“I’d forgotten to keep blasting a song in my mind. I remedied my mistake, but the lyrics to “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me” seemed too close to home at the mo-ment. “Culture Club?” Now his mouth curled downward. “And you accuse me of practicing cruel and unusual punishment.”

“If I didn’t want you so much,” he said in a deadly purr, “I’d let you keep fucking me with your gaze, but you make me impatient.”

“If anyone other than you had me fly halfway around the world just to keep me waiting while you were obviously lingering in bed, I’d have my driver run them over. Twice.”

“Mencheres dropped his hands from my shoulders. “You know that’s what he wants. He’ll want to trade, you for her.”“Then I’ll do it,” I said.Bones’s grip on me turned to steel. “No, you won’t.”

“Catherine. " She swept by me without a hug. Okay, that was familiar, too. "You really should wear something warmer, it's freezing out. " Hello to you, too, Mom. Or whoever the hell you are, because you sure don't look like the woman who raised me. 123 "You should talk, " I managed. "I can see all the way up to your thigh. My God, if Grandma saw you now, she'd come right out of her grave!" My mother opened her mouth, paused, and then smiled. "I won't tell if you won't. " I was going directly to the kitchen to fall to my knees in awe before Rodney. Lo and behold, he'd managed to give her a sense of humor, and here I'd figured that would take voodoo, several headless chickens, and a lot of gris-gris.”

“Words.” His tone sharpened. “I shared my house, my bed, and my blood with you, as well as offered you a place in my life forever. What are words compared to that?”I sighed, my anger dissipating as quickly as his flames had. “Oh, Vlad, if you believed that, you would’ve told me what I wanted to hear to just appease me. You didn’t, which proves saying ‘I love you’ means more to you than everything else.”

“Where are we going? You never told me." "My home in Romania." Wow, this guy wasn’t kidding with his Dracula fixation.”