He cuts off the song.
“Stay with me,” he says, his breath cool against my ear.
I wiggle my arse against him. “I’m not exactly running away.”
“Good. Don’t go back to London after the ball. Stay at Black Crag with me.”
I go rigid.
The old, familiar fear clenches around my heart. I see towers of stuff, rooms filled with shifting papers, a rat in the peanut butter.
“I don’t know if I’m ready,” I say. “I haven’tlived with someone since I left Mum’s house. I never even lived with Patrick. I have issues. You’ll find out?—”
“You have nightmares,” he says. “I’ve heard them. The first night, I came running, certain that you were in danger before I realised the truth. I’ve listened through the door when you had them.” He loosens his grip on me so I can lower my legs. I lean back against him, and he kisses the top of my head. “I’m sorry for breaking your trust like that, but I couldn’t bear the thought of you enduring the nightmares alone.”
A blush creeps over my cheeks as I remember what I sometimes do with my purple vibrator after a nightmare to calm myself down. “Did you ever … hear anything else?”
“Oh, no, absolutely not,” he says stoically. “Definitely not anything that would appear on page sixty-four of one of your books.”
Great. Just wonderful.
“I dream about my mother’s house – only it’s monstrous, filled with things that want to crawl all over me or eat me or bury me alive. And I can’t get back to sleep until I’ve cleaned the whole room and scrubbed my skin raw.”
“Reginald did mention that you keep asking for clean sheets,” Alaric says. “I thought it was just normal human behaviour.”
“I am anything but normal,” I sigh. “But it’s strange. On the nights you’ve been in my bed, I didn’t have the nightmares. I slept right through.”
“You still had them, but I held you and sang to you, and they passed.”
Of course, it was Alaric saving me again.
“Okay,” I say.
“Okay?”
“Okay. I’ll stay on at Black Crag with you.” My heart hammers against my ribs. “On three conditions.”
“I accept.”
“You don’t even know what the conditions are.”
“I don’t need to.”
“One – you have to keep working on cleaningup the castle and keep your projects contained within their rooms. I can’t—” I swallow. “I can’t live in a place that reminds me of my mother’s house.”
“I can do this.”
“Two – you have to explain everything about vampires to me. I need to knoweverything. I can’t have any more secrets between us.”
“No secrets.” Alaric sighs deeply. “And what is number three?”
“That Reginald must make me hot chocolate every single night.”
Alaric kisses my neck over the spot where he bit me, sending a fission of pleasure through my veins. “I agree to your terms. Do you wish me to make a blood oath?”
“No. But you could come inside me again.”
We kiss and talk and fuck and kiss some more, until my conscience gets the better of me, and I drag Alaric out of the water so that we can go back and help.
