He watched her go. I watched him watch her go, and then he shut the door, locked it, and without looking at me said, “So, just how mad are you?”
Without a word, I turned and walked down the hall, into the kitchen, and poured myself a glass of water. I wasn’t thirsty, but there was a burning pain in my throat, and besides, it gave me something to do with my shaking hands.
I heard the door open as Michael followed me in. “Seriously,” he said. “Eve, I was just being friendly. She’s new in town.”
“Oh, so the hand-kissing, that’s just being friendly? I never see you doing it to Oliver.”
“A lot of these older vamp women, it’s what they expect. They don’t shake hands, Eve.”
“Well, they need to bring their undead asses into the twenty-first century, then, because hand-kissing went out with the guillotine, didn’t it? And since when do you do what’s expected, anyway?”
Michael shook his head and leaned back against the counter. “It’s not like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like I want to take her to bed, which is what you’re thinking, Eve.”
I couldn’t believe he’d gone and said that right out loud, even if I was thinking it. Not in such polite terms, though. “Then what’s it like?”
“Like I’m . . . curious. Look, she’s friendly, not like a lot of the others. I can ask her things, about being . . .” There was more color in his cheeks than normal; that was the closest a vampire could come to blushing. “About being what I am.”
“What kind of things?” I demanded.
Michael met my eyes. “Like how likely I am to lose control and hurt somebody close to me. That kind of thing. Especially when I’m hungry and we’re together.”
Oh. That hurt, in all kinds of unexpected ways; these were personal things, and it wasn’t just personal for him. I was the one who’d drawn the line with him, who’d said I was never, ever going to let him bite me, especially not that way. And it wasn’t something we talked about, not ever. Especially not with third parties who might be named Sexy Hell Kitten. “And you thought it was okay to discuss all this with a vamp you met, like, thirty seconds ago.”
“We’ve been talking for an hour, Eve. It wasn’t like it was the first thing out of my mouth.”
I swallowed. “Did you kiss her?”
“Eve!”
“Did you?”
“Jesus, of course not.”
“Did you want to?”
Michael just looked at me for a few, fatal seconds, then said, “She’s got that effect on guys, so, yeah, I guess I thought about it. But I didn’t do it.”
That didn’t make me feel any better. Gloriana would be back. At the very least, she’d return the hat and coat, and if I wasn’t here, he’d get all cozy with her again, and . . . things could happen. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust Michael—I did, I really did—but . . . she wasn’t just any random chick. She hadn’t stopped in just to pay a social call; Gloriana was hunting.
She was stalking my boyfriend.
“Over my dead body,” I murmured. Michael looked startled. “Sorry. Talking to myself.”
He sighed, straightened up, and crossed to stand right in front of me. He took the water glass out of my hand and put it carefully on the counter, then leaned in and kissed me, sweet and hot and hard. He braced himself with his hands on either side of me on the counter, and damn, the white fire of that just about wiped out anything else I had on my mind, including Gloriana’s sly, sweet smile, or the way Michael had looked after her when she’d gone.
He was mine. Mine.
His hands left the counter and stroked through my hair, down the column of my neck, spread out on my shoulders. My top was stretchy enough to slide down my arms under the pressure of his palms, and I shivered as cool air hit my skin.
Michael picked me up in his arms like I was a bag of air, and for a long second he looked down at my face. His expression left me breathless. “You know I love you,” he said. “You know that, don’t you?”
“I know,” I said. “But I know that can change.”
“Never,” he said, and kissed me again. “Never.”
And for a little while, as he carried me upstairs to his room, I believed that would actually be true.
Always.
Even though I felt the tangle of frustration in him when his teeth grazed my neck, and he didn’t bite.
? ? ?
I didn’t hear about Gloriana for three days, until Michael told me there was going to be a big to-do in Founder’s Square on Friday night to welcome the newest arrival. He had an invitation, of course; all the vampires got them. Some humans did, too, including our bookworm housemate, Claire . . . who, not surprisingly, decided that our other housemate, Shane, would be her plus-one to the party. I was kind of shocked that Claire decided to go, though; she wasn’t generally the dressed-up party type (or the dressed-down party type, come to that).