The bed was king-sized, with a thick mattress and a blood-red canopy that matched both the duvet covering the bed and the curtains covering the window. When Frederick laid me down on the mattress, as carefully as he might handle a porcelain doll, I realized the red duvet cover was made of velvet.
This part is a bit cliché, I thought, running my fingers over the impossibly soft material. Right from Interview with the Vampire. But my body was alight with anticipation and nerves, and the tender, heated way he was looking at me as he stood at the foot of the bed made it almost impossible to think clearly.
Constructive feedback on his bedroom stylings could wait.
I reached up for him, excited for the next part to begin.
The sight of my outstretched arms, however, seemed to cause the raw desire that had propelled him to bring me into his bedroom to grind to a screeching halt. He was no longer staring at me like he wanted to fuck me into the middle of next week. His entire demeanor changed, his dark eyes drifting to the wooden floorboards, the fingers of his right hand drumming a nervous staccato beat against his thigh.
I propped myself up on my elbows, concerned. “Frederick?”
“Perhaps . . .” he began, sounding pained. He sat beside me on a loud exhalation of breath, bending forward until his elbows were on his knees. He buried his face in his hands. “Perhaps we should not do this.”
My heart stuttered as I tried to reconcile what he was saying now with what had just happened moments before. I pushed up on the bed until I was sitting beside him and then, hesitantly, I slid my hand up and across his broad chest, flattening my palm over the place where his heart once beat.
Every time I’d touched him in the past it had elicited an immediate, kinetic response from him. This time, he held himself almost preternaturally still.
It was like touching a statue.
“Do you . . . do you not want to do this?”
His breath hitched. He shifted closer to me on the bed and then, hesitantly, he wrapped an arm around me by way of wordless response.
“That is not what I said.” His voice was raw gravel, and he shifted even closer, the taut muscles of his arm flexing against my lower back. “I do want to do this. You have no idea how badly I want to do this. I simply said perhaps we shouldn’t.”
We were sitting so close it would have been nothing at all to turn my head and press my lips to his cheek. With difficulty, I stayed put.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“I didn’t plan to drag you into a romantic entanglement with . . . someone like me.”
“No one is dragging me into anything.”
“But—”
“I want to have a romantic entanglement with you.”
The look on his face when he met my eyes was heartbreaking. “You couldn’t possibly.”
“Why not?”
“For one thing, you are human.” He shook his head. “For another, I am not.”
This, of course, was what had held me back until now. But none of it mattered. Frederick was kind and compassionate. He bought out an entire cookware section when I said I needed a saucepan, and said insightful, kind things about my art even though he didn’t understand it.
He knew me, with an intuitive kind of sensitivity that took my breath away.
And, yes, okay, he was a vampire. That did present some legitimate challenges. But that didn’t change how good he was—or the fact that I wanted him more than I’d ever wanted anyone in my life.
“I don’t care,” I said flatly. I gently took his hand and laced our fingers together.
“You should care,” he murmured. But he didn’t drop my hand. He was holding me so closely he could probably feel the rapid beating of my heart against his own rib cage. “You don’t want the kind of half life I live, Cassie. You cannot possibly want to be what I am. For us to be together, really together—the changes you would have to undergo . . .”
I raised our joined hands until my lips met the cool, smooth solidity of his wrist, letting my mouth linger there. His lips parted, and oh, they had been so soft, pressed against my own lips. Even when his kisses had grown desperate. I wanted to taste them again, wanted to tease them apart with my tongue.
“I haven’t thought that far ahead yet,” I admitted. “All I know is that right now, I want to be as close to you as I can.” At some point, perhaps I’d want to imagine what a long-term future with Frederick would require of me.
But not just yet.
We hadn’t even been on an official date yet.
Giving in to temptation, I pressed a chaste, closed-mouth kiss to his collarbone, reveling in the feel of marble-like skin against my lips.
“Cassie,” he murmured, his voice thick.
Moving a little, I touched my lips to the underside of his jaw, and then kissed my way down his neck to a spot where, many years ago, there had been a pulse. To the place I suspected another vampire once had bitten him, centuries before I was born.
“Frederick,” I murmured. I opened my mouth, letting my tongue dart out to taste him. His skin was salt and musk, desire and cool night air.
He whimpered.
“If you want to do this and I want to do this, why shouldn’t we?” I asked, though he wasn’t protesting anymore. I nuzzled at the sensitive spot where his neck met his shoulder, reveling in his sharp intake of breath, in the way his arm tightened around me, the way his fingertips dug into my side.
“Cassie.” His tone was half warning, half promise. On a shuddering breath his free hand came up to cup my cheek.
I sighed and leaned into his touch. Every nerve in my body was alight, sparking with anticipation. He had large, beautiful hands. Dexterous and strong. The thought of what they could do to me if he’d only let go . . .
It was a delicious torture.
“Please,” I whispered.
With that single word it was like a switch flipped inside of him. I could see it in his eyes as the remnants of his resolve cracked and crumbled away, and then all at once his lips were on mine again, his kisses as eager and as needful as they’d been at Sam’s party. He moved quickly, wordlessly, one hand at the small of my back and the other on my shoulder, gently guiding me backwards until I lay prone on the mattress once more.
“Oh, Cassie,” he breathed against my lips. He loomed over me, bracing his weight on his elbows, his forearms on either side of my head. He leaned in, pressing a kiss to my temple. Then he chuckled quietly, the sound so happy and full of relief it broke my heart. “I will never be able to deny you anything you want.”
When I’d imagined this happening, alone in my bedroom, I’d imagined Frederick as a quiet and tentative lover, as polite and refined with sex as he was in everyday life. But there was nothing quiet or tentative about him now. Now that I was lying beneath him atop his lush four-poster bed, his passion was a dam bursting in flood, as though until this moment he’d been holding himself back only with extreme effort. His relentless kisses left me breathless and reeling—and I welcomed it, my arms going around him as he kissed me, trying to pull him even closer.