My gaze darted to her new scar and rose to her eyes. A shiver iced through me, between thought and action. She can separate the two? “I thought…,” I stammered, then mentally kicked myself. Rynn Cormel wanted us to succeed in this. Of course he’d be helping her learn to take blood without mixing it with sex, breaking old habits. My lips parted. New angle, he said. Not a sexual position, but a new tack? To help her find control?

Again my attention went to her new bite, now clearly visible as a badge of honor. Of success, maybe? Almost as if she’d heard my thoughts, Ivy leaned closer. “Yes,” she said distinctly, hitting the S with a sharp sound. “We’ve been practicing all month, and this morning, I did it. No charms, no drugs, nothing. It was the most frustrating thing I’ve ever done. It left one part of me satisfied, and the other…achingly empty.”

I blinked fast to try to gain an understanding of what that meant. Everything shifted, and I held my breath as I became afraid for another reason. It was too easy for me to become drunk on sensation and do something that I’d hate myself in the morning for. But this was something we both wanted. How could it be wrong?

Ivy tilted her head and, smiling, sent her sin-black eyes to drop languorously to my neck, making her intentions clear. Desire pinged through me, and I shuddered, knowing I was lost. Or found. About to be broken, or made whole. Inches away, Ivy pulled in my scent as she closed her eyes, bringing herself to a higher pitch, driving herself crazy with denial even as I stood in front of her. “I can do this, Rachel.”

I wanted this. I wanted to feel good. I wanted the closeness with Ivy I knew a bite would bring. I wanted to push away the pain we both felt from Kisten’s death with something real. And there was no reason not to.

I shuddered at the barest touch of her fingertip as she brushed the afghan from my shoulders and it pooled at my feet. A shiver took me, born from the cooler air hitting my skin and the heat she was pulling from my core. Vampire incense filled me on a slow intake of breath; it rolled in my soul, flashing up to make her light touch feel like electricity.

“Wait,” I said, self-preservation stronger than the remembered ecstasy she could fill me with, a millennium-old payment that evolution had gifted us in return for freely giving what a vampire’s soul needed to survive.

And she waited.