Where A Witch Goeth

Chapter Twenty-Three: How To Love A Vampire

Lesson number one of falling in love with a two-hundred-year-old vampire: it's fucking dangerous.

His effortless seduction of your blood is part of his curse, and if you—and he—aren't extraordinarily careful, you will impale yourself upon his fangs and he will struggle to stop you.

Five minutes of his adoration of my lips, and I was arching my back against the tree and baring my throat to him. Despite the supposedly foul smell of my blood, Evander scented my neck and groaned. I heard the snick of his fangs and suddenly there was stony pressure in two places there hadn't been before: between my legs and against my carotid artery.

"Oh goddess, is it going to hurt?" I whispered frantically. And still I bent my jaw to the side for him.

Evander became hard everywhere else. He stopped breathing. He stopped moving. He stopped...fuck...he stopped mimicking life. For twenty seconds, I was trapped against a tree by what felt like a carved marble sculpture.

"Evander?" I whispered. "Van?"

My hands roamed his chest, and I could feel his rock-hard breast beneath his button-down. I placed a hand over his heart. "Beat," I pleaded. "Come back."

He was not entirely a statue because he heard me. His heart thudded once and his lips smiled against the tender skin of my throat. Carefully, he placed a closed mouth kiss where his fangs had pressured moments before, and then he slowly eased me down onto my feet. "It's not going to hurt," he whispered in my ear, "Because it's not going to happen."

"Oh." I breathed out a long sigh of relief and straightened my shirt and blousey knickers. "Good. Because I'm not really ready to be your particular brand of poison." I smacked him on his rock-like bicep. "Don't hoo-doo me like that."

He backed away slightly and gave me a gorgeous smile. "I am sorry, but I can't really help it, you know. It's part of my natural predation. That is why I don't make a habit of mixing... pleasure and pleasure. In the moment, it is very hard for a woman to... uhm..." he struggled for words.

"Separate their consents for the romancing and the feeding?" I offered.

He gave me a startled look, but then he chuckled. "Yes, exactly." He turned thoughtful. "That's not a word I have heard associated with either act-consent."

Of course not. Not in this century.

"What word would you have used instead?" I asked him, somewhat amused and somewhat worried to hear his response.

He gave me a wary look. "I'm old-fashioned, but I was married once, you know. That is one of those questions to which I can supply no acceptable answer at this point."

I snickered and gave an exaggerated sigh. "Uuuuhhhh. The honeymoon is over already."

He caught me up in his arms, drawing me up to his eye level. "Lass, the honeymoon isn't even on the horizon yet. The courting hasn't even begun, has it now?" He pecked a casual kiss on my nose—the most casual thing I had yet to see him do since I had met him, and I liked it very much. My grin was probably stupid as he set me down.

"So we're courting now? Tell me, how does courting work in the vampire world?" I teased him.

He leaned one arm against the tree over my head and squinted down at me. "Well, to start with, it doesn't work well at all if the lady in possession of the vampire's affections has a lingering arrangement with another man."

Nick, he meant. I blew out a long breath. I understood Evander's point, but breaking up was hard to do—especially when your boyfriend hadn't even been born yet.