Page 4 of Snowed in with the Vampire Prince

Pierce

It took a full pint of my blood to save the young man’s life. Thankfully, he’d been sensible, even only half conscious, and he hadn’t fought me. If he had, he might have died. Because he was that badly hurt.

I’d found him about a quarter of a mile away, on the ground, clutching his side, the snow around him so dark with blood it seemed almost black. When his hand fell away, it revealed a single bite on his ribcage. He’d been barely conscious, and he’d passed out the moment I picked him up. Moving at top speed, I had carried him in from the cold and placed him in front of my fireplace, hoping that the heat of the flames would warm his freezing body. Then, when he didn’t wake up, I bared my fangs and bit my wrist, hardly even noticing the pain. I pressed my fresh wound to his mouth, willing him to drink.

He did.

At last, his eyes snapped open. They were a lovely shade of warm golden brown, like tiger’s eye. His gaze locked with mine as he drank my blood.

He let out a little moan of pleasure, drinking more of me.

Arousal tore through my body as I saw how much this handsome stranger liked the taste of my blood. From the greedy, frenzied way that he sucked at my wrist, I could tell that he just couldn’t get enough. And I wanted, suddenly and without warning, to give him as much of me as he could handle.

Scowling at myself for the ridiculous thoughts this stranger was evoking in me, I pulled my wrist back abruptly. “That’s plenty.”

He stared at me for a long moment, wiping the blood from his mouth with the back of his hand. “You’re a vampire.”

The matter-of-fact way he said it was strange. He didn’t sound afraid. Nor was he filled with giddy, simpering glee at the mere sight of me, the way one of the vampire groupies who loved being fed upon would’ve been. Instead, he said it like he might’ve been casually commenting on the weather. So maybe he wasn’t as human as he looked.

“Yes,” I told him, trying to remind myself that I was the one who had brought him here and I had no right to feel upset with him for ruining my death day. “Let me guess. You’re a warlock?”

“A what?” he asked, his eyebrows shooting up in surprise at my question. Then he grimaced. “No, definitely not.”

“So you’re an Old Soul, then,” I guessed, frowning at him. Old Souls are perfectly human, with one very unusual twist. When they die, they’re reborn into a new body, remembering everything from their former lives. They’ve lived many, many lives, and they remember every single one with perfect clarity. They’re one of the great mysteries of the supernatural world—no one knows why they keep coming back, only that they do.

“I’m twenty-four.” His voice was softer than I would have expected, given the circumstances, but he gave me a look that communicated the fact that he had no idea what in the hell I was talking about. Then he seemed to disregard all of that entirely. He pushed himself onto an elbow. A few drops of my blood he’d missed still coated his lips. He gave me a lopsided grin, and I saw that he was drunk on me. In sufficient quantities, vampire blood is intoxicating to mortals, rather like alcohol, but without the hangover in the morning. “Huh. I’ve never understood the big deal everyone makes about vampires, but I get it now. You’re sexy as hell.”

Yes, he was no doubt very drunk on my blood. And horny, judging by the gleam in his eye, the curve of his smile, and the way he kept his body open to me like he was silently begging me to climb on top of him and…

“You need to sleep now,” I told him with a glower, forcing my face back into its human visage. And like that, presto-chango, the fangs were gone. I added, “You’ve been through an ordeal.”

“Are you going to feed on me?” he asked, sounding more curious about the prospect than afraid. “Are you a Dracula vampire, or are you more of a Twilight vampire?”

I assumed he was referring to movies. Or maybe books. Or maybe both.

“Neither. I live in the real world, where when a vampire tells you it’s your bedtime, you go the fuck to sleep.”

“Don’t be a jerk,” he replied stonily, still seeming totally unphased by the fact that I was a vampire. Though, some of the drunkenness seemed to vanish from him, because a moment later, he added, “Wait. You saved my life.” He paused, swallowing hard and meeting my eyes. “Didn’t you?”

“You were hurt pretty badly,” I told him, making a conscious effort to keep my voice as gentle as possible. There was no need to upset him by telling him how close he’d come to dying. “That’s why you need to sleep?—”

He cut me off, pulling himself further into a sitting position. “I don’t want to sleep. I feel…better. I think.”

He stripped his black winter coat off, revealing a long-sleeved sage-colored shirt beneath it. He stripped that off, too, revealing his bare torso. It was covered in blood, but the wound he’d sustained was now completely healed.

I blinked, surprised at how much I enjoyed looking at him. He wasn’t super-muscular or anything. But his body was lean and very, very masculine, with a seductive dusting of dark blond hair fanning out across his chest and both of his nipples were hard and begging to be played with. And his scent…

It was abruptly maddening. It shouldn’t have been, but it was. You would think that all I would be able to smell would be blood, given that he was covered in it. But the way this strange human smelled wasn’t like that at all. Instead, his scent brought back the memory of freshly laundered sheets at the orphanage where I was raised. Clean cotton dried in the sun. A simple but pure memory; one of the few I had that reminded me that I was cared for and safe. Oddly, his scent evoked a strange sort of peace in my emotions, which was entirely at odds with the extremely unhelpful bodily reaction I was having.

Plenty of humans smell good, I reminded myself harshly. There’s nothing special about this one.

I raised my eyes to his and found him grinning at me again like he’d followed my gaze and somehow guessed what I was thinking. His face was rugged and angular, with a dusting of stubble across his jaw, but there was something boyishly innocent there as well. His hair was cut short and only a few shades lighter than his eyes, a dark gold color halfway between blond and brown. His skin was lightly tanned, even though it wasn’t even technically spring yet. The unselfconscious way he smiled at me was decidedly masculine and almost pornographically inviting.

Then he seemed to remember what he was supposed to be doing because he tore his gaze away from mine and stared down at his chest, his dark eyes searching for the wound he’d sustained and finding nothing. His eyebrows drew together in confusion, but it didn’t last long. He lifted his gaze back to me. When he spoke next, he sounded puzzled. “There’s no wound at all. I thought I was going to die.”

“Well, you aren’t,” I told him stiffly, doing my level best—and failing miserably—to not look at him.

“Thank you,” he said quietly, holding my gaze.

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