Page 7 of Don't Bite the Botanist
Well… crap.
A bead of sweat welled up on Tressa’s forehead, and she started picking at her cuticles. Any damage she did would be healed in less than a minute, and the often subconscious action was like her version of snapping a rubber band on her wrist. It offered a distraction when unpleasant feelings wanted to pull her into a dark place. And learning her mate had indeed been attacked by a rogue—not an animal like she’d desperately been hoping—definitely qualified as a dark place.
Calm down. Just breathe,she ordered herself. Maybe this is a good thing. Scratch that. It’s one hundred percent a good thing.
The internal pep talk was doing little to slow her racing heart, but she forced herself to focus on the positives. The biggest one being that he already believed in vampires.
Check that conversation off the to-do list.
Now all she had to do was convince him to become one. In all honesty, this was perfect. After only a handful of sentences with her mate, she was already halfway to her goal.
Apparently she’d been quietly hyping herself up in her head for toolong, because Ethan huffed and crossed his arms, all the earlier levity she’d managed to pull from him gone.
“You don’t believe me, do you?”
“No!” she blurted out before her brain could formulate a better response.
“Of course you don’t,” he muttered.
Wait, what?
“Shit, no, that’s not…” she stammered. “I didn’t mean that. The ‘no’ was for the not believing.”
His brow furrowed, deepening the lines on his face. “So, no, you don’t believe me?”
“No, Idobelieve you,” she replied, using every bit of restraint to maintain a reasonable distance befitting a stranger when all she really wanted to do was pull him into her arms. “The ‘no’ was because I don’tnotbelieve you.”
His eyes narrowed, but she caught the corner of his mouth curl up ever so slightly. “Granted I might have a head injury, but I don’t think that response would make sense to anybody.”
A tiny laugh slipped out, and her cheeks heated.
Wait, was she blushing? She didn’t blush. She was a three-hundred-year-old vampire, not a twitterpated schoolgirl.
Be cool, Tressa,she reminded herself.Be sexy and confident.
“Oh, you’re so funny,” she gushed, tucking a non-existent stray hair behind her ear and giggling like the schoolgirl she absolutely was not. Guys liked giggles though, right? They liked being fawned over and told their jokes were hilarious?
Well, maybe every guy except the one looking at her like she should be getting fitted for a tight, white, self-hug jacket.
“Um, yeah, sure,” he mumbled, casting his gaze toward the door like he hoped someone would come in and save him.
Okay, so maybe Tressa hadn’t needed to impress a guy in, well, ever. Her life was pure survival mode right up until she became a vampire, and after that, she only cared about finding her mate. If a guy ended up between her thighs for some nighttime fun while she was waiting, cool. If not, no worries. She hadn’t ever put much weight into caring what the male species thought of her.
There was a slight chance that everything she knew about men was wrong. That, or Ethan wasn’t your average bear.
She groaned internally. Of course he wasn’t average. Lilith would never give her an average mate. There was more to this guy than any of the one-dimensional scenarios her brain had offered up earlier, and the thought of unravelling his layers intrigued her.Heintrigued her.
Not to mention the way her shirt became a little extra tight in through the chest when she got lost in his gray eyes, and she found herself with panties that needed to be changed sooner rather than later. She dragged the chair over to his bedside, sat back down, and resisted the urge to squeeze her thighs together.
“Sorry,” she said, offering Ethan a sincere smile. “I was just trying to be reassuring after everything you’ve been through.”
His lips flattened into a thin line. “Don’t.”
She cocked her head. “Don’t what?”
“Reassure me,” he answered, his voice taking on a detached tone that told Tressa he was not the type of person who desired anyone’s approval or validation. “I’m not naïve, and I’m not crazy,” he continued. “I know what happened. Or, I know what happened up until I should have died. What I want now is details about how I survived, any information on the attack, and most importantly, answers about how soon I can get out of here. So, thanks for the placating words and the offer of… counseling. But I’m good.”
He glanced away in a firm indication he was done with theconversation, and Tressa’s brain fully abandoned her on what to say next. Wasn’t the mate bond supposed to create at least some level of attraction? She was definitely feeling a pull toward him, but either he had the restraint of a centuries old vampire or…
