Page 25 of Bought for Blood

Then he comes to me.

Quiet on the carpet, and he stops close enough that the cold reaches me. Real cold, laid over the smell of rain and road. My wolf feels it too. She stays calm. She stays awake.

Standing, he has almost a foot on me. I make myself hold his eyes all the way up. Violet, dark at the rim, and something in them tonight that wasn’t there before. Hungrier. Two days hungrier, maybe. I swallow hard.

Two cool fingers touch my jaw and turn my head aside. Not forcing. Just moving me exactly where he wants me. My hair is already out of his way. I did that for him an hour ago, and the shame of it arrives now, right on time.

Bad idea, dammit. .

I force my eyes open. I’m not going to squeeze them shut this time. I won’t let him see that he scares me. So I watch—the darkhair falling forward, the lashes coming down, the patient tilt of his head. No breath touches my skin. A man’s mouth this close means warm air. There’s none. Cool lips find my pulse, and my heart slams against them, telling him everything my face won’t.

I stiffen. His teeth press. Pain, sharp, the same as before.

Then the flood.

It comes up from the bite fast and hot, everywhere at once, and standing, I learn what the chair was for. The chair was mercy. Now, there’s my own knees under me, and that’s all. The first pull is deeper than any he’s taken before, deep enough that my vision jumps, and I feel him catch himself—a hitch, a beat where his mouth stops working—and then the rhythm comes back slower. Slower on purpose. He’s managing himself against my neck, and knowing that should frighten me more than it does.

The second pull rolls heat down through my chest into my belly. The third sends it lower, heavy, and my thighs press together against an ache that’s already unbearable. The floor tilts. I lock my knees, hard, bracing the only way I have left.

Trick. It’s a trick. He’s doing this to—

He swallows. I feel it against my skin, soft and slow, and it goes straight down through me and jerks the ache into a knot.

My knees give.

Not a sway. A drop—the bones just leave—and before I’ve fallen an inch, his arm is around my lower back, one arm, taking my whole weight without seeming to notice it was added. He doesn’t pull me against him. He holds me close enough to keep feeding, no closer, no looser, my feet barely finding the carpet.

Oh God. Oh, dear God!

My hands are in his shirt, inside the open coat. Both of them. I don’t remember them arriving, one fisted at his chest, one clutching his side, hanging on to the man who is drinking me because he’s the only fixed thing in a room.

Under my fist, through the cotton, his chest is hard and cold and silent. No heartbeat. I’m holding on to something with no heartbeat, and my body doesn’t care. My body has one goal now, winding tighter with every pull. My hips push forward against him. My face tips down until it’s pressed to his collarbone.

I made that contact. He didn’t move me there.

He allows it. The fists, my face, my weight on his arm. Allowed. Noted. Tolerated.

“God!” Out loud now.

His mouth draws at my neck in that slow, deliberate rhythm, and when it crests—

“Oh... oh...yes!” My whole body seizes against his arm. My thighs shake. Heat rolls through me in long pulses that keep coming after I think they’re done, and my fists wrench his shirt, again and again. He doesn’t stop drinking. Every pull drags it out longer. His shirt is the only thing in my hands, so I hold his shirt.

The wolf in me is watching him.

She’s watched every dangerous thing in this building for a year. This isn’t how she looks at a threat. This is long, slow, interested. I slam down on her so hard my whole body jerks in his grip.

No. He’s dangerous, dammit.

She subsides. She doesn’t apologize.

His teeth leave my neck. His tongue crosses the punctures once, and one last pulse rolls through me, smaller, and I hate it as much as the first. Then he moves me—three steps, his arm the only thing keeping me upright—and lowers me into the chair, careful and exact. My hands come off his shirt last. The creases stay where I gripped him, two crumpled fistfuls of white cotton. He doesn’t glance at them. He doesn’t smooth them.

“Désolé,” he murmurs. “Next time, you will sit, as I suggested.”

There’s a smear of blood left under my jaw. I feel it cooling. He reaches out and wipes my throat with the pad of his thumb.

Skin on skin. Slow, once, along the line of the vein. I stop breathing. He looks at his thumb after. He doesn’t wipe it clean.