Page 45

“No.”

I hold his eyes and take my time about it. I pull the hem of my T-shirt up an inch at a time, slowly, and I watch his chest stop moving and stay stopped. When I finally pull it over my head and drop it on the chaise, I’m standing in my bra in a vampire’s private room in front of a wall-length mirror, and I don’t feel exposed. He looks for a long time. His eyes go over every inch of me, and he doesn’t say a word, and by the time they come back up to my face, my nipples are hard against the lace and I’m breathing like I’ve run up the stairs.

He reaches up and undoes his tie.

He slides it out from under his collar, dark silk, and holds it between his hands.

“Hold out your wrists,” he says.

I look at the tie. Then I look at him. I hold out my wrists, together, in front of me.

He wraps the silk around them twice, loosely, and ties it in a knot that wouldn’t hold a kitten.

“See this knot?” he says. “You could slip out of it in a second. You’re choosing to stay, and I want you to remember that.” He hooks one finger through the silk between my wrists. “Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me how it feels.”

I look down at my hands, tied with a vampire’s necktie, and my whole body goes hot.

“It feels like I’m letting you,” I say. “And I like it.”

His chest goes still again. He draws me forward by the silk until I’m against him, my tied hands pressed to his chest, and he kisses me.

He’s in control here, and he knows it. And it’s nothing like watching him lose it in Merek’s kitchen, He kisses me slowly and thoroughly, as if he’s memorizing it, and every time I push for more, he gives me a little less, until I’m the one making sounds into his mouth. When I try to lift my hands to his face, he catches the silk with one finger and holds them where they are, and I go weak all the way down.

“Yellow?” he murmurs against my mouth.

“God, no.”

“Then tell me what you want.”

That’s harder than letting him tie my hands. I’ve never said it out loud. I’ve never had anyone ask.

“I want your mouth on my neck,” I tell him. “No teeth. Just your mouth.”

He gives it to me. He tips my head back with his free hand, and his mouth moves down the side of my throat, cool and slow and open, and I feel the faint hard points of his fangs behind his lips. He finds the place where my pulse is beating and stays there, his tongue moving over it once, and then again, and I’d fall over if he weren’t holding me up.

So I turn my head and put my mouth on his jaw, just under his ear, and bite down, very lightly.

He goes still against me. All of him.

“Behave,” he says against my skin.

“Make me.”

He laughs, low, right against my pulse. It’s the first time I’ve ever heard him laugh.

“What else?”

“Touch me,” I say. “Please.”

“Where?”

He’s going to make me say it. Of course he is.

“Everywhere. My breasts. Anywhere. I don’t care.”