Snippet Saturday – Unleash (Vampire Erotic Theatre Romance Series Book 6) – Excerpt

Snippet Saturday is brought to you today by my paranormal romance book Unleash, which is the sixth book in my popular Vampire Erotic Theatre romance series. Read on for this Saturday’s snippet…

“Your bed is strange.” Her voice was melodic and light, a sound that curled around him and soothed his ears but not his bloodlust. That worsened, as though it despised her presence. She played havoc with it, and with him, and he was haemorrhaging patience. She pointed to the thick steel bars at the corners of his bed and the cuffs attached to them. “You have strange tastes. Why?”

Her gaze lit upon him, bright and curious, and Snow had the feeling that she was testing him for some infernal reason.

He could ignore questions too. “What do you want?”

She walked in a shallow circle, those curious eyes flickering around everything, cataloguing it and then coming back to take every inch of him in.

“I want nothing,” she said and drifted across the room to his dressing table.

Her fingertips danced over everything on it, from the lamp to the candles, to the stack of books. She leaned forwards, cocked her head to one side, and ran her fingers down the spines. The action shifted her black wings, causing the longest feathers of the right one to graze the floor.

She straightened and turned back to face him. “I felt you suffering again and was unable to ignore it, even though I know I should have this time.”

Snow frowned. “You were here with me… before. It was you.”

She nodded and walked towards him, her steps so light even he couldn’t hear them. She twirled her black hair around the fingers of her left hand and smiled at him. It hit him square in the chest and knocked the wind out of him.

“If you were here… then you know why my bed is the way that it is, and why I must chain myself. So why did you ask?” He growled the question, growing tired of her cryptic behaviour.

“I was curious to know what you would tell me.” She wrapped her small hands around one of the steel posts at the end of his bed and leaned her shoulder against it.

Snow didn’t like that she had seen him in the throes of his bloodlust, but he was beginning to share her sense of curiosity. “Why are you here… and why did you sing to me?”

A pretty blush coloured her flawless pale cheeks. “You remember?”

Wasn’t he supposed to have remembered? Evidently, she hadn’t expected him to recall that someone had been in his room, singing him to sleep, speaking to him in a language that hadn’t left his lips in close to one thousand years before he had awoken to find Antoine watching over him.

Snow nodded.

She didn’t tell him why she was here. She pushed away from the post and twirled so her back was to him, the white layers of her dress spinning outwards to reveal the outline of her shapely legs beneath. Snow barely bit back the growl that rumbled up his throat at the sight of her long slender legs.

Her black wings shifted and stretched, almost spanning his room before settling against her back again.

“I do not enjoy your choice of decor,” she said in a bright tone and looked over her shoulder, past her black wing to him. “It is morbid. Mortals would call it depressing.”

Snow folded his arms across his chest. “You know that I am not mortal, and I feel this decor suits me and this place.”

He smiled slowly. Desire to make her blush again so he could see it shot through him.

“You must know the sort of business I run with the others here, and the sort of creature I am.”

“I do not care.” She twirled to face him, affording him another glimpse of long legs that would have made him blush if he hadn’t been in perfect control of himself.

“Again, female, why are you here?” If she didn’t answer this time, he might leave the bed, grab her shoulders and shake the answer out of her.

She was petite, delicate in appearance, but his senses warned that she was powerful and more than able to put him on his arse if he tried to harm her.

“I said… I was watching over you.” Her black eyebrows pinched in a frown. “Do you not listen?”

Snow scowled back at her and scoffed at her words. “My own guardian angel? I have done nothing to deserve an angel watching over me. Your kind should be put to better use, given to those who deserve you.”

Her frown hardened. “You do not deserve compassion?”

There was an edge to her expression and the hint of her emotions that he could detect that told him she didn’t believe him worthy of compassion either and that she hated being here. Confusing female.

He wanted to pick her up on her feelings towards him and ask her why she was here when she harboured such dark, un-angel-like emotions. Did she despise all of his kind or just him? Had he done something to gain her scorn?

It bothered him but he pushed it to the back of his mind, unwilling to contemplate the notion that she may hate all vampires because it would inevitably lead to him deciding that she was a danger to everyone at the theatre and then his bloodlust would break free of the tattered threads that restrained it.

She had been in the room before, and he didn’t know how many other times she had visited him over the twenty-one days he had been out of his mind. If she were a threat, she would have attacked before now.

No. Attacking the theatre or killing him were not the reasons she was here. There was another one, one she was unwilling to share with him right now.

The angel meandered around his room again, the longest feathers of her black wings almost grazing the wooden floor with each silent step.

She delighted in the strangest things, such as looking through his drawers and pulling out items of clothing and holding them up for inspection. She rummaged through his wardrobe too, and held more than one shirt against her small, wickedly sensual body.

Those shirts would smell like her, and he had the stupidest urge to wear one of them tonight and carry her sweet scent with him to the party. It was almost as pathetic as the pleasing image of her dressed in only one of his shirts, curled up asleep and sated on his bed, that leaped into his mind.

She hummed as she poked at everything on top of his dressing table again and thumbed through several of his books. The same melody she had sung to him. The sound of it soothed his bloodlust and relaxed him, and he found himself enjoying her company.

She turned on the spot again and looked from his black-tiled bathroom and the broken mirror to him, her dark eyebrows rising as her gaze fell to his injured hand.

“Why did you taste your blood only to spit it into the sink?” That question leaving her lips caught him off guard and almost knocked the wind from him.

“You saw?”

“Of course,” she said in a matter of fact tone, as though it shouldn’t surprise him that he hadn’t been as alone as he had thought.

“From here?” He didn’t like the thought of her being in his room, invisible to his senses, watching him. It stirred his bloodlust, reawakening the sense that she was a threat to him.

She shook her head.

“No. From my home.” Another pretty blush stained her cheeks. “I did not watch when I should not have. I only saw you strike the mirror and what came afterwards, and then I turned my gaze away from you again.”

Snow raised a single eyebrow at her. He hadn’t even considered that she could have been watching him in the shower. The thought of this beauty secretly watching him bathe had something other than his bloodlust rising and he cleared his throat and shifted his leg so she wouldn’t notice.

“Why did you spit out your blood?”

Snow averted his gaze, settling it on the black covers beside his left hip. Why indeed. He would sound stupid if he told her the truth, but the thought of lying to her didn’t sit well in his stomach, causing it to squirm worse than his hunger did.

He sighed. “Because it tastes foul.”

Snow lifted his head again, locking his eyes on her, monitoring her for a sign that might tell him what she thought of that. Her expression remained placid but the pink tint on her cheeks darkened as he stared at her and a flicker of curiosity reignited in her striking eyes.

“Why ask me about my blood and not about why I struck the mirror?” He couldn’t hold that one inside any longer. If she had watched him strike the mirror and then suck blood from the wound only to spit it out, shouldn’t her first question have been about his reason for smashing the glass? He was sure most people would have chosen that as their starting point.

Her gaze held his, unwavering and unreadable, emotionless. “Because I already know the reason why, Snow. I know what haunts your soul.”

Snow swallowed hard, the action forcing his galloping heart back down into his chest. The way she stared at him, her cool impassive eyes looking deep into his, as if she could see beyond his physical form, down to the soul she claimed to know, set him on edge and made him believe that she spoke the truth.

She knew all about him and the wretched acts in his past that he couldn’t escape.

This angel knew his pain and he had the feeling that she had been watching over him for longer than these past few days.

She turned away again and the instant the link between their eyes broke, he sagged against the pillows and his mind raced with the possibility that this angel had been watching over him for centuries or longer. His gaze followed her, tracking her as she resumed her perusal of his room.

Her eyes leaped from one thing to another in his apartment, but never fell on him. In fact, she seemed to be avoiding him now, as though she feared gazing upon him for some reason.

He doubted it was because she had noticed the effect of her earlier words on him and how quickly his body had reacted to the thought of her watching him shower. He even doubted it was because she knew his dark past and that it still tormented him now.

Was it because he wasn’t decent? He refused to close his robe for her sake. She had come to his room, an intruder not an invited guest. She would have to take him as she found him or leave.

When she turned in his direction to study the cuffs attached to the posts at the foot of his bed, her beauty arrested him again, claiming all of his attention. Her strange eyes darkened as she opened and closed one of the cuffs, and even went as far as shutting it around her delicate wrist. Her nose wrinkled in a frown when her hand easily slid free of the closed cuff.

Even the ones for his hands would produce the same result. They were designed for his thicker wrists and larger hands, not the slender ones of a female.

Her eyes finally lifted and met his, and the longer he stared into their mesmerising depths, the calmer he felt. He wasn’t sure why.

She curled her hand around the post at the foot of his bed to his right and swung around it until her knees hit the edge of the mattress. Closer than ever. She was within five feet of him now and not a trace of fear flickered in her eyes. Even Antoine was afraid of him at times and with good reason too.

His stomach twisted and rumbled, his hunger rearing its ugly head. He needed to chain himself and sleep, not give in to his urge to feed. Taking more blood tonight would be a grave mistake. He had to wean himself off it again, dropping to the smaller doses that had proved effective at keeping his bloodlust under better control before he had fallen off the wagon in dramatic style by draining three canisters in a row a few months ago.

“Leave, before it is too late,” Snow growled in warning and sat forwards with the intention of securing his ankles.

His gut clenched violently and his hands shook from the pain that ripped through him, shattering his fragile control over his bloodlust. He glanced at the angel, afraid he would harm her if he didn’t shackle his wrists this second. He trembled as he lay back, his stomach churning again, twisting in on itself until he couldn’t draw breath. Blood. He needed blood.

His eyes fixed darkly on the female.

Her blood.

He would drink her dry.

Did you enjoy today’s snippet?

Unleash
Felicity Heaton
A powerful vampire lost deep in his bloodlust, Snow is a savage animal, mindless with rage and a thirst for violence, and trapped with no hope of awakening from an endless nightmare… until a song draws him up from the abyss, restoring his sanity but leaving him haunted by the sweet feminine scent of lilies and snow, and fragmented familiar lyrics.

When the mysterious and beautiful songstress reappears in Snow’s room at Vampirerotique, she awakens a fierce protective streak and stirs dark desires that drive him to claim her as his female, even when he knows his touch will destroy her innocence.

A single forbidden taste is all it takes to unleash emotions in Aurora that she shouldn’t possess, tearing her between duty and desire, and luring her into surrendering to her wildfire passion and embracing hungers that burn so hotly they threaten to consume them both.

One act of kindness can lead to one thousand acts of sin though, each a black mark against the bearer’s soul and another grain of sand that slips through an hourglass. The clock is ticking and time is almost up. Can beauty save the beast?

Available in e-book from:
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Available in paperback from:
Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk | Barnes and Noble | Amazon.ca

You can get your hands on the first book in this series, COVET, for FREE right now on selected Amazon Kindle, Kobo, Nook and Apple iBooks Stores. Find out more at my Paranormal Romance Ebook Offers page.

If you haven’t had a chance to read any of the books in the Vampire Erotic Theatre romance series yet, they’re all available at major ebook retailers and in paperback, and you can find the links and samples of the books at my website:

Covet (Vampire Erotic Theatre Romance Series #1)
Crave (Vampire Erotic Theatre Romance Series #2)
Seduce (Vampire Erotic Theatre Romance Series #3)
Enslave (Vampire Erotic Theatre Romance Series #4)
Bewitch (Vampire Erotic Theatre Romance Series #5)
Unleash (Vampire Erotic Theatre Romance Series #6)