Page 110 of Gilded Wicked Mirrors
A cocky grin climbed onto Emrys’s face. “I thought you’d never ask.”
She didn’t reward his arrogance with a response. Her traitorous heart marched to the beat of a war drum, climbing and racing in her chest. She noted it but refused to give in to her physical reactions.
He took off his shirt and exposed a chest of chiseled muscles. “That’s a glamour, right? You’re actually hideous.”
“Tremendously so.” He placed his hands in his pockets and dared her with his eyes. “Why don’t you grab a mirror and see? It is the only way to see through a vampire’s glamour.”
She’d learned about vampire glamour in a picture book as a child. They were supposed to be stunning and draw humans in as prey. Just to wipe Emrys’s arrogance away, she did just that and examined him through a mirror. The only difference was the scars etched across his face. But his abs, his perfect body, remained. Annoyingly, the scars made him more endearing and striking than his glamoured perfection.
But Quinn didn’t understand. Her whole body healed when she was marked down to the calluses on her toes. “Why are they still there?” she asked. “Vampire blood heals. Starlight heals.”
He averted his eyes as she placed the mirror on the table. “Every mirror has a cost.”
He did not elaborate, and she did not press him.
“I think they make you beautiful.” Quinn walked over to his shirtless chest, placed her stethoscope on a peck, and listened. The rate was very, very leisurely—just like him.
“What?” he asked, based on her reaction.
“It’s so slow.”
“Hmmm. And it's racing.” Their eyes met, their breathing a bit ragged.
Quinn looked down and fiddled with her stethoscope and asked. “So, the normal heartbeat is even slower?”
“Yes,” he whispered into her hair.
“But this is . . .” She counted the beats per minute. “This is twenty-five bpm. If this is fast, what is normal? A human’s resting heart rate was between sixty and one hundred beats. “Are you even alive?”
He shrugged. “Hmmm, now that is the question, isn’t it?”
Quinn ignored his mocking comment and continued the examination. She checked his muscles and reflexes. The latter, which she couldn’t even see because they were so fast. All the while, she tried to ignore the fortissimo pounding in her chest and the wild carrion birds making havoc in her stomach. She found that keeping her eyes averted helped—a little.
Her hands studied his chest, and her toes curled because she knew it gave him permission to touch her there, too. But she needed to feel the muscles and see if they were different than human flesh. It would have been easier to study him if she could cut him open and see his muscles and organs, but she doubted he would allow that.
“Do you think becoming a vampire makes you evil?” Her voice shook. But it was what all of this was about—the examination. She needed to know what she was going to become. Would she be a monster?
He rubbed his fingers together as he thought. “I don’t know. Possibly.”
“I don’t want to—” Her voice cracked like a rock hitting a windshield.
Emrys leaned forward and cupped her face. “I know.”
“I don’t want you to kiss me,” she lied.
“I know.” He dropped his hands, making it clear that he had no plans of kissing her. The absence of his fingers felt like torment. “I do believe you’re the one fondling my abs. So, at the very least, you want me to touch you.”
Glancing down at her fingers, which were indeed fondling his chest, she removed them as if burned. “I—”
“I wasn’t complaining.” His eyes sparkled with mischief.After a beat, as if trying to settle her embarrassment, he asked, “What’s my diagnosis, doctor?”
“Definitely not human,” she said through a tense smile.
His answering grin was leisurely and toxic. It was the type of smile that would make her forget her aversion to kissing him, the type of smile that made her knees weak.
A distraction—she needed one badly. So she blurted the first thing that came to mind, “Can vampires turn into creatures?”
“No,” he said. “It’s just another persuasive illusion like the fog and blood rain at the Royalle Ballet.”
