My success was suddenly short-lived as that thought distracted me, and I began to sink. I quickly swung my arms in the water, trying to get back into it. I splashed Raphael in the process.
He splashed back. “You’re not focused on treading water. What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking I may as well be naked,” I said, more focused on regaining my coordination than filtering the response. When I realized what I’d said, I truly lost any semblance of treading water.
His hands were around my waist in an instant, pulling me back up. And closer.
“What an interesting thought,” he all but purred. “It’s not too late to change that.”
It was a good thing he was holding me, because the thought of being naked in the water with Raphael hit me low and deep, especially with the way his hands held me securely at the waist.
It was also a bad thing, because my mind was most assuredly not on swimming.
“I’ll practice more now,” I said, trying for curt. Instead my voice came out a bit too high-pitched.
Raphael just grinned, letting go but keeping close. I continued to practice treading water. I debated asking Raphael for more complex strokes to practice, but given our respective states of undress, it seemed dangerous.
Everything in the water seemed dangerous and wicked.
The sky continued to explode in bursts of colors, but the water muffled the sound around us. My confidence grew, the movements becoming more natural. At least until I looked back and realized how far we’d gone from shore. The rocks he’d pointed to, which had seemed so distant moments ago, were only a few feet from my fingertips.
Raphael read my panic in an instant. “Relax. I won’t let any of the charybdes get you.”
“That had better be a joke,” I growled. Logic told me the sea monsters would never come so close to shore, but I didn’t truly have any personal experience to draw on.
He blinked at me, all innocence. “Would I joke about your safety?”
“Raphael!”
“Relax,” he soothed. “They won’t come near us. They know I’d bite back.”
His grin was all teeth. The points of his fangs were as sharp as blades. The way they gleamed in moonlight sent a shiver down my spine. Something like fear, but not quite. Whatever alchemy went through the evening, it turned trepidation to anticipation.
How would those fangs feel? I’d let him bite me once, as a human, to save his life. In the moments before sleep claimed me, I allowed myself to remember the sensation. Would it feel like that as a vampire? Would it be different?
Why did I ache to know? When all my life, I’d been raised to fear nothing more than a vampire’s fangs?
“Is the ocean everything you dreamed?” The lights flared overhead, the greens and blues reflecting in the wet strands ofhis hair. I clenched my fingers with the urge to run my hands through them.
“It’s everything I was afraid to dream about,” I rasped.
He drew closer, the water barely rippling with the movement. “And how does it feel, doing what you were afraid of?”
His voice was low, confiding, like he was asking for a secret, one that would never leave the water with us.
“Terrifying,” I admitted. “Like every part of my body is charged with electricity, and I know it’ll end me, but I want it anyway because I’ve never felt so alive.”
It was like I’d been transported to another world, another life. One vicious dream that would be ripped away with the dawn.
But dawn wasn’t for a few more hours. And while the day brought responsibility, duty, fear—the night was for desire. And for this one evening, I would let it transform me into a creature of the night.
“You told me to do what I want,” I started, chest tight.
A challenge gleamed in his eyes. “I did.”
“Well.” Now or never. “I want you. I want you like I never imagined I could want a person.” I didn’t say everything I thought. That I didn’t just want him the way my body did, the way I did when I replayed our kisses in my mind. Didn’t say that I also wanted him in the moments when he had a wry smile on his face, when he bickered with Thea, when he helped me off the horse he’d taught me to mount. Let him think it was as simple as wanting his body.
“Not a person, a monster,” he corrected.
