5. Bastian
CHAPTER FIVE
BASTIAN
I solde’s scent clung to Bastian like perfume, and it was driving him mad.
Instinct had taken over when he saw her vault over the pasture fence, and there hadn’t been time for him to consider what she had so obviously pointed out—that she was running toward the sound of squealing goats, not away—before he’d tackled her into the snow.
He hadn’t been prepared for the way she flipped him onto his back with such ease, trapping him there with her hand against his windpipe, either.
It seemed that without a knife pressed to her throat, Isolde matched him easily in strength.
The entire time their bodies had been touching couldn’t have been more than a minute, and yet Bastian may as well have bathed in her scent for how strongly it lingered.
She smelled like snow and citrus and the little white flowers his mother had always kept in a vase on the table—lily of the valley, he thought they were called.
And now his clothes smelled like her, as did the palms of his hands where he’d gripped her waist. The scent wafted up from the dip in his clavicle, where she’d planted her own hand.
It had been the same after that first night in his forge, only worse because her arousal heightened the intensity of her scent. He hadn’t been able to get it out of his nose for days , and he couldn’t fucking stand it.
It didn’t help that every whiff of that scent had his cock hardening in his pants, either.
Partly it was the memories that went with it—of her supple body writhing beneath his, the scrape of her nails against the back of his neck, the way her hot mouth had brushed across his throat before she asked him if she could feed.
In that moment, his thoughts completely muddled by the way she fucking smelled, he’d almost said yes. He’d wanted her to feed.
Again, he blamed it on that damned scent. He blamed the way he couldn’t stop hearing her say the word fuck —and imagining the other scenarios in which he might provoke her to say it—on her scent, too.
If there’d been any sign of the beast in the part of the forest he’d searched earlier, there had been no chance of Bastian picking up on it. It was too dark for him to see anything clearly between the trees, and while his ears were functioning perfectly well, his nose had been completely useless.
Bastian hadn’t been able to get away from her fast enough. It had been one thing when she was standing five paces away, downwind, and he’d only had to contend with the dizzying scent that clung to his clothes.
And then he’d pissed her off with that comment about humans being food, and she’d closed the distance between them faster than Bastian had ever seen someone move.
She’d gnashed those deadly sharp fangs in his face, and that scent had washed over him with her proximity. He’d barely been able to think past it.
His brain hadn’t been so addled that he’d missed the flash of hurt in her ice blue eyes, though. It was there and gone between one blink and the next, concealed behind a cold wall of anger, but Bastian had seen it.
That, more than anything else, convinced him that Isolde wasn’t the beast of Bloodhaven.
It also rattled him to his damn core.
Since his childhood, he’d been taught that Vampires were soulless, bloodthirsty creatures who felt no remorse for the humans they fed on. Before the Blood Pact, they’d fed on Wolves —had hunted them down and drained them to death.
Obviously it was true that Vampires had a taste for Wolf blood. Isolde’s reaction the other night, when she cut him with his own knife—the way her nostrils had flared, her pupils blowing wide and her fangs sliding free—had made that clear enough.
But Bastian, much as he hated to admit it, didn’t quite buy the idea that she had no soul.
That wasn’t to say he didn’t hate her just as much as she hated him, of course. She was vicious, contemptuous, and arrogant, and her infuriating fucking scent contaminated everything she touched. Worst of all, she was a Vampire, and Bastian wanted absolutely nothing to do with her.
Unfortunately, he suspected he’d be seeing a great deal more of Isolde Renault. She seemed like the type to always have her nose stuck someplace inconvenient.
But for now, he had no clue what to do next. Isolde didn’t seem to have any better idea what the beast of Bloodhaven might be than he did, and he was down two good shirts, forced to burn them in a futile attempt to rid himself of her scent.