Page 59 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

The knowledge should change everything. Instead, I put my hand against his chest anyway.

Julian makes that quiet sound I have become entirely too interested in and draws me closer. For one dangerous second I forget about portraits and bells and centuries and think only about his mouth, his hand at my back, and the fact that I would very much like to invite him inside and find out whether being a vampire has any implications for the thing he nearly did to me on my prep counter.

Apparently the revelation has not improved my character.

When he finally lifts his head, I’m breathless. He, of course, is not. He rests his forehead briefly against mine.

“Goodnight, Penny.”

“Goodnight.”

He waits until I have my door open before he goes. He has done that every single time since October, and until tonight I thought it was only manners.

I stand in my dark hall with the keys still in my hand and my coat still on. Eventually I say it out loud to an empty house, because if I say it in my head one more time I am going to start arguing with it.

“He’s a vampire.”

The house takes it about as well as I do.

I’m not frightened. I want that on the record. I have spent the evening on the arm of a vampire, kissed him goodnight, and seriously considered inviting him upstairs. What I feel standing here in my grandmother’s hallway is not fear, and I am going to have to think about that eventually.

What I feel is that he has been on the stool at the end of my prep counter for days with a book he wasn’t reading, knowing perfectly well what might happen if I ever put the pieces together.

And he kept coming back.

CHAPTER 13

The copper is in worse shape than he made it sound.

“You said an alarming quantity,” I tell him, on my knees in front of a low cabinet in the Blackthorn House kitchen with a jam pan in my lap the size of a baby’s bathtub. “You did not say heirloom. You did not say museum. Julian, this is an antique French confiture pan and it has not been retinned since a French person owned it.”

“Then it has served admirably.”

“It hasn’t served anything since 1890. Look at this.” I hold it up so the copper catches the light. It’s gone the deep dull brown of something that hasn’t touched heat in a long time, and someone, once, kept it beautifully and then stopped. The base has gone bright and thin slightly off center, worn in exactly the same place over years of use. “Somebody loved this pan.”

“Did they?”

“You can tell. There’s a way people put things away.”

I set it down and reach past it for the next one, and the next. Saucepans. A fish kettle. A stockpot with two riveted handles and a repair on the base that somebody made by hand. There are nine pans in all, and the more I look at them, the more I can see the same hands in every one.

“Who cooked here?”

“A great many people, over the years.”

“Not the same ones, though.”

He’s quiet for a second too long. “No,” he says. “Not the same ones.”

I look over my shoulder at him.

I’ve been at Blackthorn House for two hours, and I have not said the word. I promised myself in the van, driving up the hill with a roll of steel wool and a tin of my grandmother’s copper polish on the passenger seat like a chaperone, that I would give him the chance to say it first. He came to my kitchen four nights a week knowing I might eventually figure him out. The least I owe him is the chance to tell me himself.

So I’ve been very good. I’ve polished. I’ve asked about the pans and not about him. I’ve watched him lean against the kitchen wall with his arms folded, wearing a soft grey sweater and no shoes, which I did not expect and which is somehow worse than the suit, and I’ve said nothing every single time the far end of my brain lit up like a switchboard.

Because the far end of my brain has been having a wonderful time. He has no shoes on. Do his feet get cold? Everything about him is cold. Does he feel the cold, or is he the cold? I have questions. I have roughly nine hundred questions, and I’ve been swallowing them one at a time for two hours until they’ve backed up into my chest.

I’ve given him openings.