Page 51 of Falling for a Villainous Vampire
But now he finishes for me.
“I would gather you into my arms,” he tells me, then just as I’m thinking what on earth that entails, he draws me into what can only be described as a clinch. I feel the wall at my back in a way that says he’s pressed me to it. Suddenly the stake isn’t between us—in fact, there’s nothing at all. That’s his chest pressed to mine, his whole chest, and oh god, has he lifted me?
I think he has.
I think he has lifted me clean off the fucking ground. I can’t even find it with the tips of my sneakers when I stretch. The only thing I can manage is brushing them against his boots, then trying to find some kind of purchase on his body. The backs of his legs, his calves, his thighs, I think, but all that does is make it seem like I’m wrapping my own around him.
He could just have me like this, I think.
Then cannot help gasping out words.
“Oh god, you’re so strong,” I somehow say, like some silly green slip of a girl who’s never experienced anything like this. But then the thing is: I haven’t. I don’t know how to deal with being held like this. I don’t even know where to put my hands or my arms right now, never mind saying the right things.
I settle on lightly touching one of his shoulders.
But that’s a mistake.
Those hazy eyes stutter closed the second I make contact. His lips part softly, so softly—a sort of fang baring that I’ve never experienced before. It’s like seeing someone moan without making a sound, and it gets me very, very close to doing something more. Stroking the long column of his throat that he has inexplicably bared for me. Touching his face, so I can explore that lost-in-bliss expression.
Let’s see what else we can make him do, I think.
Though it’s this thought that really stops me.
That idea of him not meaning to do this at all—it helps me wrench myself away. And he lets me do it. He stumbles back, his face slack with desire but his will still strong enough to do it anyway. He really would never hurt me, I find myself marveling as he holds himself away from me. It’s not a trick, it’s not a trap, it’s not something that can easily just dissolve.
Then after that, everything I have to now do seems easy.
“Okay, here is what is going to happen,” I tell him. A little breathlessly, but I get the words out. And once some are there, they strengthen the rest. “We are just going to be practical about this. Extremely practical. All we have to do is make it a few hours until morning—which means only a little will be enough to tide you over. So I say that I take this stake in one hand and hold it over your heart, and then just maybe cut some part of me. Some innocuous, sensible, non-intimate part, like my fucking elbow. And you can have a few drops. Just a few. Just enough of them. No big deal.”
Very big deal on a very bad front, the memory of Madison reminds me.
And then I see that dismembered arm again behind my eyes. I remember that he can chomp through flesh and bone like it has no more weight than a feather. I have to suppress a shudder—though I don’t know if I quite manage.
“If the deal is not big then why do you shake as you say this?”
Fuck, I think. “I would hardly call this shaking.”
“You might if you could hear your own heart.”
“This is going to scare me a little. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t.”
“It means precisely that. I will die before I cause you such torment.”
“Torment is too strong a word for what this will be,” I say.
Confidently, too. It’s just a shame that confidence has no effect.
He shrugs it off like my voice came out thin as a reed.
“Even so little a fear would be too much for me to bear.”
“I promise it isn’t that, either. I will be fine. Everything will be fine.”
“Except that you will be disgusted by me.”
He has been almost angry up until this point. Stern and steadfast in his dedication to having me stab him, instead of whatever I’m proposing. But strangely, this is the sentence he stumbles over. His voice breaks somewhere around the middle of it; it goes too high on the end.
And suddenly it all makes sense:
