C

harlize slammed the community manual closed. Bam!

Breen peeled his eyes open wider. If he’d had any energy, he might’ve startled.

She thundered over to his armchair and came to a rigid stop in front of him, her hands planted on her hips.  

The position bowed open the neckline of her robe, but he tried not to notice the view. He might not be a sitcom guy, but basic male instinct for doing whatever it took to calm down his woman so he could get laid again told him that ogling Charlize’s tits while she was jammed up would only make her more jammed.

He met her gaze, which was glaring hot.

“You were a virgin!?” she hissed at him.

He blinked slowly. Now why would that piss her off? Was this another hidden meaning thing? He tried to reason it out, but his brain was a gigantic yawn.

“You screwed me like a wild man. How the hell does a virgin do that?”  

He shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess I’ve been thinking about sex for a long time.”

She piffed. “Every man does that.”

“Not like our breed. A Vârcolac reaches sexual maturity at the age of twenty-one, but because there’s been no one for us to mate with for years—only you Dragons, who showed up on the scene recently—we’ve had to wait forever to have sex. I’m thirty-nine. That means I’ve been thinking about sex for eighteen years.”

She gaped at him, her mouth just hanging open for a long moment, then she turned around and stomped a couple of paces away. “I don’t know which number is more appalling to me. The thirty-nine or the eighteen.” Beneath her bathrobe, her spinal cord was a tight stretch of bones.  

Thirty-nine was actually young in Vârcolac years. He wasn’t sure what to say about the eighteen. “Why does the virgin thing bother you?”  

She spun back around, her glare reigniting. “Because the hell if I want to be anyone’s memory.” The edge of her jaw quivered. “Now I’ll forever be your first.”

First and only. Vârcolac mated for life. But probably he should keep quiet about it. She was already upset enough. He scratched his temple. “I’m not sure what you want me to do about it. I mean, I can’t undo it.” Virginity was one of those things.

Charlize crossed her arms beneath her breasts. The new posture was better than when she had her hands on her hips, and… No, actually, it wasn’t. “No, you can’t undo it, can you?” she snapped. “Any of it.”  

Breen wasn’t able to stop himself. He was acting on instinct.  

When Toni had said that, she’d cast him a sideways glance, and even though her expression wasn’t accusatory, it wasn’t exactly forgiving either. Like maybe at some point in this chain of disastrous events, she believed he should’ve known what the hell he was doing.