Page 4 of Sanguine
Everything I was feeling—the petulance, the suspicion, the amusement—everything is replaced by a drowsy, dulcet bloom of tenderness in my chest.
Well, okay, not everything. There’s still a heady cocktail of sangria-fueled lust coursing through my veins, but it’s not at odds with the tenderness at all. Instead the two feed each other, making my heart thump for this shy, nervous man as I throb elsewhere.
I take a step toward him, deciding that if he wants to get dinner, he’s probably not going to be bothered by the state of my erection. “So you saw me kissing and biting someone last night, and instead of killing me like a good vampire hunter, you want to take me out on a date?” I say it lightly, but the words are blunt. I need to be sure.
He looks at me through eyelashes the color of angry rain. “I’m not a hunter anymore,” he says simply.
“But you were watching me last night. That wasn’t hunting?”
“I have a new job this week, private security on the island. Midnight patrol.”
He is such a big guy that I’m not actually all that surprised. His size, plus the way he carries himself—like a man who’s taken lives—would be enough of a deterrent for most touristy troublemakers, I’d imagine. Still though. “Priest to private security—not exactly adjacent vocations, my friend.”
His shoulder moves the slightest bit—the world’s smallest shrug. “Finding work after the Church has been hard. The … nighttime … has stayed with me. The peering into shadows, the walking silently under the stars. It’s a habit I can’t break. So patrolling someplace in the dark seemed like a natural fit. I honestly wasn’t looking for vampires. Just drunks or buggy thieves.”
“But you found me anyway.”
He blinks as if remembering. “I found you anyway. You were—you are—beautiful.” He flushes again, looks away.
Beautiful. I’ve been called many flattering things before (because there’s lots of flattering things about me, that’s just facts) but it’s been a long, long time since I’ve been called beautiful.
I study him as he looks out the window, the strong lines of his jaw and nose, the impossible color of his hair. The shy press of his full lips. I don’t know this man’s name, I don’t know his secrets or his hopes or where he’s from or where he sleeps at night or what he thinks about when he’s alone. I only know that he’s a bashful, grunting hulk of a man; I only know he used to kill my kind … but for some reason, has chosen not to anymore.
I only know that he saw me kissing and biting someone last night, and instead of hunting me down out of a lingering sense of duty to humankind, he’s here awkwardly asking me out on a date. Telling me he thinks I’m beautiful while I fuss at him over sangria.
The tenderness I’m feeling toward him is practically an undertow now. I’m being sucked into the deep.
“What’s your name, former priest? And do you know mine?”
His expression is careful when he looks at me. Guarded. “You go by Bastien.”
Bastien is, in fact, my real name, and only someone who knows how to burrow into layers of paperwork would have found it on my lease here. “You were a hunter indeed,” I murmur.
He nods, but he doesn’t apologize, which I respect. And maybe even like? I have to admit, after centuries of prowling after people, it’s rather nice to be prowled after myself.
“And I’m …” The man hesitates, and I realize it’s because he’s unused to saying his first name. It makes me wonder how recently he’s left the Church. “My name is Aaron.”
I’ve wandered close enough to him that I could touch him now, if I wanted. I don’t touch him, but I do enjoy the way his eyes rake down my taut stomach to where my pants hang low around my hips. He yanks his gaze back up as if embarrassed to be caught looking, but I don’t miss how he angles his body ever so slightly away as if he doesn’t want to frighten me with his body’s response to mine.
I have never met a priest or hunter like him. A quiet brute who just wants dinner and maybe kissing. Maybe more …
Maybe waking up this morning was a good idea after all.
“Okay, Aaron,” I say softly. “I’ll go to dinner with you.”
Chapter 2
Aaron
When I wasa young priest learning how to hunt vampires, our teachers warned us how beautiful vampires were, how beguiling, how they could bewitch the senses and thwart good sense just with a smile.
Well, here I am on a date with a vampire, utterly bewitched. Good sense thwarted past reckoning.
“More wine?” Bastien asks, tipping the bottle to my glass and topping it off before I can refuse. The fading sunlight limns him in red and pink and gold, and I’m trying not to stare, but it’s impossible. His face is almost too lovely to be real—a Pre-Raphaelite composition of full lips and long eyelashes, large eyes and a Greek nose. His jaw is finely carved and his cheeks and forehead are aristocratically high, and he is all contrasts—sculpted features with soft, inviting lips, ivory-pale skin with dark eyes and hair.
He looks like a painting. Like he would have been in a painting when he was mortal.
“We’re quite a sight, aren’t we?” Bastien observes, setting the bottle down and picking up his own glass by the stem. His vowels curve with an accent I can’t quite place—nearly French, nearly British, a fleeting glimpse into lifetimes he’s spent on other shores. “A vampire and a priest, breaking bread.”
