"Well love" his fingers take their turn to reach across the distance between them and catch a glistening curl in a miniature tango swirling in the corner of her eye. "There's your answer then isn't it"

"What?" she repeats dumbly. He sees something she does not as he watches her with ancient knowing eyes and she feels every one of his thousand years stand in stark contrast to her bewildered naivety.

She should be nothing to him who has lived so long she thinks. He has quite literally watched empires rise and fall. How many great men has he met, how many great women have passed through his heart over the centuries? And she. She is a small town girl turned small town vampire with no clue what she's doing and so little fortitude she flipped the switch at the first tragic event in her immortality.

"You hear that I have never turned off my humanity and what do you see? Hmmm" his hand moves from the curl at her temple deeper into her hair and she's aware that the moment is intimate in a way she's never been with him before, even when she'd opened her legs for him amongst the ferns and fallen leaves she hadn't been this tantalizingly close to him. "Do you see the heartless monster who has never regretted the terrible things he's done enough to trouble his non-existent conscience or the loyal brother resolutely bearing his own suffering for the sake of his family?"

She leans into his touch and her own hand finds it's way unbidden to his waist. "Which is it?" she asks softly

"It doesn't matter Caroline" he moves a fraction closer and she imagines sparks leaping across the inches between their bodies. "What matters is that you saw the latter. Just as you always would have. You will always see the good in me, it is simply who you are."

She lets out a long shuddering sigh, relieved to have come, to have found her answer in him just as she had hoped when she'd got in her car back in Whitmore. She is still that girl, somehow, beneath her regret and sorrow he still sees that light filled girl. Her head falls forward a little as she releases all the fear and insecurity that have kept her spine rigid for weeks and he leans forward to kiss her forehead.

"And I promise" he says against her skin. "To always see the light in you"

She moves closer, fills the inches between them with her own body and his arms go around her, cocooning her in the inevitability of them. "I intend to be your last" he'd said and even then, before the forest and before the missing him she's denied even to herself, she'd accepted the truth of it. She hadn't scoffed or protested or fled, she'd just smiled her uneasy understanding that, yes that is how it would be, one day.

"I missed you" she admits without meaning to speak and yet without regretting letting that truth slip from her mouth straight through his chest, where her head lies, and into his heart.

"As I missed you" he speaks into her hair and holds her close for a moment before drawing a deep breath and speaking again. "Are you ready then love?"

She shakes her head against his shirt. "No" she whispers. "Not yet"

His disappointment radiates through his skin and into hers and she tightens her arms around him. "Can I stay?" she mumbles and lifts her head to look at him again. "Just for tonight?"

"Of course" he takes her chin in his hand and looks searchingly into her face. Whatever he was looking for he must have found because he slowly, brutally mercilessly slowly, leans in and lays his lips over hers. It's a gentle kiss, closed lipped and chaste and her heart thunders in her ears at the feel of it. He moves away and her hands rise to catch his head and bring him back to her.

She looses her control, the control she had hinged the rebuilding of her life upon, she simply unshackles it and kisses him. He's half a heart beat behind her and she's already pushed her tongue into his mouth before his hands make their way to her upper arms to pull her hard against his body. He feels so damn good and his kisses send emotions swirling in her heart as random and unpredictable as a tornado. There is no control here, no reason or logic, but there is emotion, so much humanity, in this crazy lust filled surrender.

She pushes him back, his light body conceding easily as she sends them stumbling backwards and down onto the couch. "Klaus" she gasps breathlessly as he pulls her into his lap. "Please"

She is begging him for so much more that sex, she's begging him to show her the light he sees in her, begging him to stir her humanity to panting sweating chaos in his arms. "Hush sweetheart," he reprimands her between kisses, his hands still trailing hungrily over her body as his lips following his words to her ear. "No need for that

Perhaps not, perhaps with him she need not beg for love but she doesn't care. She wants it so badly right now that she'll throw her tattered soul before his feet and hope, despite all that she knows him to be, that he will not trample it into the dirt. His kisses, his hands, his adoring eyes when he breaks away gasping to look at her, tell her he will not. He will gather it up and return it to her a little more mended every time.

His hands find the skin beneath her blouse and hers grasp blindly at his shirt tugging directionlessly at it in mute demand that it be gone. He strips it off himself and her blouse follows so that she can plaster her skin against his and feel every burning inch of contact ignite the loving insanity that wanting him has always been.

"God, Caroline," he breathes desperately into her mouth and his hands move erratically over her body. She likes that he doesn't have moves. Oh she's not saying that a millennium of experience hasn't paid off, that he's not an incredible lover, but it's not a consciously honed skill with him. He's just as lost in it as she is, just as instinctive. She remembers Damon's touch, the practiced consummate smugness of it, the enjoyment he derived in undoing her had been enjoyment of his own skill, his own power, and not of her pleasure.

Klaus pleases her for her own sake. In the forest he'd held her high against the oak tree, her back scraping the bark, her legs draped over his shoulders as he'd worked her with his mouth until she'd been keening and thrashing. And when he'd slid her body, limp with pleasure, back to the floor still shuddering with aftershocks of her orgasm he'd beamed so boyishly and stroked her hair with such tenderness that she'd had to fight the rising bubbling feeling in her heart.

He strips off her bra and kisses her breasts roughly and it feels so good she mewls and jerks against him arching her back to push herself harder into his mouth. "Fuck" she hisses as his hand slips inside her jeans.

She reaches for his belt, rips it from him and tosses it aside, focuses on getting him naked. She's aching and empty for him in body and soul. She came here so his faith in her could fill up her empty spirit but now she's in his arms her spirit can wait its her body she needs him to take care of. "Klaus." The pleading tone is gone and she's as commanding as the queen he sees her as. His compliance is immediate, in a flash of vampiric speed that blurs even her supernatural vision they're both naked and he's above her, his mouth possessively claiming hers. She breaks the kiss with a gasp and throws back her head in anticipation of the moment, that wonderful soul-filling coming together that a split second later she realises isn't happening.

Opening her eyes she finds herself staring into those heartbreaking chameleon eyes of his, so much power, so much self-doubt. She always has pitied him a little no matter how much they all feared him, he just sucks so hard at getting the love he craves. She thinks of him through a thousand years, striving and clawing for love then self destructing over and over again and her heart always does cry a little for him.

He's scared; she knows that no matter how well he hides it. Scared of her, of loving her and her not loving him, of trusting and being betrayed. Disappointment and unworthiness have been hammered into him for centuries and he's done everything wrong, absolutely everything, but she doesn't care because he stirs her compassion and she just wants to drive that doubt from his eyes.

So cups his face in one hand and looks unflinchingly into his ancient eyes as the other slides down his back to pull him smoothly into her. He feels incredible and he groans so helplessly at the feel of her that she floods, body and heart, with a mindless inevitable warmth. She groans too and gives him a meaningful look. "I really missed you," she tells him with playful over emphasis and is rewarded with the full force of his dimpled smile.

They're back on track, his hesitation is passed and he moves inside her. His hands map the curves of her body as he kisses a wet path from the corner of her mouth to her nipple, sucking and nipping with blunt human teeth. The sensations he creates in her are like a double shot of Damon's best whiskey, burning and buzzing all down her throat making her light headed and irrational. She tugs clumsily at his hair until they're face to face again foreheads touching eyes locked as she meets him thrust for thrust, deep and far form gentle but tender still for all the roughness and so completely connected.

By the time they're sated she barely knows her own name, and yet she feels like she's found herself again in the hours they've been together. They made it to a bed eventually, long after they'd actually broken the antique chaise in the drawing room. "Bloody hell" he'd growled. "That was Louis the fifteenth"

She'd laughed at him and flipped him onto his back in the debris. "Oh I plan to break something way older than that"

He'd laughed too. "Is that so? Well come on then love, give it your best shot"