His jaw clenches together as he shakes his head, eyes sharp. “I would never do that without your consent.”
“You could have. I wouldn’t have minded. I would have understood.”
“No.”
“Then you’re even more weak than I am,” I tell him. I think back to him at the barn, when he was in the grasp of the Dark Order. I felt like something was holding him back in his struggle. If he was weak then, how is he now?
“You need your strength first,” I tell him, sitting up straighter, and before he can do or say anything, I raise my arm to my mouth and bite into the soft flesh of my mid-forearm. Blood immediately pools at the wound and spills over.
“Lenore,” he says gruffly, trying to move back, but then I can see the smell of my blood has already taken hold of him, his pupils turning red.
I raise my arm out to him and he grabs it, his fingers sinking in, his mouth latching on. Sometimes I forget that he’s a vampire—sometimes I forget I am too—but here I’m reminded of exactly what he is.
And I love him anyway.
So he drinks, and drinks, and when I feel myself growing weaker, I pull my arm away, and fall back into the bed, and he stops.
Next thing I know he’s pressing his arm against my mouth, his blood spilling on my open lips, a few drops, enough to make me fully open my eyes, and then that hunger roars inside me and I let it go. Because with him I can be a monster, but one on a leash. He holds me back, keeps me in check, as I do for him.
I drink and let it fill the well, fill my veins, fill my heart until it’s pumping with him, pushing his life source through my circulation.
The world returns to me, a littler clearer, a little brighter. My muscles come to life, my brain switches back on, I feel like I’m glowing, floating.
I’ve never felt more alive.
Solon pulls his arm away and wipes my chin with his thumbs, his eyes positively luminous as he studies me. “There you are, my moonshine.”
I reach up with my hands, grabbing the sides of his face, my fingers pressed into his temples, and I pull him toward me.
“Kiss me,” I whisper to him, a new hunger running through me.
Heat flickers in his eyes.
He moves up on the bed, his weight over me, and covers my mouth with his and I’m lost in the way he tastes, the way he feels, the way his tongue and lips both soothe and spur me on, alternating, yin and yang.
It all comes down to feeling now.
To being.
The two of us together, somehow separated by time and then brought together.
He’d been waiting for me for so long.
“I did what I could not to fall in love you,” he murmurs, running his fingers over my lip before taking it between his teeth for a moment. “I tried. I really did. But it was already too late. It was already in the making. You were already meant for me.”
“Thank you for giving in,” I say softly against his lips.
He gives me the most breathtaking smile. “You’re welcome.”
Then he kisses me again, deeper this time, searing and sweet, the kind of kiss that your body never lets you forget, a kiss to compare all past and future ones to.
It does me in, opens up my heart to his, my heart that’s already pumping with his beautiful blood, beneath skin that feels like just a veil between us. We’re already so connected, flesh is just a formality now.
And it fades between us as he pulls my nightgown over my head, as my fingers fumble and tear at his shirt, as we strip each other naked, his body pressed against mine, hovering in my view.
I stare up at him, marveling at the way he was made, how every single inch of him is so perfectly put together. Even supposed flaws like a nose slightly too wide, the lines at the corners of his deep-set eyes, his permanent frown, every single part melds together to create a walking, breathing work of art. One that happens to have walked through history, through time itself.
All the way to me.