Total pages in book: 96
Estimated words: 93727 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 469(@200wpm)___ 375(@250wpm)___ 312(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 93727 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 469(@200wpm)___ 375(@250wpm)___ 312(@300wpm)
“I’ve done this before,” I confirmed against her lips.
Catching her hands in mine, I tugged them up above her head and braced myself on my elbows. Then, I finally began to move.
It was nearly impossible to keep Rosemary quiet, but I did my best. I caught every sound in my mouth as I memorized what made her gasp or moan or curse. While I held her hands captive, she used the rest of her body to drive me out of my mind. Her hips rolled in counterpoint, her knees bent and fell wide, her back arched, and her legs wrapped around my back, holding me to her like a vice.
When it all felt like too much, my skin so sensitive it felt like I might go out of my mind, I found myself suddenly pressing my mouth against the pulse point on her neck.
Rosemary tipped her head back further, urging me on as she whimpered.
I’m not sure what I expected to happen. I’d thought about it a lot during my life—the moment when I would complete the bond with the other half of my soul—but nothing had prepared me for when it actually happened. As the first taste of her blood hit the back of my throat, I came so hard that the world around me went silent.
It was everything.
Somehow, I had the presence of mind to pull away before I hurt her, and when sound began to make sense again, I realized that Rosemary was making these little gasping noises as she pulled at the hold I had on her hands.
“What?” I asked frantically, letting go of her. “Baby, what?”
“You have to do it,” she said, turning her head to savagely bite my arm. When she pulled away, little lines indented where her teeth had been, but the skin was intact. “I can’t do it. You have to do it.”
“Shhh,” I murmured, understanding the problem. Lifting my hand to my mouth, I quickly bit down to break the skin and offered it to her.
As she pulled the fleshy part of my thumb into her mouth and took a long pull, her body tightened around my cock. The two sensations were so powerful that another orgasm rolled over me, and by the time her mouth grew slack and her head dropped back to the bed, we were both shaking with exhaustion and maybe a little bit of shock.
Chapter 7
Rosemary
Carefully lifting the heavy arm off my waist, I scooted off the side of the bed. The floor was freezing against the soles of my feet, and if I could feel the discomfort of it, that meant my body temperature must be somewhere close to normal.
The heat had dissipated.
I’d known that it could happen, and I also knew that it wouldn’t last long.
I tiptoed across the floor and grabbed some clothes out of my dresser, inwardly cursing at every sound. Daniel never stirred, and I barely breathed until I was out of my room and making my way down the hallway in my socks.
It wasn’t as if I was sneaking away, not really. I just needed a little time to myself. After the upheaval of the day before, culminating with the completion of the mating bond, I needed a breather. I needed a moment when everyone wasn’t looking at me.
Their looks had run the gamut the day before. The eyes on me had ranged from shock to love to sympathy to possession. And while I didn’t normally pay attention to the opinions of other people, it was hard to ignore those opinions when they matched your own.
Confirmation bias or whatever.
Aunt Halle was confused? Felt bad for me? Was pissed for me? Yeah, I knew exactly how she felt.
The fact that Daniel had taken off without even looking back had been like getting a bucket of cold water thrown in my face.
Mates weren’t supposed to do that. Mates weren’t supposed to leave each other’s sides. In all honesty, he shouldn’t have been able to leave me. It should’ve been so painful for him that he rethought his actions. The knowledge that I would be in pain should’ve had his instincts screaming to go back and fix it.
But he’d still left.
I knew I sounded like some whiny codependent teenager. I knew that. But if a Vampire could leave their mate like that, without a single glance backward, then everything that had ever felt true and real and constant in my life seemed suspect. Uncle Dalton and Aunt Halle’s bond was the center of their family. It was the North Star, and by necessity, it had become mine after my mom died.
Knowing that they would never leave, and I would always have them because of that mating bond? Well, it had given the whole thing an almost mythical level of importance in my head, and I hadn’t even realized it.