A Werewolf’s Guide to Seducing a Vampire (Glimmer Falls, #3)

by Sarah Hawley

“I’m thirty-eight and single and haven’t dated in nearly a decade. My business takes up all my time, and I like to knit, and I’m not even a properly rowdy werewolf, and who could ever love someone who feels this anxious most of the time? I should like all the howling and biting things, but I just feel out of control, and no one else likes sweater vests even though they’re wrong about that, and what if nothing about me is attractive and I die alone in a ditch?”

Would she ever be able to look at a person and think: I am safe with you?

“I already feel out of control,” he said, tapping his temple with a forefinger. “On a bad day I can spiral and it’s like I have no control over my thoughts or emotions. Shifting is like that. All of a sudden I’m in a new form, feeling all these powerful instincts, and I have no say in it.”

“It’s more that…Most people end up in the ground anyway. Pretending otherwise doesn’t change that, and there’s freedom in knowing that and fighting anyway. Choosing to face the truth beneath life, no matter how bloody or strange, is always better than fooling yourself into thinking the sparkles on the surface are what’s real.”

“When pride is that fragile, it’s just aggression papered over insecurity or cruelty. It becomes a liability.”

God’s ovaries, that was delicious.

And really, every good couple should have a soft one and a stabby one.”

“The world is too large for everyone to be the same.”

“My father was prone to dark moods,” she said after a pause. “Weeks or months where he would feel despair over everything and nothing in particular. His father was the same, and some of his cousins as well. It was a private battle they all fought. Eventually the joy would emerge again—it always did—but we never judged him for those dark periods. We loved him through them.”

“You,” he said, words rumbling against her, “are delicious.” She tipped her head back, staring blindly at the ceiling. This was the passion she’d always known was inside him, the one she’d tasted in his blood that first day. Ben Rosewood was a gentleman, but he fucked.

One foolproof way to never lose her was to keep her chained to his side.

It didn’t matter how much an abuser said they loved someone—or even if they truly believed they loved that person. An abuser would always consider themselves the hero or heroine of their own story. But their love was a broken facsimile of the real thing, not worth having, and it wasn’t worth wasting time feeling sympathy for someone like that.

“The light is most beautiful to those who know the dark,” she said, remembering something her father had told her long ago.