“This side is my mother’s line,” he said carefully. “I can trace them back to the Middle Ages.”
“But your dates are wrong.”
He ignored her, pretending not to notice that some members of the family—specifically a handful close to his own generation—had unusually long lives. “In some places I worked from supposition and rumors passed through oral storytelling. I know the entire thing can’t be one hundred percent perfect, but I think it’s pretty damned close.”
“But your paternal line? You don’t have that?”
Bast shook his head, unclenching his jaw at the same time. “No. I only knew my mother. I’ve spent a long time going through documents and files trying to locate him, but I only come up blank.” Whoever the man was, he’d done a damned good job of covering his tracks. The only reason Sebastian suspected he might have been preternatural was because of the extent to which he’d disappeared from the face of the earth. He doubted any human could be that thorough.
She leaned in closer to the screen, tracing a finger along one of the lines. “You made a mistake here. This person’s on two different branches, unless...” Alice started muttering to herself. “No, not the same person. A mistake. I think if you...yeah. She needs to be on this line, not that one.”
He’d worked with painstaking precision on the chart. “Show me.”
“Here.” She made a face. “And here.”
“Son of a bitch,” he said with a low growl. “I don’t know which one is correct. Fuck. I’ll have to—”
“You could hire me to do it.”
“What?”
Her words picked up speed, her enthusiasm growing. “Let me do this for you. Like a personal assistant or something. My mother worked on these in her spare time, and I know how to do the research. Let me—”
“No.”
“But Bast, it’s a win-win. For room and board. You’ve got this huge house—”
“No, I’m sorry. I won’t let you work on this.”
“But why not?”
He shook his head again, regret washing over him that he couldn’t share even this tiny snippet of his life with someone. Especially not a human. “Not this.”
“Wait, wait. Before you make a decision, just think. I’ve spent more than ten years working on my family’s genealogy charts. It took me less than two minutes to find not one, but two mistakes on yours. I’m not here looking for skeletons in the closet. Whatever secrets I find will go to the grave with me. I’m just looking for a way to not end up on the street tomorrow. That’s all.”
“I don’t know you and you don’t know me. Yet you want that level of trust?”
“Yes. I’m worth it. Give me a chance to prove it to you. Anything I find, anything at all, remains between you and me. I don’t have anyone else to tell, I swear it.”
“You swear a lot.”
“’Cause you keep putting me in situations that require it. Come on, Bast. What do you say?”
At some point he’d stopped believing she would be leaving in the morning. If he was wrong and she happened to slip out while he slept, he would deal with it later, but with everything within him, he knew he’d have a very difficult time letting her go. He didn’t question the why of it, not yet, but allowed his gut instinct, which had never steered him wrong before, to be his guiding light.
“No,” he said, still questioning the decision. Because he wanted this too. To be able to share this burden with someone else. Someone who’d shown him a little compassion. “While I appreciate your enthusiasm, this isn’t for you. I owe you a debt and will repay you.”
Her eyes flashed when she turned to him, a smile pushing her cheeks. “So I can stay tonight, right? And maybe beyond tonight?”
“Just one night.” He tried to keep his voice stern. Somehow not betray his own growing excitement. “One guaranteed night, but the next day...we’ll see.”
She launched herself at him with an impressive speed only a vampire could admire. Prepared for the attack, he opened his arms, letting her fall into them. The thoughts that raced through his mind when their bodies collided would have made a hedonist blush.