A month of pent-up fear and frustration poured out of me, lending me the strength I wouldn’t otherwise have had. I arced my hips, twisting so I could buck him off me. The motion ground me against his very evident arousal, and the friction made desire pool between my legs as I was now straddling him.

  Yes, he might have been angry with me owing to the fact that I’d been ignoring him, but he wanted this as much as I did. It was comforting, in a way—at least one thing between us remained constant.

  Thank Hecuba I’d worn a skirt to the shop this morning, because that meant there were only two barriers between our bodies now: my panties and his trousers. Lorcan could tear the lace underthings off without effort and I’d be certain to demand a new pair once current needs were sated, but for now, they were a nuisance.

  I leaned down to kiss him once more, my hair falling like an inky curtain around us. For just an instant the argument with Maverick earlier, the sounds of Libby singing something next door, and the worries of the day fell away. Now it was just the two of us, locked together in the same power struggle we’d had from the beginning.

  Love. Hate. Desire. Anger. Frustration. Need.

  Just Wanda and Lorcan pressed together.

  Wanting. Waiting.

  So, of course, the vampire had to go and ruin the moment.

  He pulled away from the kiss, though it cost him to do so. I’d been tugging gently on his lip with my teeth and hadn’t let go when he wrenched away. Blood now coated my lips, my tongue, and I prepared to gag at the coppery taste. But... it didn’t taste terrible, like I assumed it would. And I didn’t gag. Perhaps because Lorcan’s blood didn’t taste like coppery metal at all. It actually tasted… well, good.

  That realization made me pull away.

  Blood.

  I was enjoying the taste of blood. Not only blood, but his blood. And that was wrong on a level so visceral it made me recoil.

  And yet it was nearly impossible not to lick the stuff off my lips. Lorcan tasted like Amaretto, sweet and bitter, with the aftertaste of black cherries. He’d claimed that every individual’s blood tasted uniquely good, but I’d only half-believed him, thinking he’d say anything he could to try to sell the fact that drinking blood wasn’t disgusting. After all, blood was blood, right? It tasted like old pennies and smelled just as off-putting.

  Now I knew better.

  Because for the first time since our ‘marriage’, I could finally taste something. I didn’t want to wipe my lips free of the stuff, but I did anyway. I swiped the back of my hand over my mouth, smearing the crimson drops across my pale skin. The act seemed oddly symbolic, somehow, though I couldn’t explain why.

  Lorcan watched me warily as I scrambled back, clutching my stomach. It clenched so hard I suddenly wanted to throw up and the hollow ache within me was even more concerning. Why? Because I wanted more, damn it. I was suddenly thirsting for more of that sweet, viscous liquid that, even now, I was trying my best to stop staring at, as it continued to pump from his damaged lip. And that could only mean one thing…

  Damn him! This was his fault!

  “I know I’m irresistible, sweetling, but we can’t go on like this. Sex will only hold us together for so long,” the undead penis head started. “If we’re actually even… together in the true sense of the word.”

  “What… what the spell are you rambling on about?” I could barely even find my voice.

  “Wanda, dearest, you haven’t made your feelings on this soul-melding of ours clear yet.” Then he shrugged. “As a matter of fact, you haven’t spoken to me, period.”

  He tried to keep his words light and teasing, but it was a smokescreen. Lorcan might play the part of the disinterested and unencumbered bachelor when it suited him, but there was a deeply serious man beneath the façade. I wished he’d allow that part of himself out more often. It was easier to have a conversation with the more mature aspect of his personality. Not that I didn’t enjoy his playfulness in some... ahem... more intimate situations.

  I covered my face with my hands and breathed in deeply as I tried to force the taste of him out of my mouth and out of my mind.

  This was the conversation I’d been trying to avoid since this whole marriage business had happened. I didn’t want to talk about it. Talking about it made it real, and I desperately wanted to live in my fantasy world where everything was just as it always had been—that I wasn’t married at the soul level to anyone. It was a world where I wasn’t turning into something no one had a name for, a world where Lorcan hadn’t fundamentally altered me for the rest of my existence.

  “Oh, Goddess,” I moaned. “I can’t. I don’t want to.”

  “Speak to me?” he asked, an edge to his words as his eyes narrowed and all the need, desire and want faded away into a bleached nothingness before us. Dammit to spell.

  I looked at him petulantly. “Right. I’m not in the mood for a deep conversation.”

  “Might I remind you, my dearest little hellion, that I didn’t ask for this situation any more than you did? Yet it was thrust upon me just as much as it was thrust upon you. It happened. Now we have to deal with it.”

  I rose up onto my knees, heat prickling over my skin as anger started to get the better of me. I jabbed a finger at him, half-shouting, “There’s no we in this, Rowe! I’m the one who has to deal with the consequences of what happened. I’m the one who’s been changed by all this—last I checked, you’re still drinking blood—you’re still the same! I don’t see you suddenly weaving magic or getting stuck with a crappy familiar!”

  “My dear,” Lorcan started and held his hands up in a play of surrender, but I wasn’t done yet. Far from it.

  “No!” I yelled at him and took the expression of disarmament right off his blasted face. “You’re still in control. You’re still you! I don’t know who or what I am anymore, and that’s your fault. This whole thing is your fault!”

  Lorcan climbed to his feet, a severe frown creasing his handsome face. “Don’t put this all on me, Wanda. I wasn’t the one who initiated the sex that led to all of this, if you’ll recall.” That was true and the reminder of it caused a bit of humiliation to flow through me. “I was content to wait for you,” Lorcan continued. “I would have waited forever if that’s what it took. All I’ve ever wanted is to see you happy.”

  “Ugh, I really can’t handle this conversation if it’s going to enter sappy, tear-jerker terrain,” I barked at him.

  He nodded as if he understood my aversion to feelings and emotions. “For a long time, I was the danger, the person making you unhappy and now that the bond is gone… and you are no longer in danger from me… well, isn’t that a good thing?”

  Yes and no.

  I was grateful he didn’t feel the pressing urge to savage my neck anymore, but the tradeoff... well, I wasn’t sure how to live with it. Would I have traded it all to be where we were not so long ago? I wasn’t sure. Maybe. Then again, that would have meant Lorcan would be in danger too because he would have killed himself in the event he’d fatally attacked me.

  “Yes but...”

  “But what?” he pressed. “Because I don’t see a downside here.”

  My jaw clenched so hard, my teeth ached. How could he say something like that? No downside? This entire thing was a downside! We were potentially bound together for all eternity. A forever curse that had transfigured me into something I didn’t recognize—a married woman!

  “No downside?” I hissed. “You think there are no downsides? That I’ve been avoiding you for the spell of it?”

  “I imagined you were having one of your… moments.”

  “It wasn’t a moment!” I railed at him. “I had to figure out the extent of what you’d done to me! Because it wasn’t just spiritual, Rowe, you undead bastard, it was physical.”

  “Physical? I admit I don’t quite catch your meaning, love.”

  “I mean I haven’t slept the whole night through in a month. I can barely keep my eyes open during the day. The only thing that doesn’t taste like cardboard is rare meat and speaking of rare meat, I’d probably eat it raw if I didn’t catch myself. Not to mention these.”

  I hooked a finger into my top lip and peeled it away from my teeth. My front teeth were unchanged but the incisors and bicuspids were noticeably tapered and much sharper than they ever had been. They weren’t as prominent as Lorcan’s fangs, of course, and they didn’t extend whenever I was in the company of something gory, but the fact that they were there at all made a tremor of fear run through my gut. When they’d first appeared, I’d fought hard not to break down, not to lose my grip on sanity, because I’d been convinced that if I simply closed my eyes, I’d wake up without a pulse. After weeks of waiting, I was fairly sure that wasn’t going to happen, but it raised a new question: if I wasn’t a witch or a vampire, what exactly was I?

  Lorcan leaned forward, his obvious reserved anger giving way to professional curiosity. “Enlarged bicuspids and incisors,” he murmured as he took inventory of my pearly whites. “Larger and more pointed than human or witch certainly, but not quite...”

  “Fangs,” I finished sourly as I wrapped my arms against my chest and frowned up at him. “They look like yours before you vamp out.”

  “‘Vamp out’,” he answered with a smile that was, yes, complete with fangs. “A term I’ve never heard before but one I quite like.”

  I glared at him. “I haven’t smiled properly in months because I don’t know how to explain the change to my teeth. I tried filing them down, but they just keep tapering back to a point. I think I’m stuck with them.”

  Lorcan winced. “Good lord, don’t ever file your teeth! If you damage the enamel, you risk sensitivity, infection, and tooth decay.”

  “Thank you for the lesson, doctor,” I drawled. “Not that it seems to matter. They recover no matter what I do to them.”

  He fixed me with a hard look. “Please tell me you haven’t tried to pull them or knock them loose.”

  I bit the inside of my cheek, trying not to smile. His concern for my teeth was almost cute. It was easy to forget that behind the enormous and irritating flirt was a professional dentist.

  “I haven’t,” I admitted. “Though I’ve been tempted because I keep cutting my lower lip and biting my tongue with them.” I heaved a dramatic sigh. “Nevermind the insides of my cheeks.”

  “Understandable. Witches share human anatomy, more or less. For most of your life, you’ve had a different bite pattern. More than that, the vampire diet is mostly liquid. We don’t have to worry about mashing our cheeks or tongue because we don’t chew. I could see why you’ve been having a problem.”

  “Thanks for your understanding,” I replied facetiously as I retrieved my blouse from its perch across the room. It had landed near the casement window and I belatedly realized the blinds hadn’t been drawn and prayed to the goddess I hadn’t given Poppy or her son a peep show. If Lorcan and I weren’t going to be doing the bedroom tango (and it seemed the mood was undeniably lost), I might as well get dressed. It was less embarrassing for all involved.

  I shoved my arms into my shirt sleeves with a scowl. “That’s all well and good, but how do we fix this? I can’t go around having fangs for the rest of my life. I want to be able to eat food and sleep and just exist the way I did before.” I took a breath as I turned to face him. “I’m worried that I’m now more vampire than witch.” That announcement sent such a shock through me that I paused for a moment in pulling my shirt over the top of my head. “Do you understand how disastrous that would be for me? I can’t be both.”

  Lorcan leaned against the wall, staring pensively at the floor as I dressed. I was grateful he was giving me even a modicum of privacy. I wasn’t sure I could have kept my clothes on if he was standing there, staring at my semi-naked body, lust shining in those incredible green eyes of his. I’d strip everything right off again, we’d take each other to the ground and then finish what we’d started. And sex between us again? Who knew what would happen—maybe afterwards I’d find myself turned into a toad.

  Something that still sounded loads better than this blasted conversation.

  “So, you’ve been avoiding me because you’ve been turning into a vampire, or you think you’ve been turning into a vampire, gradually?” he whispered as he frowned and then shook his head at me like the whole thing was one big shame. It was that and more. “How does that make any sense, Wanda?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean… I’m your sire. You should have come to me with problems like this.”

  “How can you help?” I shot back, glaring at him furtively. “I’m not a vampire. And I’m not a witch. There’s never been anything like me in the history of the world! It was a damn sight easier to be a Blood Witch, because then I at least knew some of the rules, owing to Betanya’s journals. This... thing I am now though… it isn’t normal. I don’t know how to live with it.”

  “Then don’t,” he said on a shrug like the answer was obvious.

  “Excuse me?”

  His eyes were solemn when he took a step toward me. I didn’t move away when he lifted his hands, cradling my face with a staggering amount of tenderness. My eyes pricked when he brushed a soft kiss across my lips. He leaned his forehead against mine then and for a quiet moment, our breath mingled and neither of us spoke.

  “Don’t,” he repeated. “Don’t live with it. If you can’t be both, just pick a side. You still have a choice, dearest.”

  Chapter Six

  It took longer than it should have to puzzle out Lorcan’s meaning.

  When I did, I stepped out of the circle of his arms on reflex, hands at my sides, ready to cast if need be. It was a residual defense mechanism left over from our early days together. I didn’t really think he’d press the issue. Still, I hadn’t expected him to bring it up at all.

  “No,” I said automatically. “I’m not turning full vamp.”

  Lorcan’s eyes were soft and pleading. “Perhaps it would be easier than battling what seems to be a losing war.”

  “A losing war?”

  He nodded. “It seems to me… and I believe you are… little by little, becoming vampire.”

  I breathed in deeply and tried not to let his words upset me, but they were highly upsetting, mainly because I could feel the truth in them. After all, what else could have been happening to me?

  “You’ve said you wouldn’t mind if becoming a vampire became necessary,” he continued.

  “But it’s not necessary! At least at this point it isn’t!” I railed back at him, shaking my head all the while. “And I won’t give up my magic if I don’t have to! It’s just this damned hunger and these stupid mini-fangs! I wish both would go away and then life as I knew it would come back.”

  “Except for the fact that you can’t sleep at night and you’re exhausted during the day and you couldn’t seem to take your eyes off my bleeding lower lip.”

  Right. Except for that.

  Lorcan sank onto my couch and gave me a significant look. “There’s only one way to go about this, you know?”

  “No, I don’t know, so stop being so obtuse!”

  He nodded and his calmness grated on me, mainly because I was jealous of his ability to remain so cool and steady in the face of disaster. “If you’ve inherited my appetites, there’s only one way to sate said appetites,” he continued. “It’s probably why the food you eat suddenly tastes as boring and nondescript as it does to you. Your body is trying to tell you something, love. I felt the same way when the blood bond was in place between us—no one else’s blood could compare to yours. After I drank my fill, though, the craving went away… until it returned anew.”

  My swallow was audible. “Are you telling me I have to drink... blood?”

  My stomach revolted against the very notion. It was wrong. Not just wrong, it was disgusting. It was one thing that Lorcan drank blood. I’d accepted that, and he was careful not to kiss me with the stuff on his breath. But drinking it myself? Oh, spell no.

  “If I’m correct, and I believe I am, drinking blood is your answer, dearest,” he continued. “It should help. Your baby fangs should shrink... In fact, I believe they’re only extended because you’re hungry.”

  “Baby fangs?” I spluttered. “Did you seriously just call them baby fangs?”

  A boyish grin stretched across his absurdly handsome face. “That’s what they are? You’re not a fully-fledged vampire so you don’t have true fangs. Would you rather I call them tiny teeth?”

  I glowered. “Are you done?”

  “Mini-masticators? Ickle incisors? Bitty bicuspids?”

  “I will hex you, Lorcan.”

  He laughed, full-bellied and loud and I smiled in spite of myself and the absolute calamity that had befallen me. I had to admit I’d missed this—this easy reverie that always seemed to exist between Lorcan and me, well, when I wasn’t busy yelling at him. Maverick was on the path to reform, so we didn’t banter the way we used to. Truly, no one bantered quite like Lorcan did and could. I hated to admit it, but I enjoyed trading barbs with him. We’d never have the syrupy love that Poppy and her boyfriend of the hour seemed to have, but that suited me just fine. I wasn’t a syrupy kind of girl. I was a whisky sour and that meant you either accepted the burn, or you passed up the opportunity.

  “I’m sorry sweetling, but the look on your face was priceless...” He chuckled. “What would you prefer I call them?”

  “‘My little problem’ should work in mixed company.” I fidgeted, sighed, and added, “‘Baby fangs’ in private. If you call them that in public though, you will regret it.”

  He chuckled. “I believe we have a deal. Do you want to shake on it?”

  “No, I don’t want to shake on it.”

  Then he smiled and I smiled and we both just stood there, smiling at each other like idiots.

  “Do you really think blood will help the problem?” I asked after another few moments, my voice so soft, it sounded like a whisper.

  He sobered at once. “I do. If you have vampire biology, you’re going to need blood, if only in small quantities. If you keep going like this, you’re going to end up attacking someone.”