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“Maybe getting bitten and having another round of crazy sex in your boudoir.”
“That’s a staple from now on, Katherine.” He presented my steak, oozing with blood. “Bon appetite.”
I was straight on it, moaning as the bloody meat melted in my mouth. Even though the steak was a huge one I was done in a few minutes, tops.
“Excellent work,” he said. “Shame I don’t have any bat-shaped candy to follow, or strawberry jam for that matter, but we’ll get the cupboards stocked up for you.”
Who’d have ever thought I’d be in a vampire’s house talking about the domesticity of cupboards stocked with strawberry jam? I almost laughed out loud, it was so surreal.
One thing that was already becoming less surreal was my easiness around Hans. Despite the crazy fact he’d sucked blood from me and taken my virginity with his huge vampire cock, plus actually killed a criminal before my eyes, it was already so natural to watch him across the breakfast bar. Me watching him as he watched me.
Maybe it was his smile, or his care, or the way he was so at ease with himself. Maybe it was because I was already a tiny bit familiar with him from Regency in my brief stint working there. Or maybe it was–
“Feeling not thinking, remember?” he said with a smirk. “Believe me, you can drive yourself insane with a mind running riot.”
“I’ve got plenty to be thinking about, don’t you think?”
“True.”
I leant back on my stool, wincing a little at the pain. I was still staring at him.
“You must have been thinking so much that you were driving yourself crazy at some point?” I asked him. “Your mind must have been in turmoil when you were turned into a vampire in the first place, suddenly undead after being tortured in Garway church.”
He tipped his head. “Undead is quite a potent term for vampire. I prefer transformed. My flesh died, but I didn’t. Call it a transition that takes over. It didn’t change who I was, just gave me a lot longer to explore it.”
“And a lot longer to think about it too?”
“Well, when you put it like that. Yes.”
He got me a glass of water and placed it down in front of me.
“Make sure you keep hydrated.”
I loved the way he was so attentive, with care in his eyes. It was quite an intense combination of authority and almost parental care, mixed with the unmistakable buzz of sexual attraction. How did that work? And that wasn’t the entirety of it, either. What other subtle dynamics were playing on different frequencies between us?
“Like I said, feeling not thinking,” Hans said. “Don’t try to fathom the unfathomable. Life is complicated. Souls are both too simple and too complex to understand all at once.”
I held my hands up. “Busted! I’ll try to keep my brain spinning to a minimum. Not sure how well I’ll succeed, though.”
I failed miserably in a heartbeat, since another question came out of nowhere.
“What happened to the people around you when you became a vampire? Did you have friends? A family? There must have been so much that changed.”
“That’s a deep one to answer at 5 a.m.” He yawned but I’m sure it was faked.
“Maybe give me a condensed version?”
“Hmm.”
He looked wistful as his mind turned inwards, no doubt looking back a long, long time.
“I was devoted to the Church and my role in the Templars. One of the vows was celibacy, so I didn’t have a family. My parents were in Normandy. I wrote letters but hadn’t seen them in years. I had grief for the people I lost, yes, but that grief was mainly for the brothers being interrogated to death all around me. Plenty of us got taken down.”
I felt like I’d overstepped the mark by probing so deep into his past, but he took my hand.
“You can ask questions. As I said, I’m happy to answer them. Just make sure you want to know the answers before you voice them aloud.”
“Why wouldn’t I?” I squeezed his fingers. “Your life is fascinating.”
