Page 66 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

“I keep waiting for it.”

“It’s not coming.” I stand up before I make the conscious decision to move. I’m just up, walking around the end of the table, and he watches me the way he watched me cross my kitchen the night he almost… The night we decided to wait. “I’ve spent weeks feeding a man who couldn’t eat and telling myself I didn’t know why. I’m done being good, Julian. I’ve been so good tonight I could scream. I have polished a pan.”

I stop in front of the stool. Our faces are level, which almost never happens, given the size of the man. Julian simply looks at me, and the restraint I have watched him carry for weeks narrows down to one final thread.

“Penny,” he says, and his voice has gone rough. “If you touch me right now, I don’t think I’m going to be very restrained about it.”

“Good,” I say. “I’ve had enough restraint to last me four hundred years.”

I put my hand against his chest, over the place where the nothing lives, the stillness I noticed the first night and pretended not to. And I feel him decide.

CHAPTER 14

One second I’m standing in front of Julian with my hand on his chest, and the next I’m against the edge of the great scrubbed table with his mouth on mine, and there is the speed I keep telling myself I’ve stopped noticing. Except now I know exactly what it is, and it is aimed entirely at getting closer to me, and I am never going to stop noticing it again.

His hands come up to cradle my face, cool and careful despite everything he just said, and I make a sound against his mouth that tells him precisely how done I am with careful.

He pulls me closer. I get my hands under the soft grey sweater and the cool silk shirt and flatten them against his skin. He makes a sound I have never heard before, and it does something catastrophic to my remaining judgment.

“The bed,” he says against my lips. “The very good one. I refuse to do this on Marguerite’s table.”

“That may be the most romantic thing anyone has ever said to me.”

“I can do better.”

“Then do better upstairs.”

He picks me up. He simply lifts me off the floor like I weigh nothing, and I get half a laugh out and then his mouth is at the side of my throat, not biting, just there, cool and open and unbearably gentle over the pulse I now know he can hear, and whatever clever thing I was going to say goes out of my head.

I don’t remember much about the stairs. I remember the dark hall going past. I remember paintings he never takes down. I remember thinking that somewhere in this house there are rooms Julian stopped entering because everyone who once filled them disappeared.

His bedroom is at the north end of the second floor, and it is very much lived in. There are books on the bedside table, and a sweater over the back of a chair. One window is cracked open to the sea, and the curtains move in the cold air and the bed is, in fact, a very good one.

He sets me on it and stands over me for a moment, and I realize he’s giving me one last exit. This is the man who waits at my door every single night until I’m safely inside. The man who came to dinner because I asked him. The man who has spent weeks wanting me and has never once made his wanting my problem.

I reach up and take a fistful of that soft grey sweater and pull.

“Julian,” I say. “I made a place at the table. Sit down.”

Whatever’s left of the restraint goes. He comes down over me, cool and heavy and reverent, his hands moving over the deep green sweater I chose at six in the morning like a liar. He undresses me the way he does everything, each unhurried movement completed before the next one starts. It takes an unreasonable amount of time because he keeps stopping to ask for permission.

“May I?” he asks as he unbuttons my sweater.

“Yes.”

His fingers find the button on my jeans.

“May I⁠—”

“Julian, I’m having a card printed.”

He stills.

“What?”

“Something tasteful. Cream card stock. Penelope Harrington hereby grants Julian Volkov blanket permission to stop asking whether he may touch every individual square inch of her body.”

“I would keep it.”