Page 16 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

“That seems proportionate.”

“Harriet Coyne won three years running and there’s an ongoing feud about the fourth. It’s tomorrow.” I’m babbling again. I hear myself do it and can’t stop it, same as at the party, the words just come tumbling out. “You should come. You don’t have to eat. Obviously.” I wave a hand at all of him. “But you should come. It’s fun. It’s the whole town. It’s⁠—”

“Yes,” Julian says.

I blink. “What?”

“Yes. I’ll come.”

No pause. No dry deflection. Just yes, immediately, like he’d already decided before I finished asking. The way you say yes when nothing else in the week was ever going to be more important. The flutter that goes through my stomach is so absurd and so sudden and so completely disproportionate to a man agreeing to attend a chowder night that I have to look down at my bag and pretend to search for keys I’m already holding.

“Great,” I manage. “Good. It’s good. You like Theo. Theo likes you. Theo likes everyone but he especially—” Stop talking, Penny. “Tomorrow. Seven.”

“Tomorrow. At seven.” He rises as I do, which nobody does anymore, and my stomach does it again. “Penny.”

“Yeah?”

He looks at me for a moment, and something moves behind the calm façade. “Thank you for the coffee I did not drink.”

“Anytime,” I say. “I mean it. That’s an open offer. On the not-drinking-coffee.”

The almost-smile is nearly a whole one this time. “I will hold you to it.”

And then I’m out on the street with two coffees’ worth of caffeine singing in my blood and a wedding tasting to run and a chowder night to look forward to like it’s Christmas, and I’m smiling like an idiot the whole way down Main Street.

He said yes before I even finished asking.

CHAPTER 5

“It’s a chowder,” Wendell Marr says. “You put fish in it. You put potato in it. You put cream in it. Then you stop.”

Hollis Baker crosses his arms. “There’s bacon in mine.”

“I know there’s bacon in yours. It’s wrong.”

“People like it. You don’t get to decide what people like.”

“People liked the Hindenburg,” Wendell says. “Right up until they didn’t.”

Four minutes past seven, and the Widow’s Lantern already has forty-one people in a room made for thirty. The windows have gone opaque with steam. Someone’s coat is drying on the radiator and making the place smell like a wet dog. Theo’s strung old brass lanterns along the beams, and they throw a warm amber light over everything—the scarred wooden tables, the fishing nets on the walls that have hung there so long they’re basically load-bearing, and the long counter where nineteen crock pots and one deeply suspicious slow cooker sit in a row like defendants at a trial.

I’ve got my own crock in the lineup, of course. Smoked haddock, brown butter, and a little tarragon. I’m not entering. I’m just participating. I’ll be telling myself that right up until the moment Bess reads out the winner, and I discover exactly how much I actually care. Bess judges the contest because while Theo owns the bar, she owns the kitchen, an arrangement that came with the building and has never once been written down. She runs both it and the Kettle with an ease that puts me to shame.

Theo works the room in a flannel shirt with the sleeves shoved past the elbow, arguing about whether to add salt and shouting things about spoons.

“He’ll come,” he says more quietly, pausing at my elbow, and I realize I’ve been watching the door again.

“I didn’t say he wouldn’t.”

“You’ve looked at that door about nine times.”

“I’m expecting the Patels. They’re bringing the⁠—”

The door opens, and it isn’t the Patels.

Julian ducks under the low frame the way tall men learn to duck under low frames, and steps into the amber light. There’s nothing as dramatic as a hush this time, just a hitch in the conversation and a dozen heads turning towards him and turning back. He’s in a dark coat over a dark sweater, and he looks exactly as out of place in a fisherman’s pub as a black orchid in a bucket of daisies, and somehow entirely at ease.

His eyes go around the room once until they find me, and they warm just before Theo bellows across the whole pub.