AllFreeNovel
Share Us
His fingers flexed against my belly, dipped down further until they reached into my panties, but then they stilled. I closed my eyes as he tightened his grip around my throat, tilting my head back to rest on his shoulder and holding me even tighter against his frame. He kissed my throat, the pressure of his fangs now gone. “Stop fighting this, little Fiorino.” He leaned forward and kissed the corner of my mouth. His tongue flicked out, a quick taste.
It took everything in me not to turn my head toward him and claim his mouth, that wicked tongue.
“You know I can smell your desire,” he murmured against my cheek. “Why do you fight it?”
Because I had no other choice. Because I hated vampires.
And because I needed him to train me, not drain me.
If the stories were true, succumbing to a vampire led to only one outcome—and I couldn’t avenge my father if I was dead.
“Vincenzo Ricci,” I stated loudly, even though the words pained me as they left my lips—
“No,” he said, his voice laced with disappointment. His hands flexed as his arms tightened around my body, as if he could hold onto me and fight against the words I was about to speak into existence. “Don’t say it.”
I closed my eyes, too cowardly to even stare into the darkness as I sent him away. “I revoke your invitation to enter this building.”
He growled, cursed under his breath, and then I was alone. I knew it by the emptiness left in his wake and the depth of my body’s longing for his touch now that it was gone.
When I opened my eyes, I was right. Vinny was nowhere to be found.
And the sadness this realization brought with it was damn near overwhelming.
“Goddammit,” I whispered into the empty shop.
I couldn’t want Vinny Ricci.
Wanting a vampire wasn’t just against my beliefs but against the law itself. The treaty was quite clear and acutely specific: vampire and human unions were strictly forbidden.
Chapter Five
Vinny
Two days had passed since she kicked me out of her shop, but the sting of Jacqueline’s rejection hadn’t abated. She wanted me, I knew that much to be true, but I couldn’t figure out why she fought that fact with every fiber of her being. It was inevitable; we’d been working toward this point since the day we met.
And I knew it couldn’t be the treaty. Jacqueline loved order and timeliness, but I doubted she cared that much about laws. Vampires and humans circumvented the treaty laws all the time. Unless something went horribly wrong—a vampire draining his human bride on their wedding night, for instance, which happened a few years back and caused quite the stir in both communities—most interspecies relationships were overlooked or ignored.
Ours wouldn’t be any different, if she’d just give us a damn chance.
The night she walked into my gym, I knew she’d be mine. Even as Jacqueline explained how much she loathed my kind and wanted to protect herself against monsters—no offense to present company, she’d said—she’d looked at me with a hint of wonder in her bright blue eyes, and more than a hint of lust.
And I’d been a goner ever since.
But I was also a patient man. I may only be twenty-four years old, technically speaking, but the past half-century as a vampire taught me patience, if nothing else. She had too much anger toward my kind to come around quickly, but I’d wait.
With Jacqueline, it was a long game.
One I intended to win.
But an hour past our usual meeting time Friday night, when there was still no sign of her, I’d begun to doubt myself.
And, as exasperating as it was to admit, I was also worried.
I didn’t know who she wanted to kill or why, but I did know that even with all the hours she’d spent in my gym, all the sparring and training in the world couldn’t prepare her to actually go head-to-head with a vampire.
Not unless he was already injured and damn near dead.
And I should have warned her.
