Page 94 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

I laugh, but the sound catches when his mouth brushes the place where my neck meets my shoulder.

“It is the loudest thing in the world,” he says against my skin. “And it is yours. And since Monday, it’s the only thing I can think about.”

Every thought I have ever had leaves the building.

His hand moves into my hair and gathers it away from my neck. He kisses the exposed skin once, cool and open-mouthed, then again, and waits until the tension leaves my shoulders and my head settles back against him.

“Penny, tell me again.”

“Yes,” I say. “Do it.”

It hurts. For perhaps a second it is a clean, bright sting. I gasp and my whole body tenses, and Julian’s arm tightens around my waist, holding me through the instinctive flinch. Then the pain disappears, and something else takes its place.

I don’t have a word for it. I make food for a living. I have spent nine years finding words for taste and texture and heat, and there is no word for this.

Warmth blooms from the place where his mouth meets my throat. Not his warmth—he is still cool against my back—but mine, spreading outward in slow golden waves, rolling through my chest and down my arms and lower, each one arriving in time with the steady beat of my own heart.

It feels like being filled with light from the inside.

My head goes loose and pleasantly heavy. My hands find his forearm where it crosses my waist and hold on, not because I want him to stop but because suddenly I need something solid in the world.

Then Julian starts to shake.

That’s the part I am not ready for. Controlled, courtly, three-seconds-to-answer-about-coffee Julian is trembling against my back as the arm around my waist gently pulls me closer. His mouth is hot at my throat, which no part of him has ever been.

And that, I realize through the warm golden haze spreading through me, is what I actually wanted. Not the biting. The surrender.

I’ve wanted to know what lives beneath all that stillness almost from the beginning, and here it is. It’s not dangerous or uncontrolled. If anything, I can feel how much control he is using. I can feel exactly how much he wants and exactly how little he will allow himself to take, and the distance between those two things may be the most naked thing anyone has ever shown me.

He said feeding was intimate. He was underselling it.

The water knocks softly against the hull. The mast creaks somewhere above us. My pulse beats gold through my body, and Julian drinks from me with his whole enormous strength banked into gentleness.

Then he stops.

He pulls back quickly enough that an actual sound of complaint escapes me. His tongue moves once over the place and the sting vanishes, and then his forehead comes down hard against my shoulder.

“Whoa,” I say.

“Please do not say anything for a moment.”

“I have so many things to say.”

“I know.” His voice is wrecked. “That’s what I am afraid of.”

I turn enough to look at him and nearly lose what little remains of my ability to behave. He’s a mess. His hair is disheveled, his eyes heavy-lidded and sparking red, and his beautiful controlled face has completely come apart at the seams. He looks at me as though he isn’t entirely certain what has just happened.

“Hi,” I say.

He closes his eyes and puts his forehead back on my shoulder. “Give me a moment.”

“Take one.”

“I am taking several.”

I lie back against him with my throat tingling and my whole body still full of warmth, and look up at a sky thick with stars.

Eventually Julian lifts his head and looks at me.