Fury's Kiss by Karen Chance Read Free Book Online Page A

moment. I’d been hurt and he’d been kind, not to mention scorching hot, and for a minute there I’d actually let myself believe that this could sort of maybe kind of work, at least for a little while…maybe.…
    Only it couldn’t. Because dhampirs don’t have relationships. Dhampirs have the occasional one-night stand in between bouts of madness, in which they hope their partner doesn’t piss them off and they end up eating his face. I think my max “relationship” had lasted five days, and that had been an aberration. And this one had already lasted longer than that, if relationship was the term for two people who spent most of their time arguing and trying to kill each other.
    Not that I was feeling particularly homicidal at the moment. I was feeling weirdly boneless, a strange, warm, drifting feeling, untethered, like I might just float away. Until he gripped my shoulders, grounding me.
    When I opened my eyes again, my face was clear, my pupils dark, my skin flushed and my lips red and full. I looked drugged, but I’d been there enough times to know this wasn’t it. This was better.
    And it didn’t help when the hands pulled me back against a warm, hard chest. I’d never thought of myself as delicate before I met Louis-Cesare, but I looked it next to six feet four inches of muscle barely contained by a navy sweater and jeans. The dark fabric made my paleness stand out starkly, like a reverse silhouette, and the hard lines of his body caused my curves to look softer, sweeter, strangely vulnerable—
    And the record scratched again, because that wasn’t me, that big-eyed waif in the mirror. I wasn’t vulnerable. I never had been. I didn’t need some guy to come along and take care of me, because I was perfectly capable of doing that myself, as I’d been proving for, oh, five centuries now. I didn’t need outrageously expensive nightgowns that didn’t even look like me. That looked completely
un
like me, in fact, like he hadn’t even thought about it, like it hadn’t crossed his mind how ridiculous I would look in a goddamn satin pussy bow and—
    I didn’t need
this
.
    “What is it?” Louis-Cesare asked as I struggled out of his grasp, reaching for my robe.
    “Nothing.”
    “Then why are you getting dressed?”
    “Maybe I don’t like being the only naked one in the room,” I said sarcastically.
    And immediately regretted it.
    “That is easily remedied,” he told me, and pulled off his sweater. And damn it, that wasn’t what I’d meant.
    But Louis-Cesare wasn’t a guy who understood half measures. He was either all in or all out, and it was kind of obvious which side he’d taken on this particular question. Before I could say anything, he’d slipped off his belt, toed off his shoes and somehow managed to peel himself out of those tight-ass jeans—
    And proved that it wasn’t only the jeans that were tight. He bent over to drape his clothes across the tub, making my breath catch. It was a mouthwatering view, and then he turned around and gave me a better one. Completely unself-conscious in the way all vampires are after a few years, because when people can hear your every thought, modesty takes on a whole new meaning.
    Not that he needed it.
    Rumor had it that his father had actually been the Duke of Buckingham, instead of anybody with “de Bourbon” for a last name. This was the Buckingham who had started out as a plain old mister in James I’s reign and ended up a freaking
duke
, the most powerful person in the country outside the royal family, mainly because of the way he filled out a pair of hose. He’d been called the best-looking man in England, something I hadn’t heard until I met Louis-Cesare and started looking a few things up. But I had no trouble believing it.
    No trouble at all.
    Louis-Cesare was smiling, just a brief twist of his lips, but it was enough to set me off. “Are you listening to my thoughts again?” I demanded, because that was one side effect of fey