I glanced down and saw the debris that had been stuck to our bodies washing away down the drain. I had scrapes and cuts all over, and they stung when the water touched them. Even with a vampire to whisk me away from the explosion, I didn’t avoid all of the blast.
Then I noticed a slightly pink tinge to the water. There was a small gash on my arm that was bleeding. Ethan’s body went frighteningly still.
“Fuck, Tegan,” he whispered, his breathing harsh.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t realise I was bleeding,” I said, moving to leave, but he stopped me.
“Don’t go. Stay and drink from me. You are hurt.”
“Remember we said we weren’t going to do that again?” I tried to remind him, even though my mouth was already watering. While my mind was determined to quit, my body hadn’t forgotten the addictive pleasure of his blood.
Ethan whipped around shockingly fast and then his lips were on the wound on my arm, his tongue licking away the last remnants of my blood. I moaned from the feel of it.
“I know what we agreed, but we can also agree that tonight has not been an ordinary night? I need to be with you as deeply as I possibly can. I need to feel you drink from me, to heal you, to be in control of this one little thing.”
“You’re in control, Ethan,” I murmured as I ran my hands through his hair. “Don’t let Theodore undermine you. That’s what he wants.”
Ethan’s face turned angry. “He blew up my club! Of course I’m not in control.”
My gut instinct was to get away from him when he was like this, but I didn’t do that. Instead, I stayed and kept touching him.
“A club is a club. You can always open another one. It’s inconsequential. Theodore is obviously running out of ideas, and resorting to using bombs when he has so much magic is the act of a desperate man. Surely, you can see that, right?”
The anger in Ethan’s features dissolved. “Yes, I see that.” His strong hands slid along my neck. “Lumina mea, you are wise beyond your years.”
“No, I’m not. It’s just easier for me to see clearly because I’m not letting anger cloud my vision.”
Ethan penned me in with his arms, pressing into me until my back was flat against the tiles. Drops of water trickled down his perfect torso, distracting me from the conversation.
His stare was intense as he looked at me. “Your friends could have died tonight if I had chosen incorrectly. Theodore has taken Rebecca. You should be just as angry as I am.”
“Yeah, maybe I should, but getting angry isn’t going to help. It’s not going to help me think clearly enough to get Rebecca back.”
I trailed a finger down his wet abs, lingering just above his pubic bone, a question springing to mind. “How could you not tell which heartbeats were human and which were vampires?”
Frustration marked his features. “Theodore had spelled them silent. There might as well have been ten dummies presented to me, for I could not hear or scent a thing.”
“Oh. Well, I’m glad you guessed right. And I’m glad Lucas jumped in front of the bullet meant for Amanda.”
“He owed her that,” Ethan whispered, his eyes now focused on my chest and my rapidly hardening nipples. Even amidst chaos and tragedy, he still managed to turn me on.
“Yeah, he did,” I whispered back as he picked me up and pulled my legs around his waist. He reached behind him to turn off the shower before swiftly sliding his cock inside me. I shuddered at the exquisite invasion. He carried me to the bedroom, our bodies wet, him still seated deep inside me. When he lowered me onto the bed, he began to thrust his hips, moving in and out, torturously slow.
Then he rose to his knees and used his thumbnail to cut a line down his wrist. I was too lost in the sex to tell him no, and when he held it over my lips and a single drop trickled out, I couldn’t help but lick it up with my tongue. Even that one drop filled my body with a maddening sense of pleasure. I felt my scrapes and cuts healing already.
I licked the blood away from his skin, not allowing myself any more than that, and then pulled him down for a kiss.
When he came inside of me, he whispered endless declarations of love, and I fell asleep wrapped in his arms. I woke up in the middle of the night, which was something I didn’t normally do. My stomach grumbled loudly. I was absolutely starving.
Sneaking downstairs, I prepared a grilled cheese sandwich, devouring it almost as soon as it came off the pan and burning my tongue in the process. Rummaging through Ethan’s cupboard, I found an array of fancy condiments that I presumed belonged to Delilah. I began experimenting, making grilled cheese with truffle oil, grilled cheese with cured bacon, grilled cheese with balsamic vinegar, grilled cheese with pesto, eating them all ravenously. I’d never been hungrier in my life, but I put it down to almost dying.