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I should have said something filthy and dismissive and unserious, rolled my eyes, and told him to climb back down the trellis he came up. But instead of pushing him away, the space between us narrowed, as though something unseen had drawn us closer without either of us moving.

“You’re five hundred years old,” I said. “As old as my great-great-great⁠—”

He turned his wrist inside my grasp and took my hand, and my sentence fell apart. No, my entire world unraveled.

“Five hundred years have taught me a great deal about patience,” he said, tracing his thumb across my palm. “You have exhausted all of it in less than a week.”

My heart stumbled.

“You cannot hide your attraction from me, Cora. Your pulse begins racing every time I enter a room.”

“Perhaps you frighten me,” I offered weakly.

“No.” He ran his thumb over the inside of my wrist, directly above the frantic beat. “This is not fear.”

I wanted him to tell me how often he thought of me. How much he longed to hold me. How badly he wanted to undress me and kiss every inch of my body beneath the same stars that watched him brood from his balcony.

But instead I said, “I suppose that at times, in certain lights, you are easy to look at.”

I lifted my chin and glanced away, not wanting him to see what the admission cost me. Yves dropped the book on the floor, and it landed with a thud. Then he set his hand on my face and guided my attention back to his. His cool fingers gently brushed back a strand of my hair.

“At all times,” he said, holding my gaze, “in every light, you draw my attention.”

My breath caught in my chest, and pain lanced through my heart, as if Della had grabbed it with her talons.

I wrapped my fingers around his wrist, meaning to pull his hand off my face, but I couldn’t find the strength. “Yves—stop,” I said. “You don’t mean what you’re saying.”

“I do.”

The certainty in his voice frightened me more than hunger would have.

“I have not wanted anything in a very long time,” he said. “Then you ran into my sea, struck me across the face, insulted my parenting, invaded my home, and reminded me that I was still capable of wanting anything at all.”

His thumb swept over my cheek. “I want you.”

The green was almost fully eclipsed by the blackness of his pupils. He flipped my hand over and traced the veins on the inside of my wrist, pausing to feel the beat of my erratic pulse.

“But wanting you is only half my predicament.” He drew in a breath. “The other is that I cannot stop imagining pleasuring you.”

Heat flooded every inch of my body.

Yves raised my wrist toward his mouth but stopped before his lips touched my skin. “If you tell me to leave, I will climb back through that window and never make this proposal again.”

He waited for an answer with my pulse leaping beneath his fingers.

“And if I don’t tell you to leave?”

His lips brushed the inside of my wrist.

“Then I want to satisfy you.” Another kiss, directly over my pulse. “Not because I expect anything in return, but because you have occupied my imagination for days, and I am tired of imagining it.”

His fangs grazed my skin without breaking it, and I sucked in a breath.

“I want to discover what makes you forget how to argue.” His eyes lifted to mine. “And then I want to do it until you remember nothing but my name.”

There were a million reasons to say no, so I offered the most practical of excuses. “I-I see you every day,” I stuttered.

“The perfect cover.”