“If you bit me, would it hurt? Does it leave a scar? Arabella from book club said it’s pleasurable, but is it pleasurable like a nice day at the beach or like a party drug? Can people get addicted? Can you do it anywhere or does it have to be on the neck?—”
“Go to sleep, Winnie,” he whispers. “I willneverhurt you.”
“What if I want you to?”
My heart thuds against my ribs.
His breath rasps.
“Alaric?”
“I suggest you sleep, wife, and stop tempting me with dangerous words.”
“But—”
“Sleep,” he growls. “Sleep, and forget what you are asking.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
ALARIC
Gideon: That is a crazy plan, but I love it. I’ll be at the castle first thing in the evening. Together, we can persuade the Lady of Agony to accept this bonkers scheme. Oh, and Allie, watch yourself. I’m not concerned about your stabby matriarch as much as I am about your fragile little heart around that human not-wife of yours.
Winnie has staged a hostile takeover of my side of the bed.
In all my years as a vampire, that is not a sentence I ever expected to think aloud. But that’s precisely what’s happened.
First, she spoke of biting, and left me aroused and starved and wanting while she slipped into slumber. Then, she wriggled towards me in her sleep until she was fully on my side of the bed, my arm trapped beneath her head, giving my hands nowhere to rest but her tiny, breakable body. She is so deep in sleep that she doesn’t know she’s crept into the clutches of a monster.
The things I dream of doing to her while I watch the vein in her neckpulse are beastly.
I remain as still as I can, fighting a battle against my darkest desires, certain that the tiniest movement will awaken the beast inside me that hungers for her. My shaft jabs against her thigh in an unseemly way, and my fangs have dropped.
I will not. I cannot.
What if I want you to?
She didn’t mean it. She doesn’t know what she’s saying.
The nightmares have threatened to claim her twice already. During the first one, she began inching her way across the bed like a homicidal caterpillar. But as soon as she settled against me, she calmed, and fell deeper into sleep.
“I’ve got you, Winnie,” I whispered. “I won’t let anything hurt you, not even in your dreams.”
The second nightmare was worse, and she thrashed and whimpered in my arms, slapping her body as she cried out. I held her and sang softly the words of an old Germanic song Hrodebert taught me – a song of forlorn love – and she settled once more.
There’s a pool of her drool on my arm. I’m transfixed by the vein in her neck, the ebb and flow of blood being pushed through her body …
I can’t lie here a moment longer, or I will do something we both regret.
I need to take all this raw, inhumanneedand channel it somewhere.
She’s so settled in sleep that she doesn’t wake as I pull my arm from beneath her. I fly from the room, down the stairs to my study, and back again, my arms filled with supplies and my ears pricked for the sounds of my mother’s Thralls. When I return, Winnie is where I left her, her beauty unchanged, immaculate.
As silently as I can, I move my chair away from the spear of sunlight piercing the gap in the curtains into the darkest corner of the tower. I sharpen my favourite charcoal and fill page after page with sketches. Each image I toss away the moment I’ve finished it, for none of them are quite right. I’ll take them down to the priest hole before Winnie wakes.
Drawing is the only way tocontrol the hunger.
Having her in my bed was everything I have ever wanted, and it should be enough. I don’t want to hunger for her the way I do. But now that I’ve vowed to make her mine, and my skin is drenched in her sunlight and strawberry scent, my need has increased tenfold.
