Mouse catches my eye. More blood paints her cheeks and my fangs sharpen.
“Sorry,” the vampire says, “but maybe we can—”
“No,” I say again and finally look at them.
I don’t recognize their faces. Damien has always been more interested in knowing everyone’s name. Where they came from, what their story is. Damien is devious like that. He knows he can use even the lower-level vampire to his advantage someday. But I’m not mining coal here.
I just want the gold.
That’s why I’ve focused more of my attention on making the right friends in the right houses.
“Bran,” Jimmy says as she sidles up next to me and hooks her arm through mine. “The boys wanted to share something they overheard. Perhaps hear them out?”
I watch Mouse for another second as she orders a whiskey neat, tilting her head so she can hear the bartender over the rise of the music.
Fuck, if everything she does makes me this hard, we’re going to spend the rest of our lives in our bed.
Our bed.
The thought catches me off guard.
Our bed?
It’s decidedly my bed. I bought it.
But I want her in it. Always. It will become her bed too.
It’s the little things like this that I am unprepared for, the minute details of loving something that you don’t want to break.
I’ll buy her a dozen beds. I’ll fuck her and love her in all of them.
But first I need to torture her.
“Bran?” Jimmy says.
I finally meet her eyes. She’s annoyed with me. Maybe she has a right to be. I just manipulated my brother into giving me Co-Head of House and I’m already bored with its duties.
“Listen,” she says, and pinches my arm with a nasty little grit to her teeth. “Please.”
I sigh. “What is it?”
The vampire on the far-left bumbles over his words. “I don’t know if you know this or not or maybe you do but—”
“If I knew it, then why would you be here telling me?”
“Right. Right. Of course.”
“Spit it out. Contrary to what you may think, I have better things to do.”
Like fuck my mouse senseless.
Across the ballroom, Mouse gets her drink—in record time too, now that she’s princess of the house—and she takes a long pull from it, breasts swelling at the lacy collar of her dress.
I press the remote again and she chokes on the drink, clamping her hand over her mouth to keep from spitting it out.
She glares at me across the room and a sick little flare of pleasure lights in my chest.
It’s a reminder that I control her pleasure. Her pussy belongs to me.