Chapter 19 #2
No. There was that denial again. Fierce and cold. “Hey.” I stepped a little closer. “That’s not the answer, you know that, right? Don’t give up.”
“Why? I hate all of this. I hate what I’m becoming, hate my place in . . . things . . .”
Things? What things? Now wasn’t the time. It might never be the time with me. But I couldn’t let him get himself down when he was probably the best person here. The best of a bad bunch, anyway.
“Hey, so . . .” I chewed on my lip because what I was about to say was a truth I didn’t want to share, but I’d done a lot of thinking over the past few days, and here it was.
“When I saw you fall into the pool, and I went in after you, there was a second there, a few seconds actually, that I thought you were gone. And those were the worst few seconds of my life. And well, I’ve had a few really, really bad days, so . . .”
His eyes widened as my meaning sunk in.
“Forget everyone else, they don’t know you. I think I’m getting to know you, and it would be a real shame if that Theo—” I poked him in his chest, his real firm chest. “Wasn’t around anymore, is all I’m sayin’.”
“I won’t age. This is me. Hot mess party boy forever. Forever is a long fucking time to be Theo Witherborne.”
Damn, I hated seeing him like this. Theo was all sarcasm and wit. All smiles and movement, but he had a darkness, and it was crushing the life out of him. I knew what that felt like too. Maybe we really were alike.
“For what it’s worth, I like you this way. Maybe not forever, as I’ll—”
I’d been about to say something about how I’d get old, cranky, and wrinkly, but Theo’s mouth on mine stole the rest of the sentence.
The kiss brought all my thoughts to a screeching halt, turning thinking into needing.
And I really needed this—all of him, on me.
Now. Vampire? Didn’t care. I’d been thinking about it all for days, going over and over it, and it all came back to the fact that Theo needed me, and I kinda needed him.
I couldn’t go back to staring at my beige walls without us texting each other at two a.m. I’d missed those dumb texts.
I swept my hand up his back, getting a good feel of his warm, firm skin under my palms. And man, it felt good. I hadn’t touched someone like this in years. Not since my ex, before my life went up in a trash fire.
Theo’s teeth nipped at my bottom lip while his hands caught my hips and pulled me in. We kissed with our mouths and bodies, push and pull, coming together in one fluid rocking motion. Heating up. Igniting. Fire to the fuel. I stopped thinking altogether and just felt.
Someone down by the pool must have noticed, because a shrill whistle went up, then a cheer followed.
So much for staying invisible.
Theo smiled into the kiss, grabbed blindly for the cord. The blind fell. His hand came back, this time cupping the back of my head. He marched me backward. My shoulders bumped the wall. Theo pressed all of himself in hard. His mouth left mine, trailed down my jaw.
Oh, heck yes.
I let my head fall back and allowed myself to feel another man touching me.
His left hand cupped my neck again, while his right slipped around my lower back and dropped over my ass. He kissed my collarbone. He was everywhere, hands moving, lips teasing over my sensitive skin.
I threaded my fingers into his messy, dark hair. Yes. This. I was having this. Him. Now.
Music thumped somewhere in the house and down by the pool, bass thumping through the floor. People chatted loud enough that it all blurred into background noise. All of it faded behind the feel of Theo’s mouth on my skin. His hands left my ass and neck and went to my shirt buttons.
I wanted those hands back on me, immediately.
Dark eyes caught mine, asking permission.
“Yes . . .” Please don’t stop. I didn’t want to sound desperate, so I kept the rest of it unspoken, but he could feel it, his body on mine in all the right places. Feel how hard I was. I swallowed, and his gaze dropped to my neck.
A dangerous thrill ran a current down my spine.
“I’ve wanted to do this since the morning we met . . .” he whispered, quick fingers working my buttons open.
“When you were sleeping on the lounger?” My voice came out gruff.
“Wasn’t sleeping.” He kissed the corner of my mouth on his way to whisper in my ear. “Was thinking about the hot new pool guy.”
He was?
He pulled open my shirt and spotted the nipple ring. “Oh.” A little, surprised laugh fell out of him. “You are a man of many surprises.”
I smiled. “There’s a lot you don’t know about me.”
“If you tell me you’ve got a Prince Albert, I might die. And I’m immortal, so . . .”
“Ah, no. Sorry to disappoint. Do you?”
“Wanna find out?” He laughed and swept his hands up, over my shoulders, scooping the shirt off, and down my back, trapping my arms slightly behind with my shirt cuffs.
He got a look at me from a foot away, and purred as he came back in, and that mouth skimmed from my neck, sweeping down my chest, tongue moving, kisses sucking, teeth nipping.
Lord help me, I hadn’t been this hard since waking up after dreaming about him. So, that same morning, then.
He was heading down. His tongue flicked the nipple ring, then a little metallic sound as his teeth teased it. If I thought I was hard before, I’d just peaked.
He went to one knee.
I was going to die if he . . .
His mouth skimmed low, along my waist, above my waistband.
Holy heck.
Was this really happening?
We were doing this. He was going there.
“You should know, I have a lot of past baggage.” Yeah, there it was, me putting my foot in it again. Every time.
“Freckles, there is nothing you can tell me that’s going to stop this from happening, unless it’s ‘No, don’t go down on me, Theo.’”
“Definitely not a no,” I whispered, unsure if my voice would hold.
I looked down, and he was on both knees now, beautiful eyes looking up at me. Dead. I was dead. But that would make this heaven, and I definitely wasn’t going there, so not dead? Whatever. “I went to prison.”
Holy sweet potatoes. Why did I do this?
“For two years.”
Theo laughed. “Makes you interesting.”
“My ex is problematic.”
Theo got to his feet and peered into my eyes, getting all serious and sexy at the same time. “That makes you a challenge. If you’re trying to put me off, it’s having the opposite effect.” He took my hand and placed it on the firm ridge inside his jeans.
I swallowed hard and lunged, capturing his mouth, kissing him fast, unleashing all my restrained need at once. I dropped both hands down his back, dug my fingers into his ass, and yanked him hard against me, feeling the firm press of his dick dig into my hip. “You don’t even know me,” I rasped.
He caught my hair, pulled my head back, and flashed a grin. “But I want to. I want this. And I’m not pretending I don’t anymore.”
His grip eased as his smile fell. His gaze flicked to my neck and back to my eyes.
The little electric current of fear and thrill was back, sparking down my spine. I definitely liked the danger. There was no denying it now.
“Is it safe?” I asked.
“Fuck no. But you don’t want safe, Owen.”
Our gazes locked, and a whole lot of understanding happened with his hand in my hair, the both of us hot and hard. This was going to happen, and it was probably going to get wild. We were both messed up, and that’s why it worked.
“Stop talking and let me go down on you, pool boy.”
I stopped talking.
Theo knelt on the carpet, hands resting on the fronts of my thighs, looking up at me through those dark lashes like he had all night and fully intended to spend it on me.
The party thumped somewhere under our feet, muffled and far away, and it was just us in the low light of his stupid, enormous room.
He’d never looked more gorgeous. Not since I’d known him. Which okay, had only been a few weeks.
His fingers found my fly.
And my brain chose that second to remember the fangs.
Because here’s the thing nobody warns you about getting your pants opened by a vampire.
They have teeth. Sharp teeth. Built for puncturing.
And he was lowering his face toward the one part of me I was most invested in keeping in one piece.
I’m not saying I panicked. I’m saying a very calm, very fast voice in the back of my head had started running the numbers on emergency rooms, and how I’d explain it to Bet, and whether “vampire oral incident” was a box you could tick on one of her forms.
“You’ve tensed up, Freckles,” Theo said.
Shoot, he’d caught me. “No, no I haven’t.”
“Is it the fangs?”
“Maybe?”
He laughed, there on his knees, eye-level with my uh . . . dick. I felt that laugh everywhere that had nerve endings, and a few places that didn’t.
“Look, it’s not in my best interests to bite it off,” he said. “Does that make you feel better?”
“Not really,” I laughed.
“Owen.” He looked up, and his eyes turned serious. “You’re the most precious thing in my life right now. I’m not going to risk that by doing something stupid to you.”
And heck. The fear and overthinking drained right out of me. Because I believed him. He actually cared.
He hooked his fingers in my waistband and drew everything down slowly, boxers and all, and the cool air of the room hit me, then his soft breaths, then his mouth. Warm, and wet, and . . . Oh, right there . . .
I’d thought about this. ’Course I had. I’d thought about it on the drive home and in the shower and lying in the dark staring at my busted blinds, told myself to quit at two a.m. when he’d been texting me .
. . then thought about it some more. None of that had prepared me for Theo’s mouth actually on my dick.
He took me in, tongue working slowly up the underside, and the sharp bracketing of his fangs . . . Those two cool points of pressure rested feather-light against me, a hair’s breadth away from being the worst idea I’d ever had.
This was how I died, either from going out of my mind with lust or having my dick bitten off by a post-transition vampire. I’d take the risk.