Page 14 of It's in His Bite
The entire world stopped spinning, I swear to God. There was no snow storm outside, no mug of hot tea perched on the counter across the kitchen, no laptop fan quietly whirring beside her elbow. My brain was the only thing moving, processing at way too fast a speed. Her closed eyes, her resistance to showing me the bite, her shuddering breath and nervous restlessness.
She was my Fated, and she didn’t want it.
I dropped her wrist at once and took two steps away from her, shoving my hands into the pockets of my slacks.
“It doesn’t need to mean anything.” The words were ash on my tongue, but I forced them out anyway, keeping my voice neutral.
There was no reason to leash her to me, to force her into this when she had only offered her vein out of an altruism I could never understand. She was going to France, a brand new career opportunity ahead of her. An entirely new coven and clan, a social network that didn’t include surly friends of her father. She would be free to find a mate of her choosing there, someone she didn’t hate.
Harlowe stared at me like she was trying to see straight through me, like she wanted to strip away every wall and metaphorical piece of armor until I stood before her truly bare. My stomach clenched, but I kept my face impassive.
An oppressive silence stretched between us. Then, she dropped her head and scooped her things off the counter. Without a word, she left the kitchen, heading deeper into the cabin. A moment later, a door closed with awful, quiet precision.
Something too close to regret crowded my throat and threatened to drown me, but I ignored it.
Chapter Ten
Landon
“The pass is reopening around midnight, so we should be up there by mid-morning tomorrow.”
Joshua’s voice cut through the room from where my phone was perched on the low dresser, the speaker crackling a bit with whatever Joshua was doing while discussing their new travel plans. I studiously sorted through the dissertation proposals I hadn’t reviewed before the winter break, reading the words without actually comprehending them. But anything was better than remembering Harlowe’s soft skin and breathy moans while her father tried to talk to me.
Fuck, I was hard again. Thinking about Harlowe. While chatting with her father.
I was going to hell.
“Sounds good,” I said, clearing my throat to cover the sudden desperate rasp in my voice.
“I’m sure you’re desperate for everything to reopen as well,” Joshua said, understanding in his tone now. “We willunderstand if you’re out with a host when we get up there. No need to wait for us to arrive.”
A host.
Just the thought of taking some random human’s vein to my mouth had me wanting to vomit. All I could picture was Harlowe’s soft skin and the mouthwatering taste of her strawberry blood. Saliva surged in my mouth, and my fangs extended between one heartbeat and the next, more than happy to slake the need. Even though my body wasn’t actually in need of blood and wouldn’t be for several more days.
“Of course,” I managed to choke out. And then I steered the conversation away from anything to do with this cabin and this holiday.
He hung up a few minutes later, drawn away by his own chosen mate. Meridith and Joshua weren’t Fated, but their love and commitment ran deeper than most I’d ever seen. None of our friends were Fated, actually. It was incredibly rare, not something every person was destined to discover. There were musings by the more philosophical of our kind—of vampires—that not everyone even had a Fated to discover, that it was something that appeared randomly just like any other trait. Much like how some animals were born with albinism. There perhaps was a reason for it to appear, but no one had taken the time to discover just exactly what those causes might be.
I had a Fated.
My stomach clenched with the thought, just as it had every time it coursed across my mind today, pacing in this tiny bedroom like a caged animal myself. I knew myself. I knew I didn’t have the self control to resist forcing myself on Harlowe if I saw her. Not with my bite in her wrist and the reality that she was my blood mate hanging in the air between us.
I put down the proposal I had been trying to read for the last half hour, finally admitting defeat. There was no way Icould focus on the minutia of my profession, no matter that I found great satisfaction from teaching various aspects of the Middle Ages. This spring I was finally getting to build a course revolving specifically around the Norman Invasion and its long lasting, rippling affects through the rest of the medieval period in England and Europe as a whole.
A soft knock had my head shooting up.
Harlowe stood against the threshold, still in that charcoal gray sweater and flowing, thin dress beneath it. Her hair was messier than this morning, more strands falling around her face. There was a burning intensity in her gaze, in the set of her shoulders, that hadn’t been there this morning. My stomach clenched in dual anticipation and foreboding.
“We need to talk,” she said without preamble, that hardline sass back in her voice.
I gathered the papers and dropped them unceremoniously onto the dresser beside my phone. Shoving my hands in my pockets, I propped a hip against the ledge, forcing my body relaxed.
“All right,” I said.
She hesitated, her teeth biting into the plush skin of her bottom lip. My dick twitched in renewed interest, but I ignored it entirely. She didn’t move from the threshold, her arms wrapped protectively around her stomach.
“You want this to mean nothing?” she asked after a long silence, no inflection at all in her voice. It was a neutral question, as if she was asking if I had noticed the snow finally starting to slow this afternoon before the sun set.