Page 7 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

“Naturally.”

“Do you want him?”

“I would not deprive you.” He turns it over in his fingers, looks at the underside, and hands it back with both hands, the way you’d return something valuable. “The near foreleg has been mended. Whoever did it took care.”

The boy beams like the rising sun and goes off to find his grandmother, dragging Horse by the tail.

And I stand there with a stack of dessert plates against my chest, feeling something warm and precarious happen behind my ribs, and think, well. There goes the serial killer theory.

“You’re staring,” Lucy says, appearing at my shoulder with her camera and a tart.

“I’m hosting.”

“You’re hosting at him.”

I ignore her and go to refill his water glass for the third time. It’s still full.

I bring the fourth course—the black garlic short rib, the one I’m proudest of, the one that took three days—and I set it in front of him and I wait for the thing I live for. That first bite. The little pause. The look.

He looks at the plate. He looks at me. And he says, with a courtesy so complete it’s almost a wall, “This is the most beautiful thing anyone has put in front of me in longer than you’d believe. Thank you.”

And he does not pick up his fork.

You should know that I do not dine.

I’d read the words. I’d turned them over. I’d decided, somewhere in the back of my optimistic skull, that they meant dietary restrictions or fasting or shy about eating in public. I’d known he might not touch anything. I just hadn’t quite believed it. I have fed people who swore they weren’t hungry, people who were grieving, and people who hadn’t sat at a table with anyone in years. I have never, not once, put a plate in front of a person and watched them simply decline to be reached.

The short rib sits there, glossy and perfect and untouched, and something in my chest pulls tight in a way that makes me extremely uncomfortable.

“Everything all right, dear?” Mabel asks softly. She’s materialized next to me the way she does, and she’s not looking at me. She’s looking at Julian, at the full plate and the man behind the plate, with those sharp old eyes narrowed the smallest fraction behind her cat-eye glasses.

“Fine,” I say. “He’s—he told me. In the letter. He doesn’t eat.”

“He hasn’t touched his wine either,” she murmurs.

“Maybe he doesn’t drink.”

“Maybe.” Mabel studies him over the rim of her glasses. “There’s something familiar about that man.”

“You’ve met him?”

“No.” Her eyes narrow slightly. “That’s what’s bothering me.”

I circle back to the kitchen. I plate the dessert. I refill goblets and laugh at the mayor’s jokes and let Theo talk me into promising the Widow’s Lantern a batch of the broth. I do my job. I run my room. And the whole time, my eyes keep going back to the head of my table, to the still, pale, unfairly gorgeous man sitting in the no-longer-empty seat.

Twice, I catch him.

Twice, across the length of my crimson-draped, candlelit dining room, over the ruin of a dinner nobody’s finishing because they’re too busy talking, I look up and find that deep reddish gaze already resting on me.

The first time, he glances away, courteous, giving me the room.

The second time, he doesn’t.

CHAPTER 3

“There’s nothing to talk about,” I insist again, and Lucy shakes her head.

“You looked at that man for four straight seconds.”