cooper-Posey’s writing keeps you on the edge of your seat, laughing out loud and wanting to use a fan to keep the heat out. A Reader

  This is one of those hidden gems in the self-publishing world. The Romance Studio

  I don’t want this series to ever end. A Reader.

  Broken Promise

  Eden Rock Hotel, St. Barths, Caribbean. Present day.

  Winter knew the moment Sebastian returned, despite the fact that she was wallowing in the shallow end of the dark-tiled bathing pool that butted up next to the deck of their private chalet.

  Nial was sitting on one of the long sun lounges, which he had pulled just inside the open arch that led out onto the deck. He wore dark sunglasses as protection against the powerful Caribbean sun, and was working on a laptop. The laptop was a recent concession. Nial was a touch old-fashioned here and there – a product of having lived so long. Sebastian had teased him about working with a pen and paper when a keyboard was so much faster.

  Nial didn’t embrace technology for the sake of it, but the idea of working faster appealed to him. He had spent four days teaching himself to touch type and now was faster on the keyboard than either of them.

  Despite it being their honeymoon, Nial and Sebastian were both working on developing their plans for the next year or so, coordinating the new vampire recruits like the one called Garrett, with the red hair.

  Nathanial stopped typing and cocked his head. “Sebastian is back,” he told her.

  Winter’s breath caught and her heart beat harder. Sebastian had been away for nearly a week, shoring up arrangements and deals in England and the States, while Nial had been coordinating his work from wherever they happened to be at the time.

  She had missed Sebastian terribly. They had only been married for four and a half weeks and she still had moments where she would realize almost like it was a new idea, that yes, she really was married to both of the men she loved. It really had happened.

  She pulled herself out of the water and stepped up onto the desk. The planks were almost hot under her feet, for they had been broiling under the direct afternoon sun for hours. Quickly, she dried herself, as she heard the front door of the chalet open and close, and the sound of luggage wheels rolling across the tiles there.

  Sebastian walked through the main room of the chalet, skirting the big sofa and armchairs. He was wearing jeans and the softened-by-age collarless shirts he favored, and slip on shoes.

  He walked right up to her and took her in his arms. His kiss was wonderful and Winter experienced another disjointed moment. She really was free to kiss him and enjoy it—especially in front of Nial.

  “Oh, how I have missed you,” she breathed.

  “It’s been one of the longest weeks of my life,” Sebastian assured her. “You’re deliciously damp and cool, by the way.”

  “I’m not damp,” Nial pointed out, “but Winter says I’m cool to the touch, too.” He put the laptop down onto the tiles next to his lounger and got to his feet. “Do I get one of those?” he asked Sebastian.

  “Ladies first,” Sebastian told him. “Liars second.” He gave Nial the same all-encompassing hug and kissed him as thoroughly as he had Winter.

  Winter watched the kiss with total concentration, her pulse doing jumpy things. She would always find watching them together both wildly arousing and just a little awe-inspiring, especially when she considered how long they had been together.

  Yet they both wanted her. It was humbling and terrifying at once.

  Nial stroked Sebastian’s hair, then let him go. “You haven’t called me that for a very long time,” he accused him.

  Winter picked up the pitcher of rum punch from the side table and poured two glasses. The glass frosted instantly at the touch of the icy liquid. She handed one to Sebastian. “You used to call him a liar?” she asked curiously. She kept her tone casual, though. Getting these two to talk about their very long pasts was like levering open oysters. If she was too avidly curious, they would become self-conscious and clam right up again.

  But sometimes she could coax them into reminiscing with an indifferent question or two – especially if the moment they were recalling struck them as funny or unusual in some odd way. So she kept her eyes on her glass, pretending she didn’t care about the answer.

  “That was what we were,” Sebastian replied, stretching hard. His hands pressed against the top of the big, open side of the room. He threw himself onto the sofa and kicked off his shoes. “We were liars, swindlers and thieves. They didn’t start calling us con men until early last century.” He stretched out his legs along the full length of the sofa with a sigh.

  Winter turned her back on both of them while she refilled her glass. She kept silent, letting the pause work for her.

  “Although you always meant more by it than anyone else,” Nial added, speaking to Sebastian.

  Another small pause. “Yeah, I did, didn’t I?” Sebastian agreed. There was a thread of amusement in his voice.

  “Does ‘liar’ mean something other than the usual, for Nial?” Winter asked, as she arranged herself at the opposite end of the sofa. Her hip pressed up against Sebastian’s feet. He immediately flexed his toes, rubbing them against her damp skin. She felt/saw that his CO2 levels were higher than normal, but that was from all the compressing and decompressing and the breathing of canned air that international travel induced. It was self-correcting if he slept and rested soon, so she ignored it.

  “It was the thing we agreed never to do to each other,” Sebastian said. He shrugged.

  “No lying?” Winter clarified, then sipped her drink. “How did that go, seeing as you both lied for a living?”

  They were silent and Winter wondered if she had pushed too hard.

  Then Nathanial spoke. “It worked very well,” he said, sounding vaguely surprised.

  “It did,” Sebastian agreed.

  Silence.

/>   Winter took another sip, letting the silence lengthen. When neither of them spoke again, she mentally sighed. “That sounds like a lie, right there,” she said. “You were together for over two hundred and twenty years. You’re telling me that neither of you lied to the other in all that time?” It was a direct challenge, which would either shut them up or blast them open. Sebastian in particular always rose to the bait if he thought his honor or reputation was being challenged.

  She glanced at them as the quiet stretched out. They wore almost identical frowns. They were sorting back through memories, looking for a way to say neither of them had broken their pact.

  “Dunkirk,” Sebastian said softly.

  Nathanial, astonishingly, nodded, his gaze dropping. He was hanging his head. Guilt?

  “Nial lied to you in Dunkirk?” Winter asked Sebastian, stroking his ankle with her fingers, which were wet from the condensation of the glass.

  “It was complicated,” Sebastian replied.

  “I broke a promise,” Nial said flatly. “There’s nothing complicated about it.”

  Sebastian took in a deep breath. Winter could tell via her touch against his flesh that his heart had jumped.

  “What did you do?” she asked Nial directly. “What promise did you break?”

  “It’s really nothing,” Sebastian replied quickly. “It was a stupid argument.”

  Winter kept her gaze on Nial. “You tell me,” she said. “Sebastian will minimize it.”

  Nial’s brilliant blue eyes locked with hers. She could see guilt and pain stirring.

  “I love you,” she told him. “Nothing you’ve done or could ever do will change that. But...I would like to know what astronomical force could possibly bring you to the point where you would lie and break your promise to the one person you loved.”

  “Still love,” Nial said flatly. “And he is not the only person I have loved.”

  “But he was the only one you loved, then,” she pointed out. “I don’t know when Dunkirk was, but I know I wasn’t there.” She gave him a small smile. “I would like to know.”

  Nial looked at Sebastian. “Do you mind?”

  Sebastian grimaced. “Winter has a right to know. You’d better tell the story. Winter is right. All I feel is a huge resistance to the idea of talking about.” He shook his head. “I didn’t realize it still had the power to press my buttons like that. Speaking about it might pull the poison.”

  “Then it is time to speak about it,” Nathanial agreed.

  * * * * *

  Gravel Lane, London, February 1793.

  I remember it was a Saturday, the day it happened, and a cold, miserable day it was, too. The slushy roads and whistling wind that tore through all the layers of your clothes left most of the streets in the neighborhood empty as people huddled around their fires. The weather, and the mood it left most of London in, was fitting.

  I generally don’t notice weather, not on a personal level, but the sour mood of nearly everyone I came across did dampen what I considered a perfectly fine day.

  I bought a newspaper from the young boy, Charlie, who most often set up on the corner by our townhouse, crying his headlines and holding out his cap for payment. I read the front page as I walked home. The headlines were the sort that made my heart sink.

  The French revolutionaries had declared war upon Britain.

  I had been following the battles and strategies of the fledging republic for more than a year, with a growing sense of déjà vu. I have seen dozens of wars in my time and the actions of the protagonists before they fully engage in battle—the skirmishes and the rhetoric in the newspapers and in centers of power—was how the new republic had been behaving recently—and Britain, too. Most of Europe was going to be drawn into the coming war. I could see the pattern repeating itself, with a sense of inevitability that I kept to myself. Sebastian didn’t need me to spoil his days ahead of time.

  Now war was here.

  I folded the newssheet up and tucked it inside my coat and went home, thinking heavily.

  Sebastian had returned from Ireland only a few days before. The man who had been his father for the first few years of life, the odious earl of Knighton, had done me the great favor of dying. I try not to kill without very good reasons, but I would have happily made an exception for that man, for what he did to Sebastian and his mother when Sebastian was a boy, but the earl had never crossed my path.

  He had died without a declared heir or legal will. Sebastian had been summoned to the estate for reasons the lawyer left very nicely vague, but I could guess well enough that the lawyer wanted to establish what claim Sebastian had to any of the estate.

  I had offered to go with him. It would be good for Sebastian to have at least one friend by his side. Sebastian had disagreed. “I don’t want you to soil your shoes by stepping onto that land. It was a blight on my life and I intend to shut this matter down as swiftly as possible. I’m not interested in inheriting so much as a bent farthing from the man.” He had packed a small trunk and left, looking and sounding introspective and angry.

  He had returned three days ago, just as the watery sun was sinking toward the horizon. His anger was gone, but he was filled with thought.

  I left him alone. Sebastian prefers to think things over and settle them in his own mind before sharing them with me. I know that my own lengthy experiences and the knowledge they give me about human affairs sometimes intimidated him, although he was slowly learning that I am just as capable as him of making mistakes and errors of judgment. Experience gives a man wisdom only if he listens to it. I fail to heed my own past quite frequently.

  I had bought a bottle of the cognac that Sebastian liked for serious drinking. It had been my intention to pour as much of the French brandy down his throat as was necessary to get him to talk about Ireland. It had been two days. He had festered enough over the affair. It was time to talk.

  Now, the bottle felt like a lead weight in my hand as I climbed the steps at the front of the townhouse and stepped inside.

  The house was lovely and warm and I could hear the fire crackling in the front parlor. “Grimble!” I called and heard the old man moving along the back passage in response to my call. Grimble was our butler and had been so for five years. I had helped him out over a matter involving his son, who had fallen in with the wrong people. It had been a trivial thing to fix. I had spent the dark end of a night, while Sebastian and the rest of London slept, to hunt down the leader of the gang that had indentured the boy as a virtual slave to pay off his debts. We...chatted. Regrettably, there was some blood involved, but I didn’t indulge myself. The man’s blood had smelled sour.

  Once we reached an agreement, I had taken Grimble’s son back to his father. Grimble had declared he owed me everything for the return of his son. Before retiring he had been the head butler for a duke’s country estate. He decided that nothing short of becoming our butler would do and had installed himself in the townhouse I had just bought on Gravel Lane.

  Grimble was slow, full of arthritis and his hearing was chancy, but given our unconventional and proscribed domestic arrangements, and that I am a vampire, unswerving and ironclad loyalty was a premium far beyond the value that a young and more energetic butler might have provided.

  He hurried down the front passage toward me, his face troubled. “Such grave business, Master Nathanial. Such a business!” he intoned.

  “You refer to the war in France?” I asked. I stretched out my hearing. This floor of the house was silent, except for the crackling of the fire. “Where is Sebastian?”

  Grimble actually washed his hands together in worry. It made me uneasy, but I waited him out with a forced patience.

  “Master Sebastian is in the bedroom, Master Nathanial.” He looked like he was about to say more, but then he shook his head.

  I handed him the cognac. “Under the circumstances, I don’t think this is the best gift to give an Englishman right now. Would you tuck this away at the back of the pantry, pleas
e, Grimble? Once the war is over, we’ll crack the seal and enjoy a glass together.”

  “Including you, Master Nathanial?” Grimble asked, surprised.

  I gave him a smile. “I will sniff mine and try to imagine what it might taste like.” I have never tasted spirits in my life. I barely remember what wine tastes like and I suspect that after so many centuries and countries, wine is very different from the watered liquid I drank as a child.

  “Very good, Master Nathanial.” He took the bottle away and I hurried up the stairs. I didn’t bother to slow my pace to human speed. Inside this special haven of ours, I could be myself. It was a rare luxury that I never failed to appreciate.

  The small trunk Sebastian had used for his journey to Ireland sat open upon the bed. He was pulling clothes from his wardrobe as I entered the room.

  I generally keep my heart still, to preserve energy between feedings and I’ve done it for so long I don’t think about the control I’m exerting anymore. It’s as automatic as the beating of human hearts. But now my heart squeezed, stirring my blood.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, which proves how foolishly human I can still be at times. I knew very well what he was doing. As soon as I spotted the trunk on the bed, I had put it together and I didn’t like the conclusion. I’m not sure what I was thinking; perhaps by refusing to acknowledge the truth that was staring me in the face, I could hold it at bay for a few more wretched minutes.

  Sebastian glanced at me. “We’re at war, Nial.” He reached into the wardrobe and pulled out another shirt that he tossed unfolded into the trunk.

  It is impossible for me to feel old, but right at that moment, it felt like my entire body ached, just like Grimble said his did on cold mornings. “England is at war,” I qualified. It was splitting hairs.

  From the look Sebastian gave me, he thought so, too. “I am English,” he reminded me.

  “You were born in Ireland.” Oh, how the desparate man denies the point! “This isn’t your war.”