incredulous look on his face. He hasn’t said a word in what feels like forever in Hudson time, but this comment has definitely woken him up with a vengeance. “You people really think I’m the fucking harbinger of the apocalypse?”
“You don’t really want to get into that right now, do you?” I turn and ask.
“Hell yeah, I want to get into it. I’m bloody well sick of being cast as the bad guy.”
“Like I said before, maybe don’t be the bad guy, Hudson,” I snap. “You don’t get to have it both ways.”
“We’re getting off track here,” Macy says, waving the book in our faces. “Are you going to tell us why you’re so convinced this is wrong?”
I don’t want to—it feels like giving everyone here a look into something they have no business knowing about—but at this point, I kind of have to. Plus, I do want to know the answer, and maybe one of them has it, even though Jaxon is currently looking as confused as everyone else.
“It’s no big deal,” I tell them. “It’s just that I happen to know for a fact that I’m not immune to vampire bites.”
“How would you know that?” Macy demands. “Has someone tried to bite—” She breaks off, her eyes going wide as understanding dawns. “Ooooooh. So that’s how. Niiiice.” She gives Jaxon an approving look.
Suddenly Flint is looking anywhere but at the two of us. “Oh, right. Well, then…” He coughs a little, clears his throat, and looks incredibly uncomfortable as he continues. “Maybe the book is wrong, then?”
“The damn book isn’t wrong,” Hudson snarls. “There are different kinds of bites.”
“It’s not wrong,” Jaxon unconsciously echoes his brother. “If I was trying to inject my venom into you to kill you—or to change you—it probably wouldn’t work because I’d be using my powers. But the times that I’ve bitten you…that’s not what I’m doing. Hurting you or changing you is the last thing on my mind. I’m trying to—”
He breaks off, like he hasn’t already said too much. But it’s too late. All three of us know how he was going to finish that statement—with some variation of the fact that his biting me had nothing to do with pain and everything to do with giving me pleasure.
Which it did. Does. A lot. But no one else needs to know that. Not Flint, who seems strangely disturbed by the image. Not Macy, who has all but turned into a heart-eyed emoji. And definitely not Hudson, who seems to be getting colder—and more pissed off—with each word any of us says.
Macy’s going to demand details the second I’m alone—it’s written all over her face. And now that I’m thinking about what she’s going to ask, I’m also thinking about how I’m going to answer. Which means I’m thinking about Jaxon biting me and—
“Enough already,” Hudson growls as I can’t help remembering the last time Jaxon did that to me. “You don’t have to be so graphic. We get it.”
“I wasn’t being graphic at all,” I answer. “What is your problem today, anyway?”
“I don’t have a problem!” he snaps back. “I just think some things should remain private.”
“Yeah, well, me too. But here you are.” I glance back at Jaxon, who’s got his eyebrows raised, like he wants me to tell the whole room what Hudson is saying. I give a quick shake of my head. I just want this entire conversation over.
As if sensing how embarrassed I am by his nondisclosure disclosure, Jaxon pushes us back to the original topic with sheer willpower and a whole lot of royal attitude. It’s funny how I forget how well he plays the prince because he does it so rarely—unlike Hudson, whose whole demeanor pretty much shouts, I’m royalty and you’re not fit to lick my boots.
Hudson’s voice is as dry and British as my mother’s favorite shortbread cookie when he answers, “To be fair, a lot of people aren’t.”
I roll my eyes and flick my gaze back to him. “You need to be careful, or people are going to start believing you mean the ridiculous things you say.”
“Good.”
I just roll my eyes again, then focus on Jaxon, who is quizzing people in a round-robin format on what they’ve found so far. Not for the first time, I’m grateful that I’m mated to someone like Jaxon, who not only doesn’t try to insert himself into my conversations with Hudson but who also steers attention away from the fact that a hundred-years-old vampire is yammering