Kiss of Crimson by Samantha Coville (best love story novels in english txt) 📕

familiar to me, but I could never place where I knew him from. But today, when I saw him drop you off, I remembered. He had accompanied Benedict Jardin a few months ago as his bodyguard at a ribbon cutting ceremony downtown."

I furrowed my eyebrows and looked at the ground as I tried to comprehend what she was implying. Jardin was one of the rival blood traders that plagued my mother's business. He was probably one of her fiercest competitors, as he had been in the trade longer than she had. And some vampires could not let go of the fact that my mother was a woman. Some just had to do their dealings with a man, those sexist pigs.

If Arden had been with him as a bodyguard nonetheless, then that meant Arden was in his employ. And the odds were that he still was, even while he courted me. My blood was beginning to boil, but I kept it at bay as I thought of Arden's warm smile and infectious laugh. Was there any way that he could have been playing me the whole time? There couldn't have been.

"Maybe he’s both? Maybe he does two jobs at the same time? Or even if he only works for Jardin, that doesn’t mean he isn’t sincerely interested in me, right?" My voice wavered and cracked. It was like I was trying more to convince myself more so than my mother.

She shook her head. "Jardin would use you to his advantage, make no mistake. Whether it be to get information about me or to use you as a bargaining chip, I wouldn't know. He tried to send someone once to pursue Madge, but I put a stop to that. He sent someone I wouldn't so easily recognize this time."

I was pacing back and forth across my room. There were too many pieces of information to take in at once. It was starting to make my head hurt. I glanced at my mother, a tear forming in my eye. "How can we know for sure? Have you considered that maybe someone might actually love your daughter and not have the intention to use her?"

My mother dropped to my bed and looked wounded. "Of course, that's a possibility. I want that for you, Eloise! But..."

"But what?" I crossed my arms, trying to be strong. I wouldn’t give up on Arden so easily. But my sister's words loomed in the back of my mind. Maybe he was just like the rest of them.

"I confronted him, El. Just now. He was slipping out of my office after dropping you home. He was probably trying to steal information from me."

I felt my heart shatter. Arden was the one good thing that had come from any of this. The one thing that made the lies and the horror all worth it. If even he was a lie, I didn’t think I could keep going. What was the point of the glitz and the glamour if it was all a facade for the dark and the vile?

My mother's voice dropped to a hushed whisper. "I'm so sorry, Eloise."

My arms uncrossed and dropped to my sides. "You just finished talking to him?"

She nodded her head, and without hesitation, I stormed out of my bedroom door. I raced down the staircase and through the double doors of the entrance without waiting for a servant to open them for me. Across the yard, I could see him, just barely. He was leaning against his car, just on the other side of the Hart property line. He was probably thinking or scheming or some combination of the two.

I screamed his name at the top of my lungs. The name that had been so sweet moments ago tasted bitter. He spun around with wide eyes and a pained expression. He realized mother had told me everything. Why hadn't he tried to come inside and reason with me and tell me he wasn't with me as part of his job? I finally got close enough, my chest heaving up and down quickly as I gasped for breath, both from storming across the large yard to catch up to him and from being enraged.

"Tell me it's not true. Arden... tell me..." My voice was shrill and bellowed unlike it ever had before.

Arden winced and looked down at his boots when he couldn't maintain eye contact with me. "I can't tell you that, Eloise..."

I couldn’t stop myself from choking on a sob. I had fallen for him so quickly and this was my punishment. I should have listened. To my mother. To Madge. I flew too close to the sun, and this was what it was like to get burned. He glanced back up at me, his eyes welling with his own tears. How dare he try to be the victim in this? I was the one hurting! This was my trauma!

"Eloise, I was told to get to know you better by my employer. I will confess to that."

I thrust my finger pointedly at him. "But you didn't confess to it. My mother had to catch you."

"I know, and I should have told you sooner. But hear me out."

"Why?" I screamed at him at the top of my lungs. I knew without a doubt that some of the servants were probably watching me from the windows or the front door. And I didn't care. Let them stare. I was laser-focused on the vampire in front of me. The one that I had started to trust, unlike anyone else outside of my family.

"Because I love you!" He screamed back at me. I was taken aback as the words pierced my heart. I wanted nothing more than for them to be true. But I shook my head as if to clear them from my mind. He saw my reaction and continued. "What we have may have started as an assignment, but that's not what it is now. I genuinely fell in love with you, Eloise. You see me in