I looked around frantically and spotted a smaller, wooden door labeled Atelier and Design Workshop a little further away from my seminar room. I sped to the door’s handle, only to be relieved to find that it was open, perhaps offering me welcome salvation. I quickly slipped through the crack and closed the door behind me.

To my surprise, I found myself in a somewhat darker room with large windows that faced another courtyard, which was decorated with white stone benches as well as columns and round arches overgrown with ivy.

It looked almost like a fairy tale, and I decided to take a closer look at this until now unknown part, maybe even together with my camera and Bay, who usually always tried to resist my forced photo shoots. However, she still owed me something...

I meandered around the tables, on which art flyers and self-made posters lay, right to the large window. Once I was there, I enjoyed the view outside.

This building had to be ancient and yet it had held up over the centuries. On the dark green hoodie the Bardot guy wore and the one I had bought in the Vanderwood Shop, I had read 1866 under the white wolves yesterday, which didn’t explain to me why the building looked like it came out of a fairy tale.

To make matters worse, I didn’t have my camera with me today.

“Hurry up, please. David is waiting for you in the surveillance room. When you’re done, you come back here, understand?”

When I heard Adrian’s voice outside in the hallway, I automatically disappeared behind the dark green velvet curtain at the window. Just in time, because the door opened and someone entered the room.

Shit... I was stuck here, and to make matters worse, with Adrian DeLoughrey. Something about that thought made a tingle rise inside me, but the footsteps approaching me wiped out that feeling and made something else rise inside me: Adrenaline.

Adrian seemed to be pacing back and forth, very impatiently, because his footsteps quickened until he slowed them down again.

“What’s taking so long...” he muttered loud enough to be heard.

Only now did I realize that I had completely forgotten to breathe and took a silent breath. A mistake, as it turned out, because Adrian’s footsteps instantly paused, and I immediately held my breath again. The adrenaline in my blood rose, and I couldn’t deny that I liked it.

Relax, Larissa. He couldn’t have heard you...

I didn’t manage to calm down at all, because his footsteps had stopped, and I couldn’t place where he was. Damn it!

I paused.

Whoosh!

Within a split second, the curtain was ripped away from under my nose, and I was staring into the glowing red eyes of Adrian DeLoughrey.

This time, I wasn’t scared, but filled with pure fascination and a touch of curiosity.

It looked like his irises were playing with me, trying to pull me into a maelstrom.

Adrian’s expression was filled with suspicion, just like last time, but there was something else....

“What are you doing here?” he pressed out tensely, and I couldn’t help but eye his straight jaw, which underlined his masculinity, making this fucker damn attractive.

My eyes continued to wander down to his slightly unbuttoned black shirt, exposing his breastbone and some of his bare skin.

I instantly felt warm and probably blushed a bit, but luckily it didn’t show on me as much as it always did on my best friend.

Embarrassed, I looked up at Adrian, whose gaze was also in a completely different place.

He was staring directly at the upper end of my tight top, where a black lace bra peeked out and accentuated my cleavage, just the way I liked it best. Playful, yet subtle. It was perhaps not subtle enough, because Adrian lingered there a little too long with his intense stare, giving me tingles that turned into goosebumps.

He seemed to notice that, too, because his gaze wandered up to my sternum, straight to my neck, pausing there for a second, until he was able to look me in the eyes again.

An unintentional sigh escaped me.

This had been too much.

For both of us.

With a firm grip around my waist, Adrian pulled me close to him.

My heartbeat quickened noticeably, and I sucked in a sharp breath.

Within a second, he closed the distance that had just lingered like a gaping hole between our lips and pressed me against him.

His lips were soft and cooler than I had expected. They pressed down on mine and his tongue probed wildly over my lower lip before biting into it.

My whole body instantly reared up, and I pressed further against his, because that was all the throbbing between my thighs was asking for right now.

The next moment, Adrian grabbed me by my hips and pulled me up against him. I knew the game, so I wrapped my legs around his body and let myself fall deeper into the intense kiss.

Our tongues played with each other as if they were both searching for something, as if his were looking for something he hadn’t gotten in a long time.

I moaned softly and felt even more heat rising inside me as he carried me, barely noticeable, to a table near the window and set me down on it, not breaking the kiss. On the contrary, his lips pressed harder and harder on mine, pulling at my lower lip until he released and moved down to my neck. I threw my head back, closed my eyes, and surrendered to Adrian DeLoughrey’s demanding kisses. His lips traveled up and down my neck, my shoulder, along the nape of my neck, and my breathing quickened considerably.

Everything about this situation turned me on so much that I could no longer suppress the second moan and finally let myself fall completely. Should he do what he wanted... At some point it would have come down to this anyway.

Suddenly, I felt a very light bite on the back of my neck. It hurt and my whole body tensed. I curled my fingers around the edges of the table I had just been leaning on, sighing audibly.

Adrian sucked on my skin, kissing me, his tongue playing with my collarbone. I was sure he was turned on, because I could feel his hardness between my thighs.

Damn.

He was playing with me like I was his prey. And I was enjoying it...

Then he bit me again, this time in my shoulder.

Chapter 30

Adrian

Never in my life had I met such an attractive human girl. And also, never before had the mere smell of blood driven me so out of my mind. I had to be careful that my teeth did not dig into her warm flesh, and that had never been an issue before.

My lips moved almost automatically on her soft skin, and the smell of her blood was now sweetly in my nose, clouding my senses in an unusual way.

Her moans were already stealing my mind, and so my teeth slid into her soft skin.

The sweetness of her blood was like a drug, and the first drop made me curse softly, but I couldn’t just stop, and so I kept sucking, biting her warm shoulder this time.

I had never been this close to being unreasonable before. But I had to pull myself together. One serious bite and her life would be over.