I ignored the ominous brow draw. “My Aunt Kate and Aunt Millicent went to talk to the instructor. They swore him to secrecy,” I waved my hand in between our faces, “the whole Buchanan reputation and all that. They don’t want it besmirched.”
“What did you do?” he asked.
“Sorry?”
“To get expelled, what did you do?”
I decided to answer.
Why not? What could go wrong?
“I was texting my friends, you know, to say good-bye because I had to move here and it’s not close. It was a quick thing for them. Obviously I couldn’t tell them I was all of a sudden a vampire’s concubine because they don’t know you all exist and they’d think I needed a loony bin. So I had to tell them I had to quit work and care for an invalid aunt they’d never heard about. They were freaking.”
Lucien looked angry though I sensed (shockingly) not at me. “They could have simply confiscated your phone.”
“They did,” I informed him. “Then I started passing notes in class.”
His eyes locked on mine then they blinked very slowly.
“Why?” he asked.
“Why what?”
“Why did you pass notes in class?”
“I was bored.” He made no reply so I explained, “We were in the vampire history part, that’s boring. It went on forever. The other concubines weren’t into passing notes. They acted like vampire history was their life’s true meaning so they told on me.”
He sighed and stated, “Leah, you’re forty years old.”
“Yes. So?”
“Isn’t it a little juvenile to be passing notes in class at your age?”
I’d heard that before.
Being juvenile was yet another of my bad traits, or so others thought. Like my Aunt Kate. And my Aunt Millicent. And my Aunt Nadia (sometimes, most of the time Aunt Nadia thought I was a hoot). And my goodie-two-shoes, perfection personified cousin Myrna.
I felt my body grow stiff and my nose, of its own accord, went half an inch up in the air before I declared, “I’ll grow up when I’m ninety-three years old, not a day sooner. I made a vow to be a girl until then and I’m sticking to it.” Lucien was silent so I finished with, “I have fifty-three years left.”
He shook his head and dropped to his side on the bed taking me with him so my head was on the pillows but my bottom was tucked into his lap, my calves hanging over his thighs. His big body was at a right angle, his legs were still partially over the side of the bed but he cocked a knee so his thigh was deeper into my bottom and he went up on his forearm beside me. He was towering over me, all huge, bulky vampire and he rested his other arm at a slant across my abdomen, his fingers casually curled into my hip.
“That still isn’t terms for expulsion,” he announced while I concentrated on not hyperventilating at this new intimate position.
He was acting like we lay in bed, physically touching, nonchalantly discussing the weather, my frequent antics and the meaning of life every freaking day!
Not like we barely knew each other, which we didn’t.
Not like he wasn’t an overbearing vampire who’d made my life a living hell with his mind games.
Not like he was a being I hated with all my heart.
Not like he was there to suck my blood from my body to make him immortal and superhuman.
No.
Like we were something else entirely.
“I didn’t get expelled for that,” I said and it came out breathy.