Demon Moon

I imagine heating this giant house must completely blow your budget.” Her dark eyes sparkled with humor, and she pressed her bottom lip between her teeth before offering, “I’ll pay for half of it while I’m here.”
    His chest tightened in desperate longing. Surely she must know a month wouldn’t be enough. “All of it,” he countered, his fingers running the length of her spine, tracing lightly over the large starburst scar alongside it. “I hardly need the heat.”
    “Your artwork runs the danger of mildew. Such a damp climate.” She mimicked her grandmother at the last; whether unconsciously done or not, it charmed another smile from him.
    As if drawn by the movement of his lips, her gaze lowered to his mouth. Beneath the blankets, her hand skimmed over his stomach and wrapped around the base of his erection. His teeth clenched at the exquisiteness of it.
    “I have a condition,” she said with a lift of her eyebrow, daring him to deny her.
    “Heat in trade for lovemaking? I accept your terms,” he said quickly. “Though I daresay you enjoyed it well enough freezing.”
    “It must be a secret desire of yours to have a woman whose skin is as cold as a vampire’s.” Releasing his shaft, she slid her hand up the side of his ribs, drawing a sigh of pleasure from him. Her lips curved into a slow, sad smile; he’d only seen that expression when she’d spoken of Caelum. “And I would have someone transform me and fulfill that wish, but—”
    “No.” The denial broke harshly from him, panic pushing it from his throat. “No, Savi. We could not even have a month if you did. You couldn’t drink from me.” She’d have to go elsewhere. And she wouldn’t be with him if the bloodlust forced her to be with another; she wouldn’t spread herself between two men.
    He’d likely murder the other vampire—or completely remove himself from her life to keep from doing it. The first would be preferable, but the continual deaths of her food sources was hardly a viable alternative for her.
    “I know.” She blinked, then lowered her forehead to his chest. “And Michael told me that I probably couldn’t, anyway. He doesn’t know how the taint would manifest in me during the transformation. It would be too dangerous. The fever nearly killed me, and that was just ingesting a little bit of blood and venom; it’s impossible to say what transformation would do.”
    “You asked him? When?”
    She turned her head, lay her cheek against his shoulder. She glanced up at him, then looked away, watched her fingers tracing a pattern over the hollow of his throat. “Just after the fever broke—about a week after.”
    Before he’d returned from England. Before they’d made their agreement to try friendship. “Why?”
    She seemed to contemplate the contrast of her skin against his for an extraordinary amount of time. “I want to see what happens,” she said finally, and though her eyes remained dry, tears hoarsened her voice. “When I think of all you’ve seen and experienced in two centuries—and Hugh and Lilith, what they’ve seen…” Her hands fisted. “And I expect that if the demon doesn’t manage to kill us this month, the next fifty years are going to be pretty freaking amazing. People are coming up with stuff all the time, changing all the time. But I want more than that. I want a hundred, five hundred, a thousand. Ten thousand. Can you imagine? I just want to see it.” Her words slowly dropped to a whisper. “I would’ve eventually asked Lucas or Fia or someone to turn me…but then I took that flight.”
    She shrugged carelessly, but yearning emanated from her psychic scent as clearly as her desire had earlier. Colin brushed his fingers through her satiny cap of hair, unable to speak. If he’d had the power, he’d have transformed her at that moment. He’d never considered it, except to think of how it would deny him any future with her, but he should have realized…someone with her extreme curiosity, with immortality all around her and the ability within reach—but then taken from her with an accidental swallow of blood and venom.
    It would have been easier had she never known the possibility existed.
    She forced a bright smile, flicked another glance up at him before her lashes lowered again. Her shields rose, as if to spare him from the pain of her need.
    He should have been grateful; his pain was more than enough that he couldn’t ease hers.
    “And then I thought I could