“Thank God you’re okay,” Gaby breathes, ignoring the hulking Strigoi King beside us. “When that damn vampire came to use his voodoo on me, I suspected the worst.”
“Problems with your compulsion?” The silky quality of Ciprian’s question has Marius issuing a grunt from the other side of the room.
“Seems this one is somehow immune to my charms,” Marius mutters.
“Charms.” Gaby snorts and releases me to round on Marius. “Youare a barbarian.”
“I’m not.”
“Youare. You threw me over your shoulder and whisked me off to this realm without so much as an invitation or even a kiss. I expected wooing. Maybe the best fuck of my life. But this?Thisis not how the books go.”
“You and your prattling on aboutbooks,” Marius hisses, coming to his feet and advancing on Gaby.
My eyes widen, my instinct to get between them thwarted by my mate holding me back.Ciprian!
Shh,he hushes into my mind.I’m rather enjoying this. Please let it continue.
He’s going to hurt my friend, I snap back at him, trying to free my hand so I can reach Gaby.
Actually, I rather think she might hurt him,he murmurs, his grip easily holding me back.
“You could learn something from those stories,” she tells him, her finger colliding with his chest.
“I don’t need toreadto know how to properly take care of a human, little nuisance,” he snarls back at her. “I have an entire harem you can interview on the topic.”
Gaby scoffs at that. “Like I’m interested in hearing about your sex life.”
“Yet you continue to talk about me fucking you.”
“No, I continue talking about how you’ve ruined my expectations of meeting a vampire?—”
“Strigoi,” he growls.
But she acts as though she hasn’t heard him and presses onward. “You’re supposed to seduce me, bite me, and make me scream in a good way. Not kidnap me and hold me in a cage!”
“My bedchamber isnota cage.”
“It is when I don’t wish to be there.”
“And whose fault is that?” he demands, folding his arms.
“The asshole who put me there?” she suggests.
“You’re forgetting why that happened, little nuisance,” he returns. “You were in a guest suite before that, and you?—”
“Tried toexplore,” she says, finishing the statement for him.
“You tried toescape,” he corrects her. “Thus requiring me to lock you in my room to babysit.” He finally looks away from her and at Ciprian. “Can you please take over now?”
“No.” That seems to be Ciprian’s favorite word of the day where his best friend is concerned. “This is your mess. Fix it.”
Marius looks offended. “How is thismymess?Youchose a human mate from another realm, and I had to go make sure no one notices her absence. I dealt with her parents, I?—”
“My parents?” I interrupt, my stomach twisting. “What did you do to my parents, Marius?”
Not that I… that I have a lot of contact with them. They were always much more interested in themselves than in my life. They didn’t even know what I was studying at the university since I was paying for it all on my own with scholarships.
“I informed them that you accepted an internship in Romania and would be relocating there permanently. You’ll need to visit every now and then to make it believable, but my compulsion helped pave the way,” Marius says. “Not that they were hard to compel. Unlikethisdevious thing.”
