Page 151 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

I lean against him. “I was going to. I don’t have anything tomorrow until noon and I left half my clothes in the north bedroom anyway.”

“No.”

I lift my head, and he’s looking down at me. Not guarded. Just Julian.

“Stay here,” he says again. “With me.”

Oh.

“I’ve had this house for two hundred and thirty years. It is the only home I have ever managed to keep. For most of that time, keeping it was enough. I knew where everything was. I knew what every room contained. I knew that I could leave and come back and it would still be here.” He glances towards the table. “Then you started leaving things here.”

“You mean the hairbrush.”

“The hairbrush. The apron. The shoes beside the back door that I have nearly fallen over twice.”

“You don’t fall over things.”

“I can be inconvenienced.”

I roll my eyes. “How terrible.”

“Two drawers.”

“One of which you didn’t tell me about.”

“Three books in my library that are not mine.”

“They’re cookbooks.”

“They’re still books.”

I laugh, but he doesn’t. Not quite.

“I’ve spent months watching you leave pieces of a life in this house and then gather yourself up at eleven o’clock and go back down the hill.” His hand tightens around mine. “I would like you to stop going home.”

My heart thumps, and he hears it. Of course he does.

“I am not asking you to give up the cottage,” he says quickly. “It was your grandmother’s. It’s yours, and I would never ask that. I have considered the practical arrangements. There is ample room here for anything you wish to bring, although I would like to discuss the kitchen before you make unilateral decisions about⁠—”

“Yes,” I say.

He stops. “You haven’t heard the arguments.”

“Yes.”

“There are four of them. One is quite good.”

“I said yes, Julian.”

He stares at me, and I start laughing. Not because it’s funny, exactly, but because he looks genuinely astonished, which is something I still don’t get to see very often. Apparently a man can live four hundred years and still be surprised when the woman who has been leaving her shoes by his back door for months agrees to leave them there permanently.

“You didn’t think about it,” he says.

“I have been thinking about it.”

“When?”

“Every time I have to drive down that hill at eleven o’clock.”