discern this look. What are you thinking, pet?”
“That I’m glad I can confuse you as much as you confuse me,” I admitted out loud, giving him my current thought rather than the previous one.
“I think we should skip right to dessert, then.” He stepped into me, causing me to back up against the counter behind me. He pressed his body to mine, his palms still cradling my face. “Have you ever had a sundae?”
“Like the day of the week?” Or was it a euphemism for something?
He chuckled. “No.” He closed the gap between our mouths to brush a soft kiss against my lips, one that was almost tender in its sweetness.
I went to return the embrace, but he was already backing away toward the refrigerator.
“I know you said you weren’t hungry, but a treat doesn’t count as real food. And I think you’ve earned a sundae after the long night we’ve just endured together.” He nodded toward the windows in the living area as if to highlight the early morning hour.
The sun spilling over Silvano City reflected off the other buildings, creating an array of color unlike anything I’d ever seen. The university ran on a night schedule because our vampire professors preferred darker skies. I never knew why, nor had I ever been in a situation where I could ask.
“You’re deep in thought again,” Ryder noted as he set two bowls on the counter adjacent to me. It was the one with stools on the dining room side.
“I was thinking about the sun.” It sounded ridiculous out loud, but it was the truth.
“What about it?” he asked before returning to the refrigerator to open the bottom drawer. Icy air escaped the compartment, causing me to shiver as it reached my exposed legs.
“Vampires prefer night, so we rarely experienced the sun at the university,” I explained, taking a step to the side to avoid more of the chilly wave.
Ryder closed the drawer after retrieving a carton, then he opened the doors above it to grab a few other items.
Once he had everything he needed laid out on the counter, he pointed at the stool side and told me, “Sit.”
He certainly was a man of eloquent terms.
I obeyed him anyway, curious as to what kind of “treat” he intended to make. The ingredients came from whatever the girl had brought up on the tray.
Ryder had busied himself with storing the food in various places while waiting for Damien to arrive. It had struck me as a busy habit to avoid the wounded female. Another strange trait because most of his kind would have pounced on the injured human and finished her off.
“It’s our senses,” he said suddenly.
I frowned. “Senses?”
“Yes.” He glanced up from his task of scooping white balls out of the container. “That’s why we don’t like the sun. It’s too bright for our eyes.”
“Oh.” Why was he explaining this to me?
“We’re bred for the night,” he added, returning to his task. “Lycans are bred for the day. Although, I think many of them keep night hours now to stay in tune with vampires. But it wasn’t always like that.”
“You frequently speak as though this world is new,” I said slowly. “Is it because of how much it’s evolved in your existence?” He’d claimed to be close to five thousand years old. From what I knew of the world, we were only in year one hundred and seventeen.
“Would you believe me if I told you there was a time when humans ruled over everything?”
I scoffed at that. “That’d never happen.”
“Not now, no. But for the majority of my very long life, mortals ran the world.” He left to drop the carton in the drawer again before continuing. “It all changed when humans spotted lycans for the first time. They wanted to use them for super soldiers in their mortal wars. As you can guess, that didn’t go over well. We were forced to put humans in their place as a result.”
“As cattle,” I muttered, referring to Damien’s term. He wasn’t the first to use that sort of commentary in my presence.
“It’s true that humans are food. But we wouldn’t exist without your kind, which is something my brethren continue to forget.” Ryder picked up a brown bottle and snorted at the label before uncapping it and squeezing a liquid-like substance out of it over the bowls.
I wasn’t sure why he considered this a treat. It didn’t appear all that edible.
When he finished, he sprayed another mound of white fluff on