6. Posy #2
“I can hear your heartbeat climbing. I can see the flush going down your throat, and your thighs pressed together, hunting relief you won’t permit yourself.” His voice drops into gravel. “You want me. And I find I very much want you to want me.”
“Valerian…”
“Would you like to touch it?” He takes my hand. I didn’t give it, and I don’t take it back. He guides my palm flat against the scar, cool skin, hard muscle, the raised silver ridges of the starburst under my fingers. “For your research, of course.”
His heart isn’t beating under my hand.
It should disturb me. A chest with no drum in it, silence where a pulse should be. Instead all I can think is that my hand is on him, and his skin is smooth and cool, and my fingers want to drift, and if they drift I’m not getting them back.
“I should go,” I whisper.
“You keep announcing it.”
“I mean it this time.”
“Do you?”
I don’t. God help me, I want to stay in this steam with this creature who shouldn’t exist and learn him inch by inch.
I pull my hand back fast, before it can vote.
“I found more. In the journal.” I’m babbling now, redirecting at flank speed. “About the anchor, and there’s another passage I flagged, and I thought you should see, in the library, where there are tables, and clothes…”
“Posy. Breathe.”
I stop.
He reaches past me, close enough that the cool of his damp skin grazes my arm, and pulls a towel from a hook I never noticed. He wraps it around his waist in one economical motion, and relief floods me, chased immediately by a disappointment I will take to my grave.
“Show me what you found,” he says, gentler now, the predator banked. “I will dress and meet you in the library.”
“Right. Yes. The library. I’ll just…” I gesture at the door. “Be there. Waiting. Clothed. As people are. Normally.”
I turn to flee.
My foot catches the raised edge of the doorframe.
I pitch forward with a yelp, the journal flying from my hands, one crystalline thought suspended above the fall: this is how I die, tripping over my own feet in front of a naked vampire.
Hands catch my waist.
Strong hands, cool and damp, hauling me upright, and then I’m pressed against his chest, his bare, wet chest, my palms landing flat on it, and he’s close enough to count eyelashes, close enough to see the darker striations in the silver of his eyes.
“Careful, now,” he murmurs, and his breath ghosts across my lips.
We hang there. His hands on my waist. My palms on his chest, one of them over the scar, over the silence where his heartbeat should be. Water from his skin soaks into my shirt. Every point of contact reports in separately, and every report says the same thing.
“Valerian, listen.”
“Yes, Posy.”
“You need to let go of me.”
“Do I? Why?” His hands flex on my waist, not pulling me in, not letting me go.
“Because if you don’t, I’m going to do something stupid.”
“Such as?”
Kiss you. Find out what the towel is hiding. Ruin my whole life.
“Something stupid,” I repeat.
His eyes drop to my mouth and hold. His jaw clenches, and the struggle moves across his face in real time, want against restraint, and restraint is losing ground.
“I made you a promise,” he says quietly. “I will not touch you without permission. Nothing you do not offer will ever be taken. And yet, Posy.” His voice goes raw. “You are making it very difficult to keep that promise.”
“I’m not doing anything.”
“You are standing in my arms looking at me as if you want to be devoured.” His grip tightens by a fraction. “You are warm, and your heart is pounding and you smell of…” He stops. Swallows. “You need to leave. Now. Before I do something we will both regret.”
He releases me.
The absence of his hands is a physical loss. I stumble back, catch the doorframe, and my breath won’t organize itself.
“The library,” I manage. “I’ll be in the library.”
“I will be there shortly.”
I turn and run. Not walk. Run, down the hallway, around the corner, away from the steam and the candles and the devastating creature I left standing in a towel with barely leashed hunger all over his face.
I make it to the end of the corridor before I have to stop, back against the wall, gasping.
My chest is heaving. My thighs are clenched so tight they ache, trying to manage the throb that’s moved in between my legs and started unpacking.
My skin is too hot and one size too small.
I can still feel his hands at my waist and the cool of his chest under my palms and the silence where his heart should be, and none of it is fading.
You are making it very difficult to keep that promise.
I press my hands to my burning face and try to breathe. This is fine. I just need to calm down and approach this like a rational adult who is not desperately attracted to a centuries-old vampire who looks like that and talks like every dark thought I’ve ever had.
I’m a professional. I can handle this.
A crash echoes from the bathroom.
My head snaps up. Heavy weight hitting marble, then a smaller clatter, candles scattering.
“Valerian? Everything okay?”
No answer.
“Valerian, answer me!”
I’m running before I decide to, back down the hallway, through the bedroom, skidding into the steam.
Valerian is on the floor.