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And it scared the hell out of me.
Chapter Four
I didn’t notice when Claire left. I wasn’t even sure if she left. I was finding it hard to concentrate with those big hands cupping my face, smoothing out my bruises as easily as someone wiping away makeup.
“Thought I took care of this last night,” he murmured, warm, rough fingers gentling away the pain. “But I am not so good at this.”
I wanted to ask what he meant, wanted to ask about last night, but I didn’t. Because he was wrong. He was really, really good at this.
A swipe of his thumbs and I looked like I was wearing war paint in reverse, with swaths of paler skin showing through the eggplant. Another pass and only a faint mauve blush remained along my cheekbones. One more and even that was gone, my cheeks blooming pink with health—or maybe with something else.
The whole process should have been fascinating. I’d been healed a time or two in the past, but hadn’t been in a state to notice the fine details. And they weren’t getting my full attention now. I was too busy wanting to catch one of those talented fingers between my teeth, to bite down and feel the flesh give, to suck the sting away afterward, to—
To do a lot of stupid stuff that would only make a bad matter worse, I thought, catching sight of a spill of lustrous pink in the mirror.
The sun was streaming through the sheers over my windows, lighting up dust motes in the air and gleaming on the extravagant satin confection on my bed. Framed against the faded blue cotton of my comforter, it might as well have been lit in neon. Damn it.
Why lingerie? I thought resentfully. Of all the things he could have bought me, why did it have to be—
But of course, I knew why. It was the sort of gift a guy got a girl when he hoped he’d get a chance to see it on her. And then maybe to rip it off her. And that would have been fine; that would have been just dandy. A racy little red number, or a long slinky black thing, something cheap so I wouldn’t care if it ended up in a couple pieces the next day? No problem-o.
But this?
This had expectations written all over it.
Expectations that I was going to fuck up royally because I wasn’t the kind of gal who wore designer nightwear and knew what all the forks were for. I was the kind of gal who thought the nightgown drawer was where old T-shirts went to die and who had only started using forks in the last century. And who frankly still thought them kind of a waste when there were perfectly good knives handy.
Shit.
I swallowed and closed my eyes, but it didn’t help. Maybe because the calloused thumbs were keeping up the slow caress, smoothing over my cheeks and down to my jaw, then back up into the hairline, massaging my throbbing head until the pain gave up and melted away. And then migrating to areas where there was no pain, where there never had been any, as if mapping my features: the arch of my brows, the sweep of my lashes, the bridge of my nose, and back down to catch on my lips.
Which was how I ended up sucking on a vamp
ire’s fingers when it was the last thing I ought to be doing.
How had I gotten myself into this?
Of course, I knew how. He’d caught me in a weak moment. I’d been hurt and he’d been kind, not to mention scorching hot, and for a minute there I’d actually let myself believe that this could sort of maybe kind of work, at least for a little while…maybe.…
Only it couldn’t. Because dhampirs don’t have relationships. Dhampirs have the occasional one-night stand in between bouts of madness, in which they hope their partner doesn’t piss them off and they end up eating his face. I think my max “relationship” had lasted five days, and that had been an aberration. And this one had already lasted longer than that, if relationship was the term for two people who spent most of their time arguing and trying to kill each other.
Not that I was feeling particularly homicidal at the moment. I was feeling weirdly boneless, a strange, warm, drifting feeling, untethered, like I might just float away. Until he gripped my shoulders, grounding me.
When I opened my eyes again, my face was clear, my pupils dark, my skin flushed and my lips red and full. I looked drugged, but I’d been there enough times to know this wasn’t it. This was better.
And it didn’t help when the hands pulled me back against a warm, hard chest. I’d never thought of myself as delicate before I met Louis-Cesare, but I looked it next to six feet four inches of muscle barely contained by a navy sweater and jeans. The dark fabric made my paleness stand out starkly, like a reverse silhouette, and the hard lines of his body caused my curves to look softer, sweeter, strangely vulnerable—
And the record scratched again, because that wasn’t me, that big-eyed waif in the mirror. I wasn’t vulnerable. I never had been. I didn’t need some guy to come along and take care of me, because I was perfectly capable of doing that myself, as I’d been proving for, oh, five centuries now. I didn’t need outrageously expensive nightgowns that didn’t even look like me. That looked completely unlike me, in fact, like he hadn’t even thought about it, like it hadn’t crossed his mind how ridiculous I would look in a goddamn satin pussy bow and—
I didn’t need this.
“What is it?” Louis-Cesare asked as I struggled out of his grasp, reaching for my robe.
“Nothing.”
“Then why are you getting dressed?”
“Maybe I don’t like being the only naked one in the room,” I said sarcastically.
