78

Then…

          Crisp snowflakes dusted their faces and stirred up laughter as Merit and Luke Dawson swished their arms up and down across the packed snow. They lay side by side beneath the glow of a streetlight in a quiet corner of a Paris city park. Luke stood and clasped his wife’s hand to pull her up beside him so they could look over their handiwork.

“Not bad,” he decided.

“Not bad? We rock at snow angels.” Merit’s bright blue eyes danced as she cuddled into his embrace and gave him a cold, wet kiss laced with snowflakes. “I love you so much.”

“I love you more than the world,” he replied.

“I know you do. Sometimes, when I’m home alone, I can feel you thinking about me.”

“Really?”

She nodded effusively, and snowflakes sifted from her thick, wavy, chestnut hair. “When the loft is quiet, I can feel your love for me as if it’s something I can reach out and grasp. Don’t ever leave me, Luke.”

“I swear I won’t. You’ll always feel my love, wherever you are. Now, are you sure you want to go with that image?” he teased as they looked over their impromptu snow angels. “You? An angel?”

Mocking outrage with a pout, Merit nudged him with an elbow. “You love my devilish side.”

“No halo for Merit Dawson, and that’s the way I like it. Especially when you get that wicked, sexy glint in your eyes—like now—and I know what’s coming next.”

She plunged against him, wrapping her legs about his waist and kissing him hard and sloppily. Her attack kisses always ended in their laughter, and, if they were anywhere near a bed, long and lingering sex.

“Happy first anniversary, lover,” Luke said against her mouth.

“And Merry Christmas,” she added.

“Only you could have convinced me to get married on Christmas Eve.”

“I love Christmas. It’s the one day that bursts with love. Can you feel it?”

He did, and the emotion radiated from deep in his soul to warm him even with the mercury teasing ten degrees. “I almost forgot. I have a surprise for you. It’s in the car. Stay here. I’ll be right back.”

Merit dropped from their embrace and then lunged to grab a stray branch fallen from a nearby topiary shrub. “I’m going to draw a halo on your angel.”

“Don’t forget the horns and tail for yours!” Luke called as he strode toward the Renault parked at the curb around a hornbeam hedge.

Running, he performed a slide across the slick, packed snow and landed at the car door with a slap of his gloved palms and a chuckle. Merit did that to him. Lifted his heart and made him feel like a kid who’d just been gifted a sleigh full of Christmas toys. A year of marriage had felt like a mere day. His job as a traveling jewelry salesman allowed him to set his own schedule, and sometimes take Merit along if she weren’t studying. She was going for her emergency nurse certification because she loved to help others and functioned well in traumatic situations. The next year promised great and wondrous things standing alongside his gorgeous wife and experiencing the world through her optimistic eyes.

He opened the car door and popped open the glove compartment. From inside, he drew out the heart-shaped diamond necklace. He tapped the five-carat diamond. “Adamant, like my love for you.”

Merit’s scream shattered Luke’s happiness. Dread curdled in his throat. He took off toward the park, leaving the car door hanging wide, and the necklace dangling from his clasped fist.

***

          Frost etched the hospital window. The glow from a lighted star topping the Christmas tree in the neighboring churchyard winked defiantly at Luke. The ambulance had delivered him and his wife to the Hôtel Dieu half an hour earlier. They’d rolled Merit into another room, a creased white sheet covering her face. A young, male doctor stood at Luke’s side now, talking, saying…something.

Luke wasn’t listening. He couldn’t hear. He didn’t want to hear.

She was gone. And he remained.

Something wrong with that. It should have been him.

The church bells clanged loudly, marking the eve of a great savior’s birth. Luke swallowed, and the air pressure adjusted, siphoning into his brain the doctor’s quiet but cutting words.

“…we did all we could.”

Sitting on a plastic chair outside the room where his wife had been treated, Luke gritted his jaw, wincing at the pain from the wounds on his neck. A nurse had bandaged him and asked if he’d like something for the pain. The pain? What drug could take away the pain he felt from the indelible wound to his heart where Merit had been viciously cut away?

“I can tell you she didn’t feel a thing,” the doctor continued. “When she hit the back of her head against the rock, it knocked her out. She wasn’t conscious to experience any pain.”

Luke tilted his head back against the wall and bit his lower lip. “You’re lying. I saw her while three of them held me back. There were two of them on her. She screamed. She…didn’t stop…screaming.” He met the doctor’s bloodshot eyes. “She felt it all.”

“I, uh…”

“Just leave,” Luke said. “Get away from me.”

The doctor receded, as did the blurry haze from the Christmas star. Snowflakes fell over the world. Including Luke’s heart.

Clasping the diamond necklace he hadn’t a chance to give his wife before the vampires had attacked, he strode out of the hospital.