"I think I'll sleep on top of the covers." Her gaze lingered on him like a cat enjoying her dinner. "I expect my dreams will keep me warm enough."
Balancing accounts, memorizing household duties… Thomas should have drowned him in all the forbidden pleasures of a Spanish bordello so she couldn't so effectively destroy his concentration with things he'd never experienced before. Somehow, however, he doubted that would have helped. What affected his body when it came to her was far more than physical, and she seemed to exploit that at every turn. On how many men had she honed the skill?
She tucked her hands under her cheek like an innocent child preparing to take her repose, unfettered by sins. When her eyes immediately began to droop, the siren's mask slipped, the shadows etching out an exhaustion too startling to be false.
Thomas said she could stay up even to the midmorning hours as long as she wasn't in direct sunlight, and it was barely past dawn. Maybe there was a reason she'd used distraction more than physical exertion to get him onto the cross. It managed to drive back his frustrated lust and tangled emotions enough to realize she'd actually been as tired as she'd said.
She turned on her back, giving him a different view of her body in that scrap of lingerie.
"Tell me who Jacob is." Her voice, sleepy, surprised him. "I like bedtime stories."
"Should Arabian Nights come to mind?"
She smiled. "Only if you tell me a bad story."
He chuckled, but Lyssa heard the strain in the tone. His current condition was weighing heavily on his mind. She wanted him thinking, particularly while his connection to her was still limited to one mark. No matter what happened, she didn't mind giving him the one that would let her know where he was, that he was alive. She'd like to keep track of him.
It was another of the many things being alive so long had taught her. A person could make a lasting impression in less than a moment. She cultivated those impressions as if they were physical relationships, visiting with them in her mind when she wanted company, imagining words they might have said intertwined with what they did say during their brief interaction with her.
"Tell me about you, Jacob. I want to see the pictures in my head. Who were your parents?"
"My parents are dead, my lady."
"Will you tell me how? You don't have to, if it's too painful."
"I can refuse you nothing, my lady. When you ask."
She acknowledged the barb, but waited, cognizant of his hesitation.
"It was a lightning strike on the water while we were all at the beach. My brother knew CPR, worked on Dad and talked me through doing it on Mom, because I was eight and didn't know how. It didn't matter, they were both gone within a few minutes."
She studied the darkness, the way it closed around her but still gave her the sense of him, just to the right of her bed. For Christmas one year, Thomas had given her a set of plastic stars that glowed in the dark. He'd put them on her ceiling for her. She watched them glow above her now. "I asked you who they were, and you told me how they died. You don't like to talk about them, then."
"When you're eight, your parents are the center of your universe. It's a shitty age to learn the universe can be turned into a donut with nothing more than a thunderstorm."
"So it was you and your brother. The vampire hunter."
"Gideon."
"He's a story for another night. But start the story for me, so I can look forward to it another time."
"How much time passes before you trust someone, my lady? Before I can sleep next to you, hold you in my arms to keep you safe as you slumber?"
His voice had the rough quality of anger, the edge of panic that overcame a strong man when he realized he was completely helpless.
There was a unique type of alpha who could fight through it, who had the capacity to find the pleasure on the other side of pain. She'd recognized it in him easily, such that the rough edge sent shivers of pleasure through her body.
Lifting a hand, she touched the darkness that held the shape of him as if she were touching him. "That will be up to you, Jacob. But I've never trusted anyone. Not even Thomas. Until the end, when he sacrificed his life for me."
When he drew in a breath, she discovered another thing Thomas hadn't shared, but that didn't surprise her. "That, too, is a story for another night. Besides which, I keep my human servant too busy to laze around in bed with his Mistress during the daylight hours." Though the mental picture was far too pleasing. "Where did the accent come from? The Irish."
"My parents were from Ireland. I was born and raised here, but being around them and my aunt and uncle… well, I picked it up. I guess it was something like knowing two languages. I could switch between them both, and sometimes the accent feels more comfortable to me. It made me feel closer to memories of them. For the first three years after their death, I spoke that way all the time. It also went over well at the Faire, so I guess it comes automatically now, in certain situations."
"I like it, too. The way it comes and goes." Like a lover's fingers gliding up her spine when they weren't expected. "Give me something about Gideon, since I'm already disposed to dislike him."
"In terms offeree of will, you two are matching brick walls." His tone was dry. "But because of him I saw you for the very first time."
When he shifted as much as his bindings allowed, she noticed his cock had dropped to a semierect state. She ran a hand over her hip, idly cupped her breast to play with the nipple, and watched his organ stiffen, lengthen. Heard him stifle a groan.
"When did you see me for the first time?"
She smiled at his whispered curse, but he answered her. "I trained and worked with Gideon into my early twenties. College wasn't for me. Never did take to the idea of having someone else teach me what I could pick up a book and learn for myself, making my own impressions. We were at a bullfight down in Mexico, because he was on the trail of a male vampire who liked blood sports, as many vampires seem to do."
"Mmm."
"You were there. With Thomas and…"
"Rex." She whispered the name, not wanting to call his image into the room. She didn't want Jacob saying his name, as if it would bring harm to him, like the calling of a curse.
"He seemed very into it. Very amused at how you weren't."