“A year of training in her institute. She was a master, it turns out, in some strange Eastern martial arts called ...”
“Stop,” I raise my hand, “let me guess. Yalninzu.”
“Yes,” he shakes his head, “and apparently, seeing how you fight, I’m not the only one who studied there.”
“Yalninzu is a secret martial art known only to vampires, Tristan,” I shake my head. “Serena and I have trained for five years and are still relative novices. The fact that you even had one year’s training, that she didn’t kill you, well, you must have the luck of the Irish.”
“Not a mermaid then,” he nods, as though he had thought this through some time ago, but needed his ideas confirmed.
“No,” I shake my head, “but every vampire knows the story of Yalninzu. She was bound in silver by an emperor two thousand years ago and cast into the sea, only to return a decade ago to reinstate her dojo and begin training vampires in her arts once more.”
“Well, then I guess that answers your question about my training,” he says, “and the existence of mermaids,” he chuckles, looking as though a weight has been lifted from his shoulders.
“It doesn’t answer why you’ve been toying with me for the past year,” I growl at him. “You’ve been attacked in a multitude of ways, and every time you use one of Christopher’s inventions to take me down. You’ve never, ever used Yalninzu.”
“I wanted to learn how vampires attacked, what weapons were effective. It all came in very, very handy on the plane,” he smiles, “and on my boat I managed to take out four before they kidnapped me.”
“Tristan, I could have killed you half a hundred times.”
“But you didn’t,” he murmurs, turning to me and looking me in the eye.
“Dumb luck,” I whisper, “you know now, you are irresistible to me. I’ll keep trying, and one day I will most likely kill you, no matter how much I want you alive.”
“I want you too,” he says, ignoring what I’ve just said. “I’ve denied my attraction to you for too long, but I had a long time to think while I was away. I’ve had to admit that even when I was with Fleur, I found myself coming back to the villa night after night, even knowing you might attack me. I wanted to be around you, Pru. We can be together, I won’t let you bite me.”
“Tristan, you won’t be able to stop me.”
“Then this will be interesting,” he says, smiling as he stands up and jerks the sheet away from me, revealing my body.
I gasp and lunge for the sheet, but he holds it out of my reach.
“Tristan, don’t be crazy.”
“Remind me how many times you have tried to bite me in the past year?” he says, dropping the sheet to the floor and slowly pulling off his shirt, unbuckling his pants.
I swallow hard, my eyes drawn to his hips, lower, as he stands before me. My dreams of what his body might look sans clothing like paling before the magnificence of reality.
“Lots,” I whisper.
“For every attempted bite, I’m going to bite you,” he murmurs, as he leans over and takes my hands, raising them above my head and lowering the length of his muscular, naked body onto mine.
“Tristan.”
I don’t manage to say anything else, his lips smother any words I might have uttered as they roam mine. I surrender to his warmth, his intensity, as he moves them slowly from my mouth to my cheek, throat, and lower. Taking one nipple between his teeth at a time, he gently bites until I am arching my back, my nails digging into him, my hips rising in need.
But he takes his time; teasing, biting, sucking, as he makes his way down the length of my body, kissing my stomach, his hands under my backside, raising me to him as his tongue circles my belly button in maddening ways.
“You have no idea how often I wanted to do this?” he murmurs as his fingers brush my opening and I writhe beneath him, “when we wrestled, how often I wished we were naked.”
“Believe me, I do,” I gasp.
“I think I was lost the moment you first jumped onto my lap,” he whispers, taking his hands from me as I inwardly scream at their removal, and once more trailing nips up my body, to my throat, leaning above me, looking into my eyes. “I had to pull out a magazine to hide my reaction to you that day, focus on fishing, will my body to behave,” he murmurs.
“You were engaged, in love,” I frown, wriggling my hips to try and manoeuvre his pelvis closer.
“Yes,” he sighs, “but it was like trying to fight the tide.”
I place my hands on his fantastic ass and urge him with my sharp nails to do what I so want him to do. But he grins and relocates his hips away from mine, once more claiming my lips before heading down my body again, as I moan and lean down, my need too great to deny, and try to bite him.
