* * *
His bedroom was different from how I’d imagined it. There wasn’t a coffin, or anything else that might suggest that its occupant was anything other than a perfectly ordinary wealthy human with questionable taste in decorating.
It was much bigger than my bedroom, with a lake-facing floor-to-ceiling window that matched the one in the living room. Like the living room, it was also rather dark. Brass wall sconces ringed the room, their dim light playing with the subtle contoured colors of Frederick’s hair. I wanted to bury my hands in that hair and feel the silky-soft tresses as they sifted through my fingers.
The bed was king-sized, with a thick mattress and a blood-red canopy that matched both the duvet covering the bed and the curtains covering the window. When Frederick laid me down on the mattress, as carefully as he might handle a porcelain doll, I realized the red duvet cover was made of velvet.
This part is a bit cliché, I thought, running my fingers over the impossibly soft material. Right from Interview with the Vampire. But my body was alight with anticipation and nerves, and the tender, heated way he was looking at me as he stood at the foot of the bed made it almost impossible to think clearly.
Constructive feedback on his bedroom stylings could wait.
I reached up for him, excited for the next part to begin.
The sight of my outstretched arms, however, seemed to cause the raw desire that had propelled him to bring me into his bedroom to grind to a screeching halt. He was no longer staring at me like he wanted to fuck me into the middle of next week. His entire demeanor changed, his dark eyes drifting to the wooden floorboards, the fingers of his right hand drumming a nervous staccato beat against his thigh.
I propped myself up on my elbows, concerned. “Frederick?”
“Perhaps . . .” he began, sounding pained. He sat beside me on a loud exhalation of breath, bending forward until his elbows were on his knees. He buried his face in his hands. “Perhaps we should not do this.”
My heart stuttered as I tried to reconcile what he was saying now with what had just happened moments before. I pushed up on the bed until I was sitting beside him and then, hesitantly, I slid my hand up and across his broad chest, flattening my palm over the place where his heart once beat.
Every time I’d touched him in the past it had elicited an immediate, kinetic response from him. This time, he held himself almost preternaturally still.
It was like touching a statue.
“Do you . . . do you not want to do this?”
His breath hitched. He shifted closer to me on the bed and then, hesitantly, he wrapped an arm around me by way of wordless response.
“That is not what I said.” His voice was raw gravel, and he shifted even closer, the taut muscles of his arm flexing against my lower back. “I do want to do this. You have no idea how badly I want to do this. I simply said perhaps we shouldn’t.”
We were sitting so close it would have been nothing at all to turn my head and press my lips to his cheek. With difficulty, I stayed put.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“I didn’t plan to drag you into a romantic entanglement with . . . someone like me.”
“No one is dragging me into anything.”
“But—”
“I want to have a romantic entanglement with you.”
The look on his face when he met my eyes was heartbreaking. “You couldn’t possibly.”
“Why not?”
“For one thing, you are human.” He shook his head. “For another, I am not.”
This, of course, was what had held me back until now. But none of it mattered. Frederick was kind and compassionate. He bought out an entire cookware section when I said I needed a saucepan, and said insightful, kind things about my art even though he didn’t understand it.
He knew me, with an intuitive kind of sensitivity that took my breath away.
And, yes, okay, he was a vampire. That did present some legitimate challenges. But that didn’t change how good he was—or the fact that I wanted him more than I’d ever wanted anyone in my life.
“I don’t care,” I said flatly. I gently took his hand and laced our fingers together.
“You should care,” he murmured. But he didn’t drop my hand. He was holding me so closely he could probably feel the rapid beating of my heart against his own rib cage. “You don’t want the kind of half life I live, Cassie. You cannot possibly want to be what I am. For us to be together, really together—the changes you would have to undergo . . .”
I raised our joined hands until my lips met the cool, smooth solidity of his wrist, letting my mouth linger there. His lips parted, and oh, they had been so soft, pressed against my own lips. Even when his kisses had grown desperate. I wanted to taste them again, wanted to tease them apart with my tongue.