It was the sight of it.
The rudeness of it.
The slick curl of that tongue easing between the split of her fingers.
Suggestive, in a way she simply wasn’t prepared for. Her mind immediately went to spread legs, and someone with their face between them. And as soon as it did, she was gone. Her hand was over his mouth, pressing. Every bit of her sizzling, when he pressed back.
But oh, the best part wasn’t that.
It was when he suckled at that bloody line she’d drawn. Sought it out, again and again, with his greedy mouth. It was unbelievable. Beyond anything. She could almost feel it connecting, somehow, with that unbearable ache between her legs. “Oh yes,” she found herself moaning.
And she couldn’t even regret it.
Because he moaned back.
The sound reverberated through him and into her, heightening every single deranged sensation as it went. Suddenly she wasn’t just enjoying it. She wasn’t just letting herself be lewd over it. She was leaning in. She was leaning down. Like she actually wanted him to claim something other than her hand.
She wanted him at her throat.
It feels so good, oh, so good, her mind murmured.Where would the harm be to just feel him there? Where would the harm be to let him put that mouth on that curve?And in that moment, she truly had no idea. All she knew was that her body was thick with sensation, and so desperate to drown in it that drowning felt like good sense.
Because yes, she’d suffocate.
But oh, wouldn’t it feel glorious to do it?
Didn’t she want to feel glorious, for once?
Yes, she thought, and tilted her head. Turned, so he could. Honestly, she thought she even felt his sharp teeth, grazing herneck. And then she saw it, out of the corner of her eye. The bloom of her magic, just as it had come to her before. Like a warning shot, like a life preserver.
And she seized it.
She took hold, as she had in the ballroom. Only this time, it didn’t singe him.
It seemed to snap against her. It almost blew her back, hard enough that she found herself on the floor. Dazed, hardly able to believe what had happened. But still in one piece. Still unbitten. She had seen real sense at the last second, and saved herself.
Then she met his low-lidded gaze, across the bedroom, and saw those parted lips, red with blood—and she knew. The ability to get out of this was never going to hold, for long. She was deep in it, all the way up to her neck.
And there was really no escaping now.
Chapter Eighteen
She knew how dazed she seemed the next day. She could see it in the mirror over the dresser—her eyes were suddenly too large for her face; her skin looked so pale it was almost translucent. But it still shocked her when Professor Cobble stopped her in the hall, as she made her way to Hargreaves’s next no doubt horrifying lecture.
“My dear, is everything well?” he asked and in so kindly a way she almost spilled all her worries.The only way I seem able to emotionally connect with magic is when a potentially murderous vampire fills me with lust, she thought.And now I’m pretty sure everybody here wants to kill me for snatching a prize they think they deserve.
But instead of saying that, she stretched a smile over her face.
“Couldn’t be better. Just been burning the midnight oil,” she said.
Then in reply she got an arm squeeze, and that soft, absent-minded smile of his, and him bustling off down the hall. She followed him with her eyes, almost wistful for what she could have had there. An actual adult in charge, to confide in and look out for her.
Because god knows there wasn’t another.
She got to Boundaries and Bureaucracy two minutes late, and Professor Hargreaves looked at her like she had crawled out of ahole in the ground. Her thin, graying face seemed to get thinner and grayer; her cool gray eyes were suddenly chips of ice. “Well,” she said, as Mina took her seat. “I suppose the golden girl no longer believes she must be on time for her lectures.”
And everyone in the room tittered.
Some turned back to stare in that same cold way.
