Page 56 of Even Vampires Bleed (Even Ever After #2)

Cassiopé

I ’m pretty sure that I’m as red as a tomato. At least I’m behind Léandre, so he can’t see me. I’m sure I would crumble under his stare.

I finish massaging him in an awkward silence and with tingling fingers.

Each time I move his hair aside to massage the top of his shoulders, I get a rush and have to stop myself from bending down and plunging my fangs into his skin.

The vein on the side of his neck is pulsing next to my hand, and I can’t stop staring.

It takes all of my strength not to act on my instincts, and when I’m finally done, I jump from behind him and go back to the kitchen.

I can’t stay there, close to him, or I don’t know what I will do.

I have no idea what need is the strongest in me right now. Between my heated dreams and my fangs dying to sample him again, I’m a mess.

So, instead, I focus on what I can actually do—breakfast.

That’s what I was about to make when I smelled a lie in Léandre. It was more of a hidden truth, but who cares for semantics?

After breakfast, the rest of the day passes like any other. Léandre goes to cut wood that we absolutely don’t need any more of, and I sit under the sun with one of my books against a tree in the same clearing, trying not to ogle him.

I’m both dreading and anticipating the time when we’ll go to bed.

The thought is so overwhelming that, by the time the sun starts setting, I have no idea what happened in the last hundred pages of my book.

I’ll have to go back to where I started at the beginning of the afternoon when I read again tomorrow.

Léandre takes his shower while I start cooking, and then at the end of the meal, I take mine while he does the dishes.

Everything seems so normal, and yet I feel like something is about to change.

There is some sort of electricity in the air that crackles each time our bodies brush inadvertently, and that seems to draw us together.

After dinner, I go back to reading my book—but once again nothing seems to print on my brain and I’ve forgotten everything I read right away—and Léandre carves something from a piece of wood he picked this afternoon. It doesn’t look like anything so far, and my curiosity has peaked.

It doesn’t help with staying focused on my book, and in the end, I give up.

“I’m going to sleep,” I tell Léandre, hoping that will get him to stand and follow me.

I can’t have him staying out of the bedroom for hours or there is a chance I’ll actually fall asleep, which would ruin my plan.

“Give me a minute. I’m coming,” he replies and some weight lifts from my shoulders.

I walk to the bedroom and open the wardrobe.

I filled it with my own clothes the first day I woke up here, and I know there are extra pillows and blankets here, even one of those long pillows that you’re supposed to put behind all the others against the headboard.

That’s the one I’m getting now, because I still need Léandre to believe I’m going to stay in bed once he joins me here .

After my reactions last time, there is no way he’ll believe I don’t have a sneaky plan to leave him the bed. So I’m installing the pillow in the middle.

It’ll act as a barrier between us. At least for the time I’ll spend there, which—hopefully—won’t be long.

When he arrives in the room, Léandre gives a nod of approval at my makeshift barrier and starts removing his shorts.

“What are you doing?” I ask, and I know I can’t hide the alarm in my voice. If he sleeps naked, it’s going to be so much harder for me.

Léandre’s hands stop mid-thigh.

“You saw me this morning, Firefly. I sleep in boxer shorts.”

“You can’t do that,” I tell him, and even to myself, I sound petulant.

“You’ll survive,” he tells me flippantly. “You massaged my back for half an hour this morning, and you survived. This time there is a pillow between us—you put it there—so not a centimeter of my skin will touch yours.”

He raises an eyebrow, as if daring me to contradict him.

I don’t even need to fake my outrage at what he just said, because I do believe he’s making it difficult, and yet I stay quiet.

I can’t deny it. I survived this morning and telling him that my sanity was a thread away from breaking is not something I want him to know—ever.

Instead, I walk to my side of the bed—yes, that’s the one he put me on when I got hurt—and slip under the bedsheet.

I wait for the bed to dip on the other side.

“Good night, Léandre,” I tell him with a yawn.

“Good night, Firefly,” he says before adding, “I kept the shirt on if it makes you feel better.”

And with those last words he turns off the sun charged light on his nightstand.