My head hung in shame. “Please don’t hate me for loving him, David. I loved him for such a long time before I ever even knew you existed. I can’t just shut my heart off like that.”
“I do know that.” He exhaled, stepping into me. “I just… I suspected it. I’m actually angrier with myself, Ara, for not listening to my own gut. Again.”
“What would you have done if I’d told you I loved him in that way?” I rolled my face up to look at him. “Or if you had’ve looked into my thoughts that day and seen it? Would you have left?”
“That’s the stupid thing about all of this.” He sighed, casting his gaze to the heavens. “Even if you had admitted your feelings for Mike, there’s no way I’d have left you. I love you, and that love has made me stupid and irrational and way too forgiving.”
We both laughed softly.
“To be honest,” he added, “I knew a large part of your heart so obviously belonged to him, and it was my hope that I could somehow overshadow that, but we were just never given enough time.”
“Then don’t leave yet.” Hope filled me. “I love you, David, and I know for a fact that the messed-up last few months of my life are clouding all of my thoughts right now. I have so much I need to work out—stuff I need to work out with Mike, too. Don’t run away just because I’m too messed-up right now to think clearly.”
He softened, shaking his head. “You know I won’t. How can I not savor those last precious moments?”
I melted against him again, relieved. “Thank you, David.”
After a breath, he turned my face so our eyes met. “I’m not usually this pathetic. If you were any other girl, I’d have drained you and left you for dead by now.”
“You’d kill me just because I’m in love with someone I grew up with—someone I spent every day of my life with?”
“And because I know you’re about to break my heart in the worst, most final way.”
“How so?”
“When he arrives, and all those feelings you have come to the surface, what do you think will happen?”
“Nothing. We’re… are you worried about me cheating on you?”
“Perhaps. But it’s not the only thing I worry about.”
“Well, I can have feelings for him and still make choices based on my feelings for you.”
“But you will not ever make the choice to come with me, even when grief no longer clouds your mind.” He sighed. “And here we are, going around in circles again. We know how this ends, and it’s stupid for me to hang around here waiting for you to end up with Mike.”
“That won’t happen. Especially not while you’re still in the picture.”
“I need you to promise me that, Ara.” He held my gaze firmly. “I just need to hear you say it.”
“I promise,” I said, my eyes flicking to each of his. “And I just need you to understand that I might still decide to go with you. Nothing is final until you’re gone for good.”
He groaned and turned away.
“Come on, you know I’m not myself right now,” I insisted. “I could change my mind at the drop of a hat.”
“Stop it.” He grabbed my shoulders firmly. “Ara, just admit it. Just tell me you’re not coming with me once and for all, like ripping off a plaster.”
“No. Because that’s not what I’ve decided on.” I folded my arms. “My head wants one thing but my heart wants another.”
David turned away from me again, extending his arm to grasp a tree branch. “You will eventually have to say it. Either way, a decision has to be made. Wholeheartedly or not.”
“Okay, then… ask me on the last day of our two weeks. That way I can be sure you’ll stick around.”
“That’s the night of the Masquerade?”
“Yeah. It’s perfect.” I carefully touched his elbow until he turned his face to me. “You can ask me on the last dance.”
“The last dance?” He dropped his hand from the branch, his brow staying up in an arch of mockery. “On the last stroke of midnight?”
I nodded, smiling. “Perfectly corny.”
He gently grabbed my arm and pulled me into his chest. “I’m sorry I yelled at you.”
“That wasn’t really yelling, David.”
“No matter. I shouldn’t speak to you that way, despite how I feel.”
“I yell at you all the time.”
He laughed. “But you’re harmless. When you yell, it’s merely amusing.”
“Thanks. Glad to know you take me so seriously.”
“Only as seriously as you take me.”
“Hey.” I slapped his chest softly.
He laughed. “So, I guess that means you don’t take me very seriously.”
“Not really.” I smirked, then remembered the gift I had in my pocket.
“Gift?”
“Stay out of my head, vampire!”
“Make me.”
I ignored that and reached into my pocket, keeping my hand there, unsure if I should do this. “It’s a little corny, but—”
“I like corny.”
“I know.” I smiled warmly. “I figured the old guy in you might like it.”
David’s lips quirked up on one side, his eyes lighting with curiosity. “You’re getting good at keeping your mind clear when you want to hide something from me.”
“I know.” I grinned and pulled out a small white square of cloth. “You know in movies how the fair maiden would sometimes give her knight a handkerchief?”
“Well”—David swept the beads of water through his hair—“it wasn’t a custom that began in movies, but… yes?”
“Um… well, since you have this strong set of beliefs about not sleeping over, I figured you could at least take a part of me home with you after you leave my room each night.” I pressed the cloth into David’s palm. “It has my scent on it.”
He sniffed it. “So that’s why you were sleeping with this under your pillow the last few nights?”
“Yeah. You saw that?”
“Yes. I thought you might have had a cold or that you were… crying.”
I pouted, reaching back into my pocket. “No, I’ve actually had this diabolical plan going all week.”
“Plan?”
“I… it isn’t just my scent I want you to have.”
“Okay.” His brows pinched with confusion. My shoulders lifted as I clamped my index finger onto the pin in my pocket then drew my hand out. “Ara!”
“This is my perfume,” I said, before he could get mad, then dropped a dollop of blood onto the hanky. David’s fingers tightened around it for a moment. “It’s the best way I could think of to give you a part of myself.”
“You silly, sweet girl.” He shook his head then kissed mine. “Thank you.”
“Eeesh! It hurts. I must’ve pricked it pretty deep.” I squeezed the base of my finger. “It’s still bleeding.”
“Don’t squeeze it, you’ll make it worse.” David pocketed the hanky and took my hand, pausing for only a moment of hesitation before he slid my fingertip into his mouth, closing his lips firmly around it.
I wasn’t afraid. I wasn’t worried he might lose control. There was no urgency to his touch. Just a deep longing within it.
When he was done, he slid my finger past his lips, dropping a kiss to the cut. “Sweet and yet so powerfully intoxicating.”
“So it…” I watched him standing there, lost in his own bliss. “You liked it?”
“Liked it?” His eyes changed color as they opened, just like in the storage closet at school, the growing pupil almost entirely consuming the whites of his eyes. “I can’t keep doing this.”
“Doing what?”
“Telling myself not to touch you, not to want you. Not to drink from you.”
“Then stop denying yourself. Don’t you know how badly I want that too?”
“Yes. And that’s what makes it so much harder for me to refuse you.”
I smiled. “I don’t want you to refuse me.”
He tr
ied an accusatory glare, but the look washed away quickly as he ran his tongue over his lips one last time and the history of my blood clearly fell against it. “Fine.”
“Fine what?”
The vampire surfaced within his touch, a firm hand holding me in place at the side of my neck, his body inches from mine. “I’m going to drink from you. But not with your clothes on.”
I looked down at my jeans, then back up at the vampire. “Huh?”
“Vampires like skin; we need skin. If we do this with clothes on”—he looked away for a second—“when I get carried away, I might rip them off you. I don’t wish to explain to your father why I’m bringing you home naked.”
“Oh.” I laughed, but a sudden sinking feeling shot through my arms, like a hot blast of toxic adrenaline-inducing drugs.
“It’s okay.” He placed a steadying hand over my heart. “I won’t do anything to hurt you. You have my word.”
“It’s not that.” I released my fingers from their ball-grip. “It’s just that no one’s ever seen me… naked before.”
“Are you uncomfortable?”
I nodded.
“Why?”
“I’m… I guess I’m afraid that you might be… disappointed.” I tensed, waiting for him to laugh, but he slid the backs of his fingertips along my cheekbone and stared deeply into my eyes.
“What if I were to undress, and suddenly you decided I was not as hot as you thought?”
“Point taken,” I said, because I wouldn’t care. I loved him. Fat, skinny, hot or not. “Naked then?”
“Yes.” He fingered the base of my tank top suggestively. “Naked.”
My shoulders rounded slightly as he lifted it, unveiling my belly and then my ribs. And I stiffened all over, realizing I hadn’t planned my undergarments to suit this kind of misbehavior.
“Don’t worry,” he said with a laugh. “You won’t be wearing them for much longer anyway.”
And so many pictures of all the things we would do ran through my mind. I knew David could see every one of them.
I lifted my arms above my head, and a breath of a smile swept across my lips as David dropped my top to the wet grass and stepped back, shaking his head.
“My love.” That look warmed his entire face. “You are more than perfect.”
I quickly covered my purple-and-pink candy-striped bra. “Even in a bra I bought from the same boutique as Bozo the Clown?”
David’s burst of laughter caught me off guard, making me laugh too. He reached out, took each of my hands, and pulled them away from my ribs. “This”—he nodded to my bra—“is just another thing that I love about you. I didn’t expect black lace.”
“But, I look like a flamboyant zebra.”
“You look beautiful.”
“I feel naked.”
“Well, you’re not—yet.” His eyes slowly drifted to my jeans. “May I?”
“Mm-hm.” I nodded, holding my breath.
In one yank of my button-fly jeans, the denim parted, revealing my pink underwear. I wedged my thumbs into the waist and shimmied them down my hips, feeling the air cool my skin where the rain made it soggy. David watched, his eyes falling past my underwear to the apex of my thighs, down my skinny white legs and to my knees.
His lips split into a grin when I carelessly stumbled and tripped, kicking my ankles free of my jeans with about as much finesse as a drunkard.
As I stood expectantly in front of him, more naked than I’d ever been with anyone, the whirling winds circled the clearing and brushed my hips, my arms, my belly—all the places I knew David was thinking about touching. And for the first time in my life, I felt beautiful before his eyes.
The patters of rain stopped completely then, and the beads of water glistening in David’s hair and over his lashes looked almost out of place. His wet T-shirt hugged the curves of his chest and arms, showing his golden skin through the fabric. He spread the collar and slipped it past his head, then dropped it to the grass beside my clothes. When the sun wandered in for a peek at this innocent step toward danger, it made the water on David’s skin sparkle, as though he was starring in the wrong storybook.
“What’s funny?” he asked.
“I like the sun on your skin.”
He angled his arm outward and studied it, running a hand down the droplets, his eyes flashing to another thought for a second.
“What?” I asked.
“What’s what?”
“What were you just thinking? You looked worried.”
“Oh. Uh—just that…” He laughed. “I hope the rain didn’t soak through my jeans.”
“Why?” I asked, watching him unbutton them.
“Because,” he said, slipping them down his hips, “my briefs are white.”
“So?” I said, but as soon as I heard my own words, the white of his shirt, all see-through with the water, registered in my mind. “Oh.”
He winked and tossed his jeans aside, allowing me a moment to scrutinize. My gaze drifted over his broad shoulders and the tight skin across his chest, down his cagey ribs, stopping above the thick band of his underwear. He didn’t have the obvious six-pack I kind of expected, just that nicely contoured ‘V’ leading up smoothly to his hips from below his briefs.
“I always wondered if you were a boxers or briefs guy.”
David looked down then shrugged. “These are kind of in between.”
“They’re kind of sexy and”—I pouted—“they didn’t get wet.”
He threw his head back, laughing. “Quite frankly, I’m relieved.”
“Well, they won’t be dry for long.” I nodded to the sky as the heavens opened up again.
“No.” He caught a few raindrops in his hand. “I should be taking you home.”
“I don’t want to go home.”
“I know.” His words landed all hot and moist on my face, his brow coming to rest on mine as he suddenly appeared with his body pressed against me. I looked up into the anguish that his closed eyes tried to hide. “Lie down,” he whispered.
The grassy bed beneath my feet felt sticky, the summer’s dying heat making the rain rise off it in a warm cloud. David stayed standing, stiff and tall as a tower, while I pressed my palms to the grass, my elbows shaking, and edged jaggedly onto my back.
“Close your eyes,” he demanded sweetly, still not opening his.
“Okay,” I said, but after six long breaths and two fistfuls of grass pulled from the soil, only an empty breeze had caressed my half-naked body. I opened my eyes. “David?” I watched him expectantly, waiting for him to look at me. He didn’t. He was fighting that battle within—the war between the vampire and the human—and as he dropped to one knee, then the other, my main concern was not the possibility of my own death, but that he might deny himself the pleasure of my blood.
“You remember not to scream, right?”
I nodded, biting my lower lip.
Without a second thought, both his hands cupped my face then slid down my jaw and over the curve of my neck, slipping my bra strap off my shoulder. “Just stay still, Ara.”
“Are you… are you going to take my bra off?”
“Not if you don’t want me to.”
My thoughts moved to his breath on my chin, his lips within reach, his body immensely close but not touching; wanting but not taking, practically floating down the length of mine like he was just a layer of heat in the atmosphere. Every nerve in my brain called out to him; every part of my body, tingling hot, begged him to press himself against me.
But he didn’t move. He just smiled to himself, leaning on his elbow beside me. “Well, do you want me to take it off you or not?”
I could feel my pulse racing like a twitch in my neck; felt my body succumb to the lust—scream out its own instinct-driven desire to die at his hands.
But I wasn’t ready to undress completely.
“Not yet,” I whispered.
His eyes stayed on the bare patch of skin under the bra strap, lips softly landing the
re as he smoothed it back in place. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” I said, then quickly reached down to scratch my leg. “The grass is just really itchy.”
“Shall I run to the rock and get the picnic rug?”
“No,” I said, eyes wide. That would just give him too much time to think about what he didn’t want to do to me.
He smiled to himself—his secret smile—and cupped my neck, his thumb sliding down over my chin easily with the rain’s assistance, coming to rest just under my jaw as he tipped it up to expose my throat. “Your life is in my hands right now,” he whispered against my pulse. “And the most beautiful thing about that, Ara, is that all I can read in your mind is desire.”
“You don’t scare me, Mr. Knight.”
“I wish I did.”
“No you don’t.”
“You’re right,” he said, keeping his eyes on mine as he reached down and took my hand, folding it open to press a firm kiss on the softer, more delicate side. “I like you this way.”
I looked at his nail, sitting ready at my wrist, one firm indent away from releasing my blood. “Then what are you waiting for?”
“Someone to stop me.”
I gave him a reassuring smile. “I trust you, David.”
“You shouldn’t.” He made a shallow, horizontal cut, drawing slivers of red out over my milk-white skin. But I didn’t feel the cut—just the pressure of his fingers gripping my bone.
Only a beat passed after that before the black in his eyes washed the human away again, the vampire taking control, pressing his teeth down on the outer edges of the wound to open it.
Thousands of tiny bubbles raced up my veins, making my fingers want so badly to flex out and either shove him away or run along his jaw to feel his throat move as he drank me. My blood was finally deep inside him, touching his heart, coursing through his veins, warming everything I could never physically touch. I wanted it to stay there forever. I wanted the sun to go down around us, and rise again tomorrow, leaving us here like this, always.
I rolled my face to the leaves above and watched them swirl around, my lungs filling with humid air, as the rain moistened the back of my throat with each shallow breath. And the feel of David’s thumb in the cup of my palm, holding my hand in place against the stubble on his chin, made me feel so close to him—to the human that loved me; the human that was buried deep beneath desire right now.
Dark Secrets Box Set Page 42