Page 50 of Falling for a Villainous Vampire

Then back to meet my eyes as I answer.

“Yes, and I will do it until the end of time so you might as well stop asking.”

“If asking will not persuade you, then I shall force your hand.”

“And how are you going to go about—” I start to say, so sure he won’t that my sentence starts off almost incredulous, almost amused. But then he suddenly lunges forward and grabs me by the waist, and it ends in a gasp.

And I’m not entirely sure what the gasp means.

It sounds scared, I think, I must be scared.

But if I truly was, Phone would do something. She would sound an alarm, she would make that piercing noise. Yet she doesn’t do a thing. She stays silent in my pocket as he clutches me like that. One arm right over the small of my back, one hand gripping me all along the left side of my body.

His thumb is curved around me in a way that almost reaches my breast.

Or, at least, it feels like it, when it’s him. I’m suddenly hyperaware of every sensitive and sexual part of my body in a way I’ve never been before. That I really don’t want to be. It’s awful, it’s hideous, stop, stop, stop, I think. Though I don’t actually struggle or say a word until he gets hold of my hand and forces the stake into it. Then he wraps his own around mine, and aims the point at his heart.

“No,” I tell him as I buck in his arms. “No, I will never. We’re friends.”

“Friends do not savage each other.”

“You don’t want to do that.”

“Oh, but I do. I want to sink my teeth into all the tenderest parts of you. Your beautiful throat, your soft wrists, those delicious thighs, ah, those thighs—they are my every thought, they are in all my dreams, I see them spread like a feast before me and all I can think of is licking slow and soft over the curve of them. On the inside where it’s sweeter, the sweetest, the most delectable,” he says, his eyes drifting closed somewhere in the middle, his tongue curling up to lick over one sharp incisor close to the end, each word more terrible than the last.

Though maybe not in the way he thinks.

My hair is practically standing on end by the time he’s done.

“That doesn’t sound so much like savaging,” I find myself saying faintly.

Then wish I could take it back. He looks even more incensed by this than the rest—and not in the bad way, dear god, how doesn’t he know that it’s not in the bad way?

“It will be. I will have my hand in your hair, like this,” he says. And then he does it. I feel his fingers plunge in right to the roots, so sudden and so intimate that my body reacts before I can even consider it.

Like all I register is the different man he has become.

Or maybe I just don’t know how to process contact from him at all. I’m really starting to remember how much the man he was never touched me at all. And it damn near sizzles with some sort of forbidden quality that I can’t quite describe. For the first time, I don’t just think I like this man’s nature more.

I think: I like that this man’s nature is inside my enemy’s skin.

That everything between us is made new and strange.

And so much so that I sound breathless when I respond.

“To hold me still, then.”

“Yes, oh yes.”

“And bare my throat.”

He does it, when I say it.

Only slightly, only a little, but god, I feel it as if it’s a lot. His touch tingles when it tightens in my hair, when it turns me, tilts me. And the air on my throat is by turns cold and hot, cold and hot. The undisturbed breath of the library; the heated breath from him as he leans close. As he speaks.

“I cannot think of anything better.”

“And then—” I start to say.