“How much longer will it be like this?” I asked. “The bond, I mean.”
“It’s impossible to tell.”
“Does it make you… see things too? Like really vivid images or whatever?” I halfway muttered the question, not entirely sure I wanted to admit my brain was a constant porn reel of all the ways I apparently wanted to get my world rocked by Lucian.
“Yes,” he said plainly. “Just a moment ago I was imagining how you’d taste.”
“What?” I asked, touching my neck self-consciously. “Does it work like that for you? I mean, are you going to lose control and drink me dry or something?” I briefly considered throwing a pillow in his direction and running for it. But then I remembered he seemed to have the conditioning of an elite athlete. I, on the other hand, had the conditioning of someone who was elite at finding places to put just one more doughnut when my stomach was begging for mercy.
“No,” Lucian said, voice stiff. “I wasn’t talking about the way your blood would taste.”
I felt myself sink into the mattress a little, eyes bulging. Oh lord. Please help me to resist the overwhelming horniness that’s trying to consume me.
Change the subject. It’s your only salvation, Cara. Change the damn subject.
“The whole thing is just extra weird for me because I’ve never been a very sexual person. I mean, the last serious boyfriend—” Oh God, stop talking Cara. Stop talking. I cleared my throat, compelled by the momentum of stupidity and poor choices to continue. “It’s been a long time,” I said plainly. “A long, long time. I probably wouldn’t even know where to put it anymore.”
I stared at the ceiling. Suddenly I knew what Hell would be. It would be reliving the last ten seconds over and over. It would be sitting in a control room with twenty camera feeds and ultra-high-quality microphones so I could rewatch every little detail of my embarrassment.
As slowly as I could, I pulled the covers up over my eyeballs, retreating to some childlike mentality where the things I couldn’t see wouldn’t reach me.
Lucian made a sort of choking sound. I risked a look and saw he was propped up on one elbow and watching me with a strained expression. He swallowed, then laid back down, visibly making an effort to relax.
My eyes darted from him to the ceiling and back to him again. What was that? Did vampires get indigestion?
“You okay?” I whispered when he hadn’t made a sound for a few minutes.
“I require silence,” Lucian snapped. “I’m concentrating.”
I squinted. “On what?” I asked, expecting him to tell me he was using some magic vampire powers to fight off Bennigan’s attempt to reach his mind.
“To stay here on the floor. To stop myself from reminding you where ‘it’ goes.”
Neither of us spoke after that, and I couldn’t say for certain, but I didn’t think either of us slept.
Lucian stayed in his place all night with his arms crossed over his chest. I stayed under my blankets, where I hoped he didn’t have a supernatural sense of smell that could pick up on how hard my hormones were raging or how embarrassingly wet our blundering conversation had made me.
Eventually, the sun rose, and I lifted my tired, horny ass out of bed feeling like I’d been hit by a truck. Repeatedly.
I had a full day of classes ahead of me, my internship, and whatever seedy vampire establishments Lucian needed to drag me around to after dark ahead of me. Woo freaking hoo.
16
Lucian
By the time night came, Cara was practically sleep walking. We were in one of the graveyards of Savannah where I was supposed to meet the vampiress who fancied herself the head of the White family.
Cara was shaking her head as we weaved around gravestones. “I give tours of this place, you know. Well, gave. Are you seriously telling me you guys are that cliché? Meeting in graveyard crypts? It’s almost disappointing.”
“The safest places for us are the ones most thick with superstition. How likely would your kind be to believe a claim of supernatural beings lurking around a graveyard or a haunted house?”
Cara seemed to consider my question, then gave a little shrug of admittance. “I guess there’s some logic to that.” She punctuated her sentence with a huge, jaw-cracking yawn.
“You can sleep once we enter the crypt, if you prefer.”
“Somehow I think I’ll have a hard time sleeping while you have a clandestine meeting in the middle of a burial ground.”
“Suit yourself.”
I pushed back the latest frenzy of explicit images that flooded my mind. I saw brief snapshots of Cara waiting for me on her bed while she wore nothing but a thin t-shirt. I could see the soft skin of her thighs exposed, could sense how only the faintest movement would lift her shirt enough to show me everything. I could imagine the full weight of her breasts in my hands and how I’d enjoy taking her lower lip between mine.