She lifted her head, looked down at Niall. “I didn’t know how to explain it to you, but you can see it, feel it, inside me now, can’t you?”

The Scot held her gaze. She could see a lot shifting behind his tawny eyes. He was adjusting to the increased sharpness of his senses, the shape of his blood hunger, temporarily sated. It changed him dramatically, but in another way, it didn’t change him at all. It was just another part of the same remarkable man.

In sifting through all those slides, she’d seen so many pictures of Niall, or ideas inspired by Evan’s love for him. In a sense, each slide had given her a glimpse of both men, their many different facets, their interests and needs, intertwined so closely. Niall picked up on that thought. His mouth tightened, and she slid her fingers over his lips, caressing them. She closed her eyes as Evan laid a kiss on the back of her shoulder.

From the beginning, when I thought about serving a vampire, there was this feeling that, if I did it right, I would be lost in it. Like swimming in a sea I never wanted to leave, because I would be immersed in this one true, perfect thing. But the truth, and the perfection, is that nothing is one thing.

She turned her attention to Evan now, a tilt of her head that won her an additional brush of his lips over her temple.

“You showed me that. We’re as many things as we desire to be. And I’ve never really seen myself that way. Or realized how much better a servant I could be if I embraced that.”

“Ye have a whole lifetime ahead tae be all that ye desire, a ghrá,” Niall murmured, stroking her hair back from her face.

“So do you,” she whispered. “I like that. A ghrá. What does it mean?”

“Love,” Evan said, his mouth continuing to tease her flesh. He’d pushed her hair over her shoulder, was laying more tender kisses along the exposed track, and Niall was wrapping his fingers in the loose tendrils, the two of them weaving an erotic spell around her anew.

She gave herself to it, to the pleasure of their hands wandering over her, their breath touching her skin, their love surrounding her. Before dawn, they’d head for the cottage. After that, on to Ireland and almost three hundred years of memories. She’d follow her vampires wherever they’d take her.

As a servant, she’d never wanted anything more than that.