Page 43 of Falling for a Villainous Vampire

“You still do not believe me, then. That you have lit a fire in my soul.”

Of course I don’t, I want to say.

But oh, I just can’t get there anymore. I’ve never seen anyone mean something more than he means all of this. All I can do is stick to the most likely other option. “Honestly I still think some sort of magic is fucking with your head. Some spell I can’t see, some curse I can’t understand. Something felt old when I tried to search inside you. Old and strange, somehow,” I say.

He’s ready for that, however.

“Like the secret song of someone’s heart.”

“I was thinking something less corny than that.”

“Corny means trite, does it not? Mawkish, sentimental.”

“Something along those lines, yeah.”

“So you have lost faith in love.”

When did I ever have the chance to have it, I think.

Though naturally, I can’t say that. I need to be convincing. Hell, maybe if I’m convincing enough, he’ll stop saying all these things that have me completely messed up. “This isn’t just a modern times are unromantic and exhausting thing. And I’m going to prove it, as soon as I get you fixed up enough that I can take you to a place that might have some answers,” I say.

But it doesn’t make him back down.

“I am fixed up now,” he says, and brandishes a hand at himself.

“Dude, you have no shirt or shoes on, and you’re swaying like a tall tree in a hurricane. Probably because that burn on your arm needs a little help healing.” I point to the still blackened and raw mess of his right bicep. Then before he can protest, I race on. “Not to worry, though, I have just the thing.”

“A bandage with an image of a man who is the spider on the front?”

“I was thinking more like the massive steak I was saving for dinner.”

“Forgive me, but I am fairly certain I cannot consume such a thing. Only … only the life force of a living being. A living, breathing, beautiful being, with a scent so intoxicating that it almost feels—” he starts to say. He even moves toward me, like before, all slow and languid and like this is all just a dream.

Only this time, his eyes are on my throat.

So I put my hands up before he can go any further.

“Stop right there. We are not doing that.”

“Doing what?”

“The thing you were thinking of.”

Maybe he doesn’t really know, I think as I take in his confused expression, his faintly dazed-seeming gaze. Like he feels the pull to drink, but isn’t quite conscious of it. But then he seems to shake himself, and his eyes widen. “Oh, you mean biting. You mean taking from you, as in the revered moving-image masterpiece Twilight,” he says. It almost makes me giggle—but I don’t want to ruin how horrified he seems about this accusation of mine. And sure enough, a second later, “I would never do to you what that demon does to Bella. He turns her into a weird skeleton, then eats a baby out of her. And the baby … never have I beheld so haunting a creature. If these are the consequences of feasting on your blood, I will die first.”

That actually happens because of vampire sex, my brain starts to say.

But getting into that seems like an even worse thing to do than giggling. “Well, good, because I won’t ever let you. I have never had a vampi—he’s never managed to—and I don’t intend to let that change,” I say instead. Then when that seems too awkward and fumbled and still like it’s about sex somehow anyway, I rush on. “You shouldn’t even need it to change, either. You’re a millennium old, you don’t need a lot of blood to keep you going. And it can’t have been more than a few days since you last fed, seeing as Halsten was never one to deny himself. No, no, I was suggesting the steak because it’ll be an easy, non-murderous way to help a wound remember how to heal. Here, lemme show you.”

I dart to the kitchen before he can persuade me to explain any further.

Or say anything else that makes me all awkward and not practical at all.

But then I have to go back to him, and with a bunch of things that mean I’m about to have an even harder time than I did before. I mean, I’m going to be making contact. In order to duct-tape a steak to someone’s arm, you kind of have to. Plus he has to sit down before I can do it, and so now I’m the one looming over him.

He looks up at me as I tear off a strip of tape.

And his eyes are so large, and trusting, and lovely. It’s honestly hard to imagine him brutalizing my neck. He’d probably do it gently, so very gently, like it always seems in so many movies and shows I used to love. Like it feels good, instead of what I’ve been forced to imagine all these years, courtesy of Halsten’s every snarl and snap and savage ripping off of someone’s arm.