Page 95 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

“What do you need?”

I start laughing.

“What?”

“Nothing. It’s just—” I wipe at my eyes with a sleeve that hangs four inches past my hand. “You’re sitting here in pieces and you asked me what I need.”

“It is the only question I have ever found reliable.”

“I need a cookie.”

“Thank God.”

He reaches for the bag with a hand that is not entirely steady, and that nearly starts me laughing again. The dizziness arrives a minute later. It isn’t bad, more like the first ten minutes after a large glass of wine on an empty stomach. Julian makes me eat a cookie and finish the chowder, and he sits beside me with two fingers resting on the inside of my wrist.

After a while I look down at them. “Are you taking my pulse?”

“I’m counting. I count most things.”

“You’re taking my pulse. I’m fine.”

“I know.”

“You can stop.”

“I know.”

He doesn’t, and I let him keep doing it. Eventually the dizziness passes, leaving behind only the pleasant hum of warmth under my skin and an increasingly serious awareness of the man sitting beside me.

I turn towards him, and his eyes narrow immediately. “No.”

“I haven’t done anything.”

“You’re about to.”

“I was going to kiss you.”

“That’s not all you were going to do,” he says, and he’s not wrong. I huff at him anyway.

“You can hear my heart. That’s cheating.”

“I have never claimed otherwise.”

I lean across and kiss him. There is the faintest trace of copper and salt on his mouth, and it’s mine, and I want it again. I slide a hand beneath his jacket and into the front of his shirt.

“Penny.”

“Mm.”

“We’re a half mile offshore.”

“I’ve noticed.”

“There is a great deal of standing rigging on this boat and you will damage yourself on all of it.”

I finally pull back. “That may be the least romantic sentence you have ever produced.”

“It’s a practical sentence.”