where you can take a shower, so my sister quits giving me death glares for being rude to a guest.’”
“I’m a guest? Not an abductee?”
He actually growled in response but said nothing, so she decided to shut up, look around, and see what happened next in this part of the waking dream she seemed to be having. Now—with his back to her—would be a great time to start running.
To try to escape.
But he’d almost certainly catch her. She’d seen how fast he could move. And it would probably make him angry, and maybe vampires got vicious when they were angry.
He still hadn’t promised not to kill her, she realized, and the thought sent a cold shiver snaking down her spine.
But, on the other hand, there was Hunter.
For now—and maybe they’d be her own version of famous last words—she’d see what she could see. She’d always have a chance to escape when daylight came and they all went off to sleep in their coffins.
If, in fact, any of that happened to be true in any way. Maybe they loved the sun and slept in beds with quilted bedspreads right in front of open windows.
Or, maybe, her hungover brain was starting to stutter into idiocy. She took a deep breath, tried to shake off panic and mental fuzziness, and looked around.
The hallway was as beautiful as the ballroom they’d come from. Rich, slightly faded Persian rugs that looked as authentic as the ones in her grandmother’s—now Ryan’s—home covered the lustrous hardwood floors all the way down the hall. Dark wooden panels covered the walls partway up, and then the most luscious wallpaper she’d ever seen, in a delicate pattern portraying a garden party in spring in perhaps the nineteenth century, continued to the high ceiling. A series of small tables, placed equidistant all down the hall, were resting places for large crystal vases filled with fresh flowers. Wall sconces held exquisite globes of what appeared to be hand-blown glass, lit from within with a warm golden glow. Considering her hosts were vampires, she was somewhat surprised not to see lanterns and candles instead of electric lights.
And I’m trying very, very hard to focus on the walls and light fixtures, so I can avoid thinking about the hot vampire leading me down the hallway (pick one: a. to my doom or b. to a bathroom), and especially so I can avoid staring at the amazing musculature of his incredibly fine ass.
Seriously, he could be a model for anatomical drawings, he’s so perfect. How unfair is that?
“Very unfair,” she said firmly, as if to convince herself. Sadly, she wasn’t much of one to lie to herself, so she quit pretending she wasn’t staring at his butt or at the muscles in his broad shoulders or the narrowness of the waist that led to his hips and…
…And there we are, back at his truly fine ass.
“Do vampires have to work out?”
This time, he stopped and turned to stare at her. “What?”
“It seems fairly impossible that you can have that unbelievably perfect of an ass…anatomy, unless you work out, or it’s some vampire hocus pocus. I mean, your body is objectively perfect, isn’t it? Is that some magical side effect? I’m asking for scientific and evidentiary purposes, you understand.”
A slow smile of quite unfairly wicked sensuality spread across his quite unfairly beautiful face, and she wondered if it were possible for panties to self-destruct.
“Perfect? I like the sound of that, Doctor. Shall we discuss the perfection of your ass…anatomy while we’re having this fascinating conversation?”
And just like that, ice water washed over the unbelievable recklessness that had been running through her hormonally overactive mind.
“Very funny. Nobody has ever called my overly round ass perfect, and I know it, so maybe we could quit with mocking the human who already has enough to deal with right now.”
His eyes widened, and if he’d been human, she’d have said he was surprised. But he wasn’t human, and she didn’t know how to translate vampire facial expressions yet.
Maybe widened eyes meant “I’m going to suck your blood from your body until you’re a dying, withered husk on the floor if you don’t shut up.”
She shivered and caught him noticing, so she raised her chin and stiffened her shoulders, refusing to show fear.
“I’m not mocking you, Ryan,” he said quietly. “Shockingly enough, I find little about this conversation, or this situation, funny.”
With that, he turned and opened a door, pushing it open and gesturing to her to precede him into it.
She