Page 79 of Soul Sucker

She stared up at the ceiling. Somehow his belief that she’d be okay with him lying on her bed irritated her. “It’s an old favorite dream of mine. I get trapped in an elevator and some handsome dude insists I mate with him.”

He sat up. “You had a nightmare about that?”

“Just kidding. The nightmare is the reason why I got scared of elevators and small places in the first place.”

“So that phobia was caused by a dream?”

No,” she sighed. “Keep up, can’t you? The experience triggered the nightmare, and the nightmare is triggered by new experiences, get it?”

“I think so.” He rearranged the pillows behind his head as if he was settling in for the night. “So what happened originally?”

She looked sideways at him. “Why do you want to know?”

“Because if you’re going to wake me up, I’d like to understand when I need to worry, and when you’re just processing an old fear.”

“You don’t need to worry about me,” she said more sharply than she had intended. “I’m quite capable of looking after myself.”

He didn’t say anything, just looked at her until she leaned back against the pillows. She suddenly realized she was naked under the covers and that all her clothing lay in an untidy heap on the bathroom floor. In movies, the women always managed to gracefully drape a sheet around them before they made their dramatic exit. She’d have to get the sheet out from under Vadim and then untuck it from the sides of the bed and she didn’t see that working at all.

“Okay, when I was about five, just before I got sent off to school, I was at home with my siblings playing hide and seek. One of our favorite places to hide was in a big Chinese chest on the upper hall landing. We were told not to get in there because there was no safety catch, but none of us took any notice. So, I was looking for a place to hide and decided to go in there for the first time. The thing was, when I put the lid down, I thought one of my other cousins had already got in there, so I turned toward them and—there was no one there.”

Vadim edged closer and put his arm around her shoulders. “What happened then?”

“I looked down and there was something on my leg. At first I thought it was a spider but it was too big.” She swallowed. “It was also creeping up from my ankle to my knee and whatever it was had long black nails and hairy skin.”

“Troll?” Vadim stroked her skin with his thumb.

Ella nodded. “At that point, I had no idea what it was, just that I had to get away from it. I tried to stand up and push the lid off the chest but it was too heavy for me, and I started to scream.”

“Did it bite you?”

“Just as I felt its teeth graze my skin, my oldest brother appeared, opened the box and picked me out of it. I was screeching like a lunatic. He threatened to put me back in there if I didn’t shut up, so I stopped. No one believed what I said. They just put it down to an overactive imagination.” She managed a shaky laugh. “I didn’t know until years later that Otherworld creatures consider young empaths a special delicacy.”

“And you’ve hated small spaces ever since.”

“Yeah. Lame, eh?”

“Not at all.” He hesitated. “One of the reasons I like things to be in order is because my early years were lived in such chaos.”

“Makes sense,” she murmured, guiltily aware of the mess she’d made in his bathroom. “Did Alexei come back?”

“Not yet. I think he’s out with some Fae kin. He could be hours. They have an amazing tolerance for alcohol and sex.”

“Lucky them.” She allowed her head to remain on Vadim’s shoulder. “Did you get any sleep at all?”

“A little.” He glanced at the clock on the bedside table. “It’s about two in the morning now.”

She considered how safe she felt with him next to her. It freaked her out.

“Do you want me to go?” he asked softly.

“It’s your bed.”

“Then I’ll stay.” He rolled onto his side and got up. “I’ll just go to the bathroom, okay?”

While he was gone, she pulled down the covers so that he could get in beside her. For the first time in her life she felt like one of those women who needed a man sleeping next to her. Was that what mating had done to her? Made her dependent?

“What the hell did you do to my bathroom?”

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