She desperately needed to think of something else. Like what she would post on Facebook the next day. Her author page usually had several daily posts to keep her readers interested. Yeah, she’d think about that … and all she came up with were images of Naked Ronan.
An hour later, she was still wide awake. She couldn’t take it any more. She flipped on the bedside lamp.
“Something wrong?” Ronan asked in that deep, rough voice of his.
For once, she wished he could compel her … compel her to fall asleep.
“I’m too tired to sleep,” she muttered. “How can you just sit there in the dark doing nothing?”
“I like the dark. And I wasn’t doing nothing. I was reviewing what we know about the situation and the possibilities.”
“Hal may have heard us talking about it in the living room earlier,” she said.
“Which is why I’m here with you. No one is going to hurt you,” he said in a steely voice. “I’ll make sure of it.”
Sierra looked down at her arm, where her wound was healing nicely. Hal had already drawn first blood. And Ronan was a vampire who consumed blood. Ronan hadn’t told her where he was getting his food source. She assumed it came from the bar she’d seen near the cupcake shop. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know any details beyond that.
Those images really weren’t conducive to pleasant dreams.
“Go to sleep,” he said in what she recognized to be his compelling voice. At least he hadn’t come closer to look deep into her eyes or she would have been a goner. She would have looped her arms around his neck and tugged him down onto the bed beside her. Then she would have ripped off his clothes and licked her way from his chiseled cheekbones to his chiseled abs. Where was all this licking coming from? She’d never had those thoughts before.
Sighing, she turned off the light and willed herself to sleep. Her last conscious thought was, Why did life have to be so complicated? Falling for a vampire went far beyond complicated and entered the realm of … She drifted off before she could come up with the right word to complete that sentence.
Chapter Fifteen
“You can’t leave this house!” Ruby had plastered herself against the front door again the next morning.
Sierra paused while fastening her coat. “I’m just going next door to Zoe’s house.”
“How do I know you’ll come back?” Ruby demanded.
“Because I’ve got this stupid bond thing going with Ronan and I can’t be far from him.” Sierra had a headache. She really didn’t need ghostly trouble this morning. She’d barely gotten five hours of sleep last night. The good news was that Hal hadn’t thrown any more furniture or objects at her. The bad news was that Sierra had vividly hot dreams about sex with Ronan that always stopped right before she could reach a climax.
“Is Ronan going with you to Zoe’s house?” Ruby said.
“Yes.”
“Then the two of you could leave me here and never come back.”
“All my stuff is here,” Sierra said.
“You already tried to take off once.”
“Not without my laptop and my laptop is here.”
“You could have backed it up to the cloud,” Ruby said.
Sierra stared at her in amazement. “What do you know about the cloud?”
“Not much,” Ruby muttered. “I’ve just seen on your laptop that you are able to do that.”
Sierra was stumped. She didn’t know how to reassure a panicky ghost that she would return. Not because she really wanted to come back to this cosmic chaos, but because she had to, thanks to Ronan.
Okay, maybe it wasn’t fair of her to blame him. He hadn’t deliberately forged that blood bond with her. Or so everyone kept telling her.
“What are you going to do over at Zoe’s house anyway?” Ruby asked suspiciously,
“What are you, my mother?” Sierra said in irritation.
“You sound guilty.”
Sierra shoved her hair away from her face. “I do not.”
“And you look guilty too.”
“That’s not guilt, it is exhaustion,” Sierra said. “I didn’t sleep very well.”
“Afraid Hal might throw more furniture at you?”
“No, Ronan stayed with me.”
“I know.” Ruby smirked.
“Then why did you ask?”
“To see if you’d lie to me.”
Ronan showed up behind Sierra. She sensed him there before she saw him. Was that something new? A new ability she’d developed since the blood bond thing? She was already trying to deal with the reading-her-thoughts stuff. Surely dreams didn’t count, right? No way was he able to view her dreams of last night. That was her opinion on the matter and she was sticking to it.