All he does is raise an eyebrow at me.
“Oh,” I say, my gaze widening in understanding. “How much of a while are we talking?”
He shakes his head, putting the water back into the fridge and grinning. “Just a while, Petal.” He steps forward so that we’re almost chest to chest and pinches me on the nose. “You’re inquisitive today.”
He allows his fingers to drift down from my nose. I suck in a breath at the sensation of his touch as he presses his finger softly to my lips. “What’s with the whole “Petal” thing?” I ask, in an effort to distract myself from how close he is to slipping a finger into my mouth.
“It’s a good name for you. You’re like a petal, all delicate and soft.”
I almost snort at that. “I am not.”
“You are. On the outside you’ve certainly got a hard shell, but on the inside you’re just this lovely little sensitive creature.”
“Shut up or I won’t hesitate to bite you,” I warn. I’m seriously incapable of acknowledging what he’s just said to me. I hate how he so easily sees through my bitchy façade.
Finn pulls his hand away then. “I better go and get cleaned up.”
“Yeah,” I agree, coughing to cover up my embarrassment. “You better.”
About an hour later Rita comes into the house with a huge amount of Chinese takeaway for dinner. It’s a good thing Finn and Ira eat so much or we’d never get through it all. Rita tells Finn all about our encounter with Damien today, to which he curses and gives my knee a subtle squeeze.
He asks me if I’m okay and I tell him I’m fine. I don’t know how to react to this new Finn, the one who says sweet, concerned things to me and calls me Petal, as opposed to the one who would tell me off for trusting vampires and flirt with me in an aggressively sexual fashion.
Just as we’ve finished cle
aning away the dinner there’s a knock at the door. I can tell it’s Ethan when the last remnants of the lust spell wake up. It feels more like a dull fizzing in my belly now, rather than an all-consuming…passion. He strolls into the house like he owns the place, as per usual, followed by Lucas and Delilah.
“Hey, any way for you to tell your ex to fuck off sending her blood donors to try and kill me?” I ask, angry at how he’s just standing there, staring at me in that cold, judgemental way of his.
He glances at me impassively. “What are you jabbering about?”
“Eliza sent one of her blood donors here today to spy on us. If it weren’t for Rita giving him a truth spell and hypnotising him then he might have gotten away with it as well.”
Out of the corner of my eye I see Rita face-palming. Oh right, maybe I shouldn’t have told Ethan about her doing spells like that. Although he has seen her flood a mansion, so it can’t be that big of a deal. Maybe she just doesn’t want me reminding him of her powers. Good luck to her with that. Just like the elephants, Ethan never forgets.
The only indication of his surprise is a slight twitching of his brow. “She did that?”
“Yes, apparently she wanted him to cart me across the river to vampire territory so that she could kill me publicly as some kind of an example to traitors.”
Ethan nods, scratching his short nails across his jaw. “Eliza is not the kind of person to let go of a grudge, and after what you did to her in her father’s home, I’m assuming that her grudge against you is now quite a substantial one.”
“All of you aren’t the kind of people to let go of a grudge,” I mutter under my breath.
One end of Ethan’s mouth tilts up. “What was that?”
“You heard me,” I reply, turning away from him dismissively.
“You’re acting like a petulant child.”
“Compared to you I am a fucking child.”
He laughs harshly. “Is that a put down about my age?”
“What do you think?”
“I think you need to learn some manners.”
“I think you need to pull that stick out of your arse.”