Page 110 of My Big Fat Vampire Wedding

“We could wait for you,” Victor said, gesturing around the room with its minimalistic staged furniture as if to say, “There’s nothing to steal here.”

“Well, maybe if I could just meet him downstairs,” the estate agent said, sounding conflicted to even leave them alone for a few minutes.

“We’re OK here. Gives us more time to argue over whose books get to be displayed on the shelves in the living room,” Victor said, all charm.

“OK. I will have him meet me here,” she said. She reached for her phone to shoot off a quick text. “I’m not thinking straight. My in-laws are coming to town,” she added with a grimace.

“We know a thing or two about that, what with all the wedding planning,” Victor said, draping his arm around Pandora’s hips and hauling her against his side.

She didn’t even pretend not to melt into him. She even let her hand slip up his stomach to rest on his chest.

The agent’s eyes softened before she hurried to the door. “I will be quick.”

They both heard the flat door close, but neither of them moved for a long moment. It was Victor who stepped away first, making Pandora feel like her heart was being pulled away with him.

“Obviously,” she said, reaching into her bag for a book. “My books go on the eye-level shelves.” She stuck the book there, front cover out. “It’s because of their superior cover design.”

“I can’t argue with … Is that the one we were reading in Morocco?” he asked, lines creasing between his brows.

“I … uh … yeah.”

“You haven’t finished it yet?” he asked, walking over to pluck it off the shelf, opening to the bookmarked page where they’d left off.

She couldn’t exactly tell him that she hadn’t been able to bring herself to read any further without sharing it with him, but that she also seemed to be carrying it around with her like some sort of security blanket.

“Not yet,” she told him. “Things have been busy.”

“They’re not busy now,” Victor said, walking over to the couch, gaze scanning the pages from where they’d left off.

There was no way he hadn’t seen that it was the beginning of a detailed sex scene.

And he still wanted to read it. Aloud. To her.

She never crossed a room so quickly in her life.

Her belly was flip-flopping even as her chest felt like a thousand butterflies had started swooping as she lowered herself down on the couch beside him.

It was a small couch, so when she kicked off her shoes and pulled her knees up, she’d shifted close enough that they were touching from shoulder to thigh.

Feeling her, Victor sucked in a breath so deep his chest shook before he slipped a finger behind a page in the book, then started reading.

To be fair, while it was a spicy book, it was a bodice-ripper from the heyday of the eighties. Which meant that while it wasn’t closed-door, it didn’t have the explicitness that was typical of more modern love stories.

Still, Pandora felt herself pressing her thighs tightly together to ease the ache building between them as Victor read those pages, talked about desire and forbiddentouches, of sighs that became moans, of shivers that turned into writhing and ecstasy.

If Pandora needed to breathe, she was pretty sure she’d practically be panting right then.

She was so distracted by her own desire that she barely noticed when Victor stopped reading.

His head turned, eyelids heavy, to look at her.

“You liked that scene, hmm?” he asked. Was it just her, or did his voice sound deeper, thicker than it had a moment before?

Pandora couldn’t even try to come up with any sort of intelligible response to that. Nope. All that came out of her was this low whimpering sound.

Victor’s eyes blazed in response as the book fell to his other side before his hands were grabbing for her hips, pulling until she had no choice but lift up, turn, and move to straddle him.

He didn’t release her, though, until he dragged her hips down, until her need was pressing down on his lap, meeting his own straining desire.