Page 3 of Sanguine
And then when he takes a real drink, and I watch the swallow work its way down his throat, I nearly have a heart attack. If I had my lips on that neck, if I had my teeth there …
I have to move around the corner of the island so he doesn’t see the needy erection currently pressing against my pants. They’re loose enough pants but they’re also thin, and also—this isn’t to brag, it’s honestly just true—it’s a very noticeable cock when it’s in the mood.
The man sets the glass carefully on the counter, as if one drink of wine will be quite enough, thank you very much. “You’re not how I thought you would be,” he says after a minute.
I’m trying not to think about his throat. Or the way a drop of wine lingers on his lower lip, begging to be sucked off. “And how did you think I was going to be?”
He shrugs. “I’ve met some vampires before. They weren’t as…blithe…as you are.”
“Blithe?” I echo, a smile growing across my face. “Blithe? That’s the word you picked?”
The man grunts, and if I’m not mistaken, there’s color coming up on his cheeks. “It’s a real word,” he mutters defensively. “I’ve read it before.”
“First of all, can we just acknowledge that not using ‘sanguine’ was a real missed opportunity for you, given our discussion five seconds ago about Latin root words?”
“I like blithe,” he says. Stubbornly.
I’m shaking my head and laughing. This silver-haired giant looks like he could crush rocks with his bare hands—and then out he comes withblithe. “Got any other thesaurus words for me? Jocund, maybe? Mirthful? Merry? Gladsome? Gay?”
The wordgaymakes his cheeks go even pinker. Interesting.
“Let me ask you this, Mr. Ex-Priest: were you a hunter? Because if the only vampires you met were vampires you killed, then that probably explains why they weren’t so blithe when they met you. When we’re not fighting for our lives, we do tend to be a fairly sunny bunch. Get it?Sunny?You’re not laughing. You’re one of those austere Latin Mass priests, aren’t you?”
“I was a hunter,” he says, ignoring my last question. “But I left because I didn’t want to hunt anymore.”
“So you’re not hunting me now?” I ask.
He shakes his head. The ends of his silvery-blond hair brush distractingly over his shoulders. They’rebigshoulders, big and hard, and I wish I could squeeze them. From behind.
While I pressed slow and slick into his muscular body.
“I didn’t come to hurt you,” he says, and when he looks at me this time, there’s a sort of earnestness underneath the grim sphinx thing he has going on. Like he wants me to believe him. “I came because I saw you last night, and I—” He clears his throat, pauses, clears his throat again. He looks very uncomfortable, and I’m already guessing why.
“You saw me hunt,” I say. Flatly. “And even though it’s not your job to stop me anymore, you feel like you need to—what? Chastise me for it? Threaten me away? Chase me off?”
“No,” he says, more quickly than he’s spoken all day. “Nothing like that. You didn’t kill him—and you took so much less than you needed.”
“I never kill, not if I can help it,” I inform him, my blithe mood gone. (I’m a little sensitive about this, if you can’t tell). “I haven’t killed since—well, okay, it was Gilded Age Paris actually—but that wasprovokedand everyone I’ve told the story to agrees with me, if you must know. I just want to drink and then let my victims go, no worse off than if they’d donated blood. Which, I mean, really is what it amounts to if you think about it.”
The pink is back in his cheeks. I blink at him, wondering why seeing me hunt last night would be embarrassing for him—oh. Ohhhhhhhh.
Oh yeah. This priest is getting very interesting indeed.
I give him my wickedest, most louche grin. “You saw more than the drinking, didn’t you? You saw thekissing.”
“Do you—” He clears his throat again. “Do you always kiss them? Your victims?”
“When they want me to.” I fold my arms across my chest, suddenly back to enjoying this morning very much. All this delicate blushing on such a big, bleak man—it’s a combination of delights, enticing and carnal. I wonder if I could bite that blush sometime, just a little nip, just a sharp, little kiss. “Why do you ask, my sullen priest? Are you in the market to be kissed? Or bitten?”
He shifts, and although his body ripples with unconscious grace, I can also sense his uneasiness. A light lace of adrenaline and cortisol in his blood, making the air around him taste faintly acrid—smoky and earthy, like a good Islay scotch. It’s not unpleasant, but it does have wariness tickling at the nape of my neck again. I still don’t know why he’s here.
“Why are you asking me about kissing and biting? Why were you watching me? More importantly,why are you here?”
“I was working up to that!” the ex-priest grumps, shifting on his feet again, and I realize that I’ve completely misread him from the start. He’s not impatient at all.
He’snervous.
I slowly uncross my arms and watch as he takes a step forward, and then a step back, and then turns to face the ocean, and then turns back to me. And then finally he says, “I came to see if—maybe—if you’re not busy or anything—and only if you’d like to—I mean, only if youfeltlike it—if you’d like to get dinner. With me. Sometime.” The last words he grates out like they’re physically painful to speak, and that proud face dips down to the floor as if he’s considering curling up into a miserable ball after this display of vulnerability.
