Page 3 of Bitten By Mr. Darcy
“Let’s go for a little walk,” he said.
“What?” She gave him a very odd look. “That’s highly irregular. I do not tend to go walking in the night with strange men. That you would ask such a thing—”
He took her by the arm and started walking, pulling her along with him. He had to taste her. He was thirsty already, and the smell of her was so tantalizing that it was driving him out ofhis head. He would slake this mad thirst that had risen in him and then he would charm her to forget all of this.
“What are you doing?” she said, and there was a thread of panic in her voice.
He wanted her so badly he didn’t even get her outside. He pulled the two of them out of the ballroom and into a dark corridor. There, he pressed her body into the wall and ran his nose over her neck, drinking in the sweet, cinnamon scent of her. He might have let out something like a groan.
She was breathing very fast. “Sir, if you please, let me go,” she said in a high-pitched voice.
He gently adjusted her head, tilting it to the side to give him access, and his fangs were just there, of course, right at the ready, and he sank them into her vein, and the taste of her blood filled his mouth, and—
Damnation.
He was in trouble, he knew.
She tasted far too good. He could lose control and glut himself on her if he weren’t careful.
A vampire never needed to drain an entire human body of all of its blood to survive. Little drinks were really all that were necessary to sustain creatures like him. So little that it barely weakened his victims. A vampire could drain and kill a human, of course, but it was rare that this happened, and when it did, it was typically borne out of this, what he was experiencing, blood madness, something that sometimes overtook a vampire when he tasted something delectable.
Must stop,he told himself.If you kill her, you’ll never have the chance to taste this again.
With effort, he detached from her, letting out a long, soft moan.
She was dazed, still breathing hard, her lashes half-lidded, but she wasn’t frightened anymore. The bite tended to have apleasant effect on victims, after all. His fangs injected something into humans which made them feel sleepy and good. “What was that?” she whispered.
He feathered his fingers over her chin. “You are exquisite,” he said. He did something ill-advised, but he was feeling out of sorts. He leaned in and brushed his lips against hers.
It wasn’t always this way, the confusion of romantic desire with the desire for blood, but sometimes, it happened and the human victims seemed like romantic conquests. He knew that Louisa had taken her little human Mr. Hurst that way, letting him marry her and everything.
Of course, such things never ended well.
Humans lived such short lives.
One was faced with the choice of turning them, and then pulling them into this unending life of darkness and difficulty, or of watching them fade away and die.
She gasped. “You just kissed me.”
He sighed, and then he rested his forehead against hers, capturing her gaze with his, their eyes so close that the vision crossed. “Look at me, then. Listen to my voice. Are you with me, Elizabeth? Are you listening?”
“Yes,” she replied, her voice a little odd in the way that the charm affected human voices.
“Good,” he said. “You shall forget this. You shall forget that I spoke to you. You shall forget that we were alone together.”
“Forget the kiss?” she said, her voice still odd, but a bit of disappointment creeping into it.
“Definitely forget the kiss,” he said sternly.
“Oh,” she said, disappointed. “All right, then. I shall forget it all.”
“HOW DID SHEtaste?” came Bingley’s voice in the darkness of the carriage.
The ball was over, and they were going back to the country estate that Bingley was letting. It was called Netherfield. There were only a handful of rooms in the entire place that could be navigated safely without the rays of the sun, so Darcy hadn’t seen much of it, actually, though he could have explored after sundown.
“What is this?” spoke up Caroline Bingley. “You are out there tasting girls, are you,cor meum?”
Darcy wished she would drop that term of endearment. She always rendered it in Latin, and it had been since before the fall of the Roman Empire that he had dallied with her. It meant “heart of mine” and he would wager to say, even when they were lovers, neither of them had thought of the other as their heart.
