Don't Hex and Drive (Stay a Spell #2) - Juliette Cross Page 0,84
point.”
“I’m sorry.”
His sincerity cooled me off. Some of the steam had blown out of me. “I don’t like you interfering.”
His smile disappeared. He took a step toward me into my personal bubble, forcing me to tip up my chin. I didn’t back down, though. I wouldn’t let any vampire intimidate me. If that’s what he was doing. But the flash of heat in his eyes told me that might not be what was on his mind.
“Maybe not,” he said in a low whisper, his voice silky smooth and sweet like a chocolate river. “But I care about you enough to make sure you’re safe. I’m sorry if I crossed a boundary.” He reached up and tucked a lock of hair behind my ear, his fingers trailing along the shell. I barely repressed a tingly shiver. “Some of these guys make up their profiles to hide who they truly are. What they’re really like.”
Swallowing hard against the emotion I saw in his deep brown eyes and heard in his unfairly hypnotic voice, I asked, “And you know this from experience? On your own dating profile?”
His fingers had trapped a long strand of my hair, which he rubbed slowly between his thumb and middle finger. My gaze was drawn to that cuff bracelet, the one made of his mother’s mangalsutra.
A little throb beat in my chest for this charismatic man who still loved his mother so much. I would say he was a contradiction, but that wasn’t really true. He was exactly who he showed to the world. A brilliant, charming, and stealthy vampire who lived life fiercely. Too fiercely perhaps. His light shone too brightly. It burned.
He scoffed, his gaze on the lock of hair he toyed with between his fingers. “I don’t use dating apps.”
“Only the blood host app, iBite.”
His smile became that wide, all-knowing force that made me all melty inside. He’d caught me.
“Now look who’s stalking. Have you been checking me out on iBite?”
“Please.” I rolled my eyes. “Not stalking. Jules was on there, so I happened to check and see, you know, if you had a profile.”
“Why was Jules on there?”
“To check Ruben’s profile, of course.”
Somehow, he took that in stride with a nod. Huh. I wondered what he knew about those two.
He twirled a lock tighter around his index finger and tugged, drawing me an inch closer. “You read the forum reviews.”
I shrugged a shoulder, giving him my I-don’t-care look.
“I see.” His dark gaze roved down to my lips, coasted lower to my throat, then back up. “Have you ever thought of donating a little to team vampire?”
“No,” I snapped.
“Liar.”
“Don’t call me a liar.”
“Even if you are one?”
“Okay, maybe I thought about it after that one time. You know.”
He arched a black brow. “No, tell me. I don’t know.”
His fiendish grin was unbearable. He was having so much fun taunting me, and for some dumbass reason, I was enjoying it, too. A stark contrast with the rest of my evening with Terry.
“I think you can guess,” I added flippantly.
“Okay. I’ll play,” he said, his hand drifting under my hair to wrap loosely around the base of my throat. “You enjoyed it when you nicked your tongue on my fang. You enjoyed it so much you’ve wondered what it would feel like if you went all the way.”
I clenched my thighs tight at the phrase all the way because that conjured up our one-night stand. The most fantastic sexual experience of my life.
He brushed his thumb along my pulse, heat pouring off him. “You’ve thought about it more than once. You want to know if what those women said about vampire toxin is true.”
“Maybe,” I said, aggravated with his arrogance. And the fact that he was totally right. I pulled away till his arm dropped from me, refraining from groaning at the loss of his sensual touch. “Maybe I need to try a vampire next on Zapp and see for myself.” Then I turned and walked up Magazine Street toward home.
That was a bitchy thing to say, I know. It was really unlike me. But Devraj needed to understand he didn’t have rights over me. We weren’t in a relationship. We were friends. Who’d happened to have had mind-melting sex once. Twice, really. And that was that. I needed a man I could fall in love with. One who’d stay.
Chapter 22
~DEVRAJ~
Damn. That woman was going to kill me. After cooling my head and biting back a string of curses in ten languages, I caught up to walk