Page 39 of Our Sins in Blood (Coven of Sin 1)

“How do you mean?” he asked, flattening out a five-dollar bill to feed the coin machine.

“I mean,” I dropped my voice, leaning against the coin machine, “when you made me mad back at the house…”

He looked up with a wicked glint in his eye. “You mean when you threw me onto the bed and straddled me?”

“Um, yeah.”

“That was hot. But I’m not going to bite or fuck you without your explicit permission, Red. Even if I was that evil of a shithead, Sterling and Vincent would kill me if I tried anything you weren’t down for. The goal is to earn your affection here. Vin might be blowing it big time, and I can’t vouch for Deathwish because he’s a sadist with a fetish for the word ‘no.’ But I want you to feel safe around me.”

Ididfeel safe around Corry. And that was the problem. I didn’t want to feel anything when it came to Corry. What I needed was to get on with my plan.

“You wanna shoot some zombies?”

“Huh?” I muttered, pulling myself from the plan running through my mind.

The vampire jabbed a thumb at a machine with two plastic guns attached to rubber cords. Zombies ambled across the screen with a fluorescent sign mounted on top of the cabinet reading ‘House of the Dead.’

“It’s a classic.”

Curiosity won out, and the details of my plan fizzled away as I stepped up to the game. Corry pressed two quarters into my palm, and I gave a sure nod when asked if I knew what to do. I’d seen enough Chuck E. Cheese commercials to get the gist. I pushed the coins into the slot, and the machine came alive.

“Here, I’ll show you how it works.”

Corry came up behind me, his warmth pressing into my back. Books had always made vampires out to be ice cold, but Corry had a pleasant heat to him that enveloped me like a blanket. His arms encircled me, his hands guiding mine to the gun.

The game started, and we were doing terribly, mostly because neither of us seemed to be paying any attention to the mission. We were both distracted by how close we were to one another.

Corry’s hard chest pressed against me, trapping me against the arcade game. He was leaner than Vincent, sharper, and even through his denim jacket, I could feel his rock-hard muscles. He didn’t have an ounce of fat on him.

Every human instinct ingrained in me screamed in the back of my head to run, to get as far away from the youngblood as I possibly could. Under his bleached-tipped hair and his bright blue eyes and playful smirk, he was still a predator. A predator who hadn’t yet gained complete control over his need for blood.

But I ignored what my survival instincts were telling me. Not because I was adrenaline starved from my years spent in suburban captivity, but for some stupid reason, I felt safe with Corry.

He made me feel normal.

“Why are you doing all this?” I whispered, my voice strained with a sudden wave of emotion.

He grinned, his arms still wrapped around me, the gun still pointed toward the screen. “Why am I showing you how to survive in case of a zombie uprising?”

“No. You’re showing me all these human things, stuff I never got to do or have. Then you were teaching me all that reflex stuff. You’re letting me experience both worlds I’ve been suddenly thrown into, and you’re doing it in a way that makes me feel…”

“Cared for?”

I gulped back a lump, my head bobbing with a slight nod. “Yeah, something like that.”

He pushed closer to me from behind until there was no space left between us. I could feel every inch of him, from the swell of his pectorals, the ripple of his toned abdomen, all the way down to his semi-erect shaft pushing against the valley of my ass cheeks.

I should have wanted him to stop. His cock was throwing a major wrench into my whole escape plan. Of course, seducing him had been my plan the entire time, at least up until the point where I could steal his keys without him noticing. But all these emotions weren’t meant to get tangled in the details.

His brow rested against mine, his blue eyes searching my gray ones.

“Do you want me to stop?” he asked me on a breath so soft it took my own away.

I bit my lip and shook my head, my cheeks heating under his hot-blue gaze. “No.”

Chapter twenty

Just Like the Rest of Them

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