Bane's Choice (Vampire Motorcycle Club #1) - Alyssa Day Page 0,18

a frame of reference for a hallucination like you. I’d have to have seen some astonishingly high-class porn.” She whistled. “Or Brazilian soccer players. Yep, that’s probably it. I watched that soccer game with Annie in the doctors’ lounge, and my brain knows I like blue-eyed blonds, and here you are, with those muscles, and that six-pack—eight-pack? Oh dear heavens—and here you are, like sex on a stick, and—”

“You’re babbling,” he said, a feeling of smug, male triumph spreading through him like a river of warm honey. “Also, sex on a stick? I don’t know what that means, but I find that I like it. A lot.”

He took a step closer, unbuttoning his jeans as he moved. “Shouldn’t you be taking your clothes off, too?”

By all the gods, she was gorgeous, although she also…wasn’t. He blinked. In fact, her face was almost ordinary, as Luke had said.

What was happening to him? He, who’d seen and touched and tasted beauties from a dozen generations?

But then she smiled, and her face lit up like the sun.

As did her skin. He’d almost put her glowing skin out of his mind. She’d presented as completely normal—plain, ordinary human—when he’d entered her home. Until now. When she smiled, her skin had lit up, too. And the glow remained, making every inch of her uncovered skin luminous.

And any thought of ordinary disappeared. She was far more than the sum of her parts, this woman. The sheer intensity in her eyes had caught him—claimed him—and wouldn’t let him go. But maybe it was merely illusion that her skin was gleaming in the soft light in the room?

She’d let down her hair since he’d seen her at the hospital, and it was a gleaming dark fall of chestnut brown that reached halfway down her back. He couldn’t wait to see it spread across his pillow. And the curves that the lab coat had hidden were on full display in her silky nightclothes, which consisted of shorts and a cropped top that hugged her breasts. Were he a poet, he’d write odes to those breasts. They were so round and ripe, with nipples begging for his mouth.

The tiny pair of shorts, too, which revealed the most delicious, curvy legs he’d ever hoped to have wrapped around his waist.

Or thrown over his shoulders.

He swallowed, hard, when he realized his fangs were in danger of descending, and not from blood lust, either. His body had hardened, too, to the point of making his pants uncomfortably tight.

He also felt something…wrong.

Which made no sense.

A beautiful, okay and possibly glowing, woman wanted him to take off his clothes.

He wanted to fuck her.

There was nothing wrong, and everything right, about this situation.

He took another step toward her, but something in his gut twisted.

What the hell?

It had been his way of life for three centuries—to take what was freely offered.

No.

This—this somehow felt wrong.

Ryan, who’d started unbuttoning her shirt, glanced up at him from beneath her lashes, and the gesture was so incredibly sexy that his cock hardened to the point of pain.

“Why are you stopping?” She bit her lips, suddenly looking more nervous than seductive. “I get to call the shots, right? This is my hallucination, after all. Keep taking your clothes off.”

Oh, hell no.

“I am not a hallucination,” he ground out from between clenched teeth. “Quit calling me that.”

She stopped unbuttoning and put her hands on her hips, because, of course, compulsion didn’t work on her. Why would anything be normal and reasonable about this enchanting, infuriating, fascinating woman?

“You don’t get a say, buddy. You aren’t even real. I’m actually standing here arguing with my own frontal lobe. Although I have to admit you’re a lot sexier than the last frontal lobe I saw. I’m just saying. Which is lucky for you, since I dissected that sucker.”

Bane started to feel like he was out of his depth, again, which he’d felt a lot since first encountering Dr. Ryan Gorgeous-But-Possibly-Nuts-and-Definitely-Drunk St. Cloud.

“And you smell like flowers and sunshine, not guano,” he muttered. “Odd, for someone who’s clearly bat-shit crazy.”

She grinned and then leapt up and threw her arms around his neck. His hands automatically lifted to catch her, and he found himself groaning at the warmth and weight of her deliciously round ass. Her hair was like silk, touching his cheek, and she was warm and soft and lovely and everything he had never known he’d always wanted.

Then she wrapped her legs around his waist, and the torrent of electricity that shot through his body made