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Finally, he gently cupped my backside and slid me off the chair, depositing me on his lap. I inched closer to him, wishing I didn’t have to pause for breath. The swell of need and pent-up desire and the hope for more was a rush I wasn’t prepared to handle.
“Oh my!” Grandma Betty stopped short in the kitchen doorway.
Dom and I broke apart, me scurrying back to my chair like a student who’d been caught breaking out of detention. Dom languidly threw his arm over the back of his chair and stretched like a cat in sunlight.
My grandmother glanced between us with curiosity, then flicked her gaze pointedly at her watch. Her brow furrowed. “It hasn’t even been an hour. How...happy is this little reunion?”
Once again, my grandmother’s thinly coded statement clicked. She was assuming that her little Happy Hex had turned Dom into a randy vampire, and that was the reason for our impromptu make out session.
I knew differently. The potion had nothing to do with the kiss.
“Sorry,” Dom said. “I apologize for letting things get out of hand, Grandma Betty.”
“Don’t apologize,” Gran said. “Happy to see the two of you are on good terms.”
“I’m not apologizing for kissing Trixie,” Dom corrected. “Just for getting carried away in your kitchen.”
My face went pink. Gran gave a tinkling laugh.
Then Grandma Betty eyed me. “Well, this should be a fun ride home, I guess. You don’t mind taking Trixie back to The Hollow, do you, Dom? We used pixie dust to get to Crystal Rivers, and I know it’s not my granddaughter’s favorite mode of transportation.”
Dom studied me pointedly. “It’d be my pleasure.”
Chapter 16
Dominic
Three hours in a car with Trixie Gardens was a sweet kind of torture.
I made the mistake a few minutes into the ride of glancing over at Trixie. One look at that mussed hair and those swollen-kissed lips, and I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about her since. Literally. For even a second. It was this compulsion, this desire to pull her close unlike anything I’d ever experienced before.
I also felt sort of deliriously happy. At one point, I reached over and grabbed Trixie’s hand, just holding it as I drove for no reason at all. The last time I’d held a woman’s hand was... well, a long time ago.
About two hours into the drive, Trixie glanced down at us holding hands, her ears turning red. She studied me with some side-eye, which was probably warranted. I wasn’t a smiley sort of guy, and it was like I couldn’t wipe the grin off my face. Literally, I’d tried. It was stuck and I was at a loss for what was happening to me.
Once, she’d ventured a careful, “Are you okay?”
“Yep,” I chirped, that smile glued to my lips. I could practically feel my incisors fighting the smile going on around them.
“Can you pull over here?” Trixie asked, giving one more glance at my oddly long-lasting smile when I shifted uncomfortably. “I need to do something.”
I glanced at the stretches of cornfields that went on for miles on either direction. “Here?”
“Yes, please.” She wiggled her phone. “I have service.”
I pulled over. We’d been the only car on the road for miles and miles. I waited while Trixie stepped into the sunshine. She shut the door behind her, and despite my best efforts not to eavesdrop, I couldn’t help but hear every word of her conversation. Vampire senses and all. That, and the fact that Trixie was practically shouting.
“Gran?” Trixie ran a hand through her hair, the color of it glittering beneath the sunny blue skies. She looked like a princess. “Yes, it’s me. What the hell did you put in that hex?”
“The usual,” Gran said over the phone line. “Why? Is it working? Has Dominic been deliriously happy?”
“You’re making the poor man miserable. It’s like he’s got this smile fixed onto his face that won’t go away, and the way he’s shifting in his seat has me thinking he’s been happy in his pants for so long he’s requiring a trip to the emergency room. Not to mention the fact that the vampire is holding my hand. Holding my hand, Betty!”
I winced and turned to glance out the other window. Trixie wasn’t wrong. My body was doing a few things I wasn’t exactly proud of, and I wasn’t sure what was happening. A growing suspicion told me it might not entirely be the fault of biology.
“Oh, how very interesting,” Gran muttered. “I didn’t realize my Happy Hex would have so many side effects. I did add a spoken enchantment on top of the actual potion, and I’ve never been the best with word specificity. I suppose my words could’ve been twisted a bit.”
“Gran,” Trixie groaned. “What enchantment did you use exactly?”
