Page 51 of The Reveal
The vampire in the driver’s seat bares his teeth at me so I can see his fangs. Long and sharp. The smoke dances all around us, thick like fog on this part of the hill or he wouldn’t dare open a window in the first place.
I don’t lower my weapon. His companion, a woman, sneers.
“He wants to see you,” the first vampire says, and he makes it sound like an insult. “Tonight. Sundown. If I were you, I wouldn’t be late.”
12.
That night, I storm down to the school at sunset, not sure exactly what I think I’m going to prove. What I know—or feel deeply, anyway—is that I have to make it clear to him that I’m not going to be bullied.
Not by douchey minions who try to run me off the road.
Certainly not without comment.
Ariel is finishing up that class of his again—or maybe it’s vampire military training, what do I know—but he makes me wait. He inclines his head and indicates that I should sit down on those benches again, so I do.
Entirely too aware that I’m the only person in the room with a pulse.
I figure everyone else is equally aware. This, by the way, only makes my heart beat faster. Louder.
Like a fucking kettledrum.
“You really have a way with invitations, don’t you,” I throw at him when he finally makes his way over to me, once the grand room is cleared again. It’s not that I’m not appropriately overawed by him, because I am. But since he could kill me at any moment and likely will, why go out in a grovel? I glare at him instead. “First you make it clear you can find me in my home. Then you have your goon squad come for me on the road.”
“I’m sorry I can’t live up to your family’s high standard of gentility,” he replies in that offhandedly scathing way of his. I don’t miss that this is a roundabout reference to my brother, who hangs over this interaction and this school and me like a dense fog. One of his perfect browsrises. “But to be clear, I’ll expect you here every night at sundown, Winter. No need for invitations.”
He does not say,Consider this an order.But I hear it all the same.
“And if I decline?” I ask, and I have to push the words out. As if they know better than to show themselves.
But Ariel only laughs.
And I’d love nothing more than to say that I see the error of my ways and keep my hands to myself in the presence of a creature so overwhelming and dangerous, who might not beactively compellingme but certainly isn’t trying all that hard to keep me at arm’s length, either. A creature who knows where my brother is when I don’t.
But I fail at this. Spectacularly and pretty much immediately.
Because when he finishes laughing, Ariel simply kneels down before me where I sit on the bench, puts his hard hands on my thighs, and bends his head between my legs.
Then bites me, through my clothes—though not through my skin.
I come so hard I think I might have passed out, or at least toppled over, if he wasn’t holding me still.
By the time I manage to find my way back into my own body again, he’s moved on, peeling off the long-sleeve T-shirt I’m wearing and the cargo pants too. And while I’m still panting and sobbing from that first wild explosion of heat, he settles down between my legs once again. This time there’s no barrier between his mouth and all that soft heat that was making my pussy ache, and he licks his way in all over again.
Somewhere in the middle of it all, as he works that stern, cruel, gloriously demanding mouth of his over my clit and sucks just a little too hard—so the sensation sears through me, pleasure and near-pain and too much of both—I open my eyes.
I look down the length of my own body, and I can see the dirty, erotic sight of him crouched over me, those muscled shoulders of his working as he moves my body where he wants it. His grip on my ass is sure, holding me open and digging in just enough to make the sensation that much more intense.
I can see the top of his head and the long line of his perfectly shaped back, with hints of that phoenix covering it. I shudder, hard, because I forgot about the phoenix on my own body. The tattoo I really don’t want him to know I have and yet forgot to hide when he stripped off my clothes.
In fact, I actuallyhelped himget me naked.
Ariel looks up, and once again it’s like he knows what I’m thinking, because his smile comes again, slow. Something like wicked. Then he reaches up a hand and places it directly over my tattoo like a scalding-hot brand.
As if he is linking us without saying a word.
I feel that like another bite, and shudder into it.
He bends himself back to his task, and before I tip my head back and surrender to the storm of it all, the sensation, and the mad fire, I look in the mirror.
