Accidental Sire(58)

I rolled, pinning him down with my hips. My fangs sneaked out of my mouth, scraping against his nipple. He hissed but gripped at my shoulder, keeping me in place. I pressed those sharp points against his skin, testing and teasing until he was panting.

Panting myself, I slipped my own hand into the elastic of his shorts, pulling at them. He pulled back, watching me as I tugged at his clothes, his lips wet and parted. He nodded, pressing his forehead against mine and lifting his hips so I could pull his shorts all the way off. I'd just managed to get his underwear below his ass when something thumped against my door.

We both froze.

Fitz whimpered from the hall, scratching at my door. I could hear Jane's voice, just outside, saying, "Is she not awake yet, buddy? Why don't you give her a few more minutes? She had a rough one last night."

My eyes locked with Ben's, and I mouthed, Don't think anything.

Fitz whimpered again, and I could hear his paws crawling up the door.

Jane sighed. "Aw, OK, buddy, but let her sleep. No chewing on her blankets."

The doorknob turned, and Ben scrambled out from under me. He landed noiselessly on my floor and rolled under my bed. Jane opened the door just enough for Fitz to wriggle through and shut it behind him. The gray-brown blur of dog sprang across the room and landed on my bed with a flump, nearly dislodging me from the sheets.

"No, Fitz, off the bed," I whispered as he attempted to cover my face in slobber. "Off."

Fitz rolled to the floor, sniffing and searching until he found Ben. He yapped happily when Ben crawled out from under my bed. All traces of sexy times had disappeared. Ben looked ashamed and a little panicked.


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"I'm really sorry," he said. "This was a bad idea. I don't know what came over me."

"It's OK," I told him. "I wanted to."

"I shouldn't have," he said. "Let's just, uh, let's just forget this happened, OK?"

Somewhere inside me, there was a witty retort that demanded to know what exactly Ben meant by that and required him to act more like a damn grown-up and less like my dad had just caught him rifling through my panty drawer. But what my brain came up with was "Uh . . ."

And with that, Ben stuck his head out into the hallway and checked for our housemates. I guessed the coast was clear, because he slipped past the door without another word and closed it quietly behind him. I flopped back onto the bed. Fitz propped his head on the mattress, huffing at me, trying to get my attention.

I rolled toward him, rubbing the top of his massive head. "What the hell just happened?"

Because dogs could not shrug, Fitz settled for licking my face.



Ben didn't withdraw from my life. He didn't avoid me. He did exactly what he'd asked me to do, which was pretend that the whole making-out-after-sleeping-on-top-of-me thing didn't happen. He was perfectly friendly. He let me have the last Hemo Pop for breakfast when we ran out. He let me ride shotgun in Jane's car on the way to work. He even held doors open for me. But he didn't make eye contact. Our conversation was stilted and weird, like the sort of small talk you would make during a job interview.

I spent most of my time trying not to think about what had happened, because Jane did not need those visuals in her head. Also, I didn't want to be grounded for having a boy in my room.

To avoid this mental pitfall when I was sitting just a few feet outside my psychic foster mom's office door, I threw myself into work. I'd managed to tame my laundry cart of files. But more paperwork crossed my desk every night, and some of it was pretty damned interesting.

It was enough to keep me distracted and thinking of something besides Ben's thrusty hardness, especially when a bright red-as in alarmingly red-folder with Ophelia's name in bold block printing was delivered while I was on my lunch break.

At this point, I'd pretty much lost my qualms about looking through sensitive paperwork-though I will say that the sheer redness of the folder made me pause for just a second. The top sheet of the file was marked "Ophelia Lambert-Rehabilitation Progress." 

The report was pretty bland, discussing Ophelia's progress on UK's campus and her "lack of proven murders." Who the hell wrote this? Did Ophelia have some sort of social worker she had to report to every week? I tried to imagine that vampire paper pusher. And it made me laugh.

Wait a minute.

I opened my "mystery drawer" full of loose papers that I had not yet figured out how to file. Most of them were reports that had fallen out of file folders when they were tossed into the giant laundry cart. I remembered a two-page printed e-mail with Ophelia's name at the bottom, an e-mail that included a lot of cursing. Maybe that was supposed to go in this file? I shuffled through the papers until the all-caps cuss words jumped out at me.