Page 24 of Bewitched By a Vampire

Made him consider dangerous things.

Like opening this door and telling her to run.

Bastian might not kill him when he discovered what he had done.

Night opened his eyes and stared at her door, his senses still locked on her. He was surprised she hadn’t tried to leave sooner. He frowned. Maybe she had. Bastian had told him to keep an eye on her after all. He sighed. What was he going to do? He wasn’t sure of the answer to that question.

This wasn’t like him.

Lilian wasn’t his business and neither was what his brother did with her.

But he couldn’t stand by and let it all happen.

He just couldn’t.

He pressed his emerging claws into the door and gritted his teeth, wrenched in two and feeling as if he was going to be pulled apart. His loyalty was to his family—to his brothers—and he had never interfered with Bastian’s life before now. It wasn’t his place, and Bastian wouldn’t take it well. He had to remember those things.

If he helped her, even if he made it appear she had escaped on her own, Bastian would hold him responsible.

Might even shun him, severing ties with him as punishment for his disobedience. Bastian was too much like their father. Their father had been cold and hard, brutal when it came to family matters and acts of betrayal.

He had killed his own brother and all he had done was choose to turn a human he loved.

Night shoved away from the door. He returned to his room before he did something he would regret and ended up pacing it, thinking things over and trying to calm his mind and centre himself. Impossible. Lilian was a constant in his mind. Her every look was seared on his memory to torment him, and her every word was like a sword in his heart or a balm for his soul.

He huffed and pivoted, wearing a trench in the wooden floor, unable to rest as he thought about her. What was it about the little female that had him twisted in knots and unsure what to do?

He saw a flash of her. Long dark hair tumbling around her shoulders, feeling like silk in his grip. Caramel-coloured eyes shining with fire. Tempting lips beckoning him for a kiss, destroying his strength and tearing down his defences. She was beautiful.

And he couldn’t blame his attraction to her, the desire she stirred in him, on the fact he had been alone too long.

If it was that simple, any one of the beautiful females who had been in the mansion—even Elspeth—should have inflamed him and stirred his passion. But they hadn’t. He had felt nothing in their presence.

But in Lilian’s…

He scrubbed a hand down his face. He couldn’t let this get the better of him. His loyalty was to his family. His brother had given him a duty and he would fulfil it. He was merely swept up in her beauty, mistaking lust for something else—something dangerous—and convincing himself it was real. It was lust. Bastian would return and Night would leave, and he would find a whole line of females to satisfy his every desire, and then he would forget Lilian. He would see he was right and he had only wanted her because it had been too long since he’d had a woman.

So why did he want to throw his head back and roar at just the thought of letting Bastian have her?

He stilled. Movement. His gaze swung to his door and then the clock. The display mocked him with the hour. It was gone six now. He had lost track of time and awareness of the world for six hours and he still hadn’t slept. It would be dark soon.

Night rubbed his tired eyes and stared at the door, feeling beyond it to Lilian’s room. He tracked her movements around it. Or across it. She was moving at speed back and forth. Pacing. Planning her escape now her attempt to convince him to help her had failed?

His stomach twisted a little and he ignored it. He wouldn’t feel guilty about what he had done.

It didn’t stop him from feeling guilty about a few other things.

He found himself moving to his door and opening it, and before he could regain control of himself, he was knocking on her door.

It opened slowly and she peered up at him. The dark circles beneath her dull eyes and her mussed chocolate hair said he wasn’t the only one who hadn’t been able to get some rest.

Night rubbed the back of his neck, growing aware of the fact he was only half-dressed as her gaze dropped to his bare torso and then darted off to her right. His heart pounded, loud in his ears, and the pace of it only quickened as a hint of colour touched her cheeks. Maybe he should have put a shirt on before coming to see her, but then he wouldn’t have evoked this telling reaction in her.

He savoured it and the way she kept her eyes off him, and how that blush on her cheeks kept darkening as he gazed at her. All the tension that had been building inside him throughout the day ebbed away as the knots inside him loosened as if her reaction had tugged at the end of the string to unravel them all. She wanted him too. He wasn’t going crazy. He wasn’t the only one swept up in feelings that they knew they shouldn’t have. It was right there in the way she struggled to keep herself from looking at his body.

In the hint of arousal that laced her scent.

And the quickening of her pulse as it hammered a tempting rhythm in her neck.

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