She glanced at me, her lips pressed together and spots of color showing on her usually pale complexion. The hint of almond-shaped eyes gave away her Asian heritage, and that, combined with her small, strongly defined features, made her striking. Her eyes were brown most of the time, going pupil black when her living-vampire status got the better of her.

I had let her sink her teeth into me once, and though as exhilarating and pleasurable as all hell, it had scared the crap out of both of us when she lost control and nearly killed me. Even so, I was willing to cautiously risk trying to find a blood balance. Ivy flatly refused, though it was becoming painfully obvious the pressures were building in both of us. She was terrified of hurting me in a haze of bloodlust. Ivy dealt with fear by ignoring its existence and avoiding its origin, but her self-imposed denial was just about killing her even as it gave her strength.

If my roommates/business partners could be believed, finding thrills was what I organized both my daily life and my sex life around. Jenks called me an adrenaline junkie, but if I was making money at it and remembered my limits, where was the harm? And I knew to the depths of my soul that Ivy didn’t fall under that “looking for a thrill” umbrella. Yes, the rush had been incredible, but it was the self-worth I had given her that told me it hadn’t been a mistake, not the blood ecstasy she had instilled.

For an instant, Ivy had seen herself as I did: strong, capable, able to love someone fully and be loved in return. By giving her my blood, I had told her that yes, she was worth sacrificing for, that I liked her for who she was, and that her needs weren’t wrong. Needs were needs. It was us who labeled them right or wrong. I wanted her to feel that way all the time.

But God help me, it had been a rush.

As if she had heard my thought, Ivy turned from Jenks. “Stop it,” she said, and I flushed. She couldn’t read my mind, but she might as well have. A vamp’s sense of smell was tuned to pheromones. She could read my mood as easily as I could smell the sharp scent of rose hips coming from my untouched tea. Crap, Ceri really expected me to drink this?

Jenks’s wings reddened, clearly not liking the shift in topic from how to spend our pooled business money to how to keep our teeth to ourselves, and Ivy gestured with a long, slim hand to include me in their argument. “It’s not that I don’t want to spend the money,” she said, both soothing and assertive. “But why do it if a demon will take it down again?”