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He was standing less than a foot away, staring past me toward the front of the house, and every trace of expression had vanished from his face.

That frightened me considerably more than the cold.

"Miss Byrne," a man said from the front doorway. "I do apologize for interrupting. I've been waiting on the porch for a while, and I'm afraid I've exhausted every convincing way to pretend I'm admiring the bicycle."

I crept out slowly and stuck my head out to look at whoever was talking.

He stood in the open doorway with the gray weather behind him, making no attempt to come inside.

I understood why almost immediately.

What I didn't understand was why the universe insisted on making dangerous men so offensively beautiful.

Destin was stunning.

There was no other word for him, and I resented having to admit it even inside my own head. He was tall and lean beneath a charcoal overcoat tailored so perfectly it made every other man who had ever worn a suit look as though he'd borrowed it for a funeral. Dark hair swept back from a face built out of sharp cheekbones, a strong jaw, and a mouth that had no business looking that inviting on something technically dead. Silver touched his temples, not enough to age him, only enough to make the rest of him seem more deliberate.

Then there were his eyes.

They settled on me with the intimate concentration of a man who already knew what I tasted like.

My pulse stumbled.

Oh, fuck him for that.

The reaction wasn't entirely mine, but knowing that didn't stop it. Vampires had spent millennia perfecting the art of making prey want to move closer. Everything about him encouraged it, from the symmetry of his face, the low warmth of his voice, the faint curve of his mouth, even the way he stood completely at ease in the doorway. Some primitive part of my brain took one look at him and suggested that perhaps walking directly toward the predator would be an excellent idea.

Fortunately, the rest of my brain had survived twenty-six years of my decision-making and knew better.

I tightened my grip on the tin box.

The longer I looked at him, the more the illusion began to show its seams. He was too still. Not composed. Not relaxed. Frozen in place, more like it. Human bodies were never truly motionless. We shifted our weight, swallowed, blinked, breathed.

Destin hadn't drawn a single breath since he started talking.

Nothing moved beneath the expensive coat. There was no rise of his chest, no unconscious adjustment of his shoulders, none of those tiny betrayals of a living body that you never noticed until they were missing.

The pentagram against my skin flared hot.

Attraction evaporated beneath a much healthier instinct.

Run.

"You're on private property," I told him, raising my eyebrows at his audacity.

His mouth curved, and there it was again, that completely unreasonable face doing things it had no business doing to my concentration.

"I'm on a threshold, which is a distinction that matters a great deal to me and apparently not at all to you."

He made no move to cross that threshold, thankfully.

Instead, he inclined his head with the effortless grace of a man who had probably been charming women into terrible decisions since before indoor plumbing.

"Destin. I would offer you my hand, but they're cold and it tends to upset people."

Of course, his name was Destin.

A face like that was never going to belong to a Gary.