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His mouth quirked up at the corner. “And I’d been so proud of myself for being honest with you right off the bat, too.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t believe you,” I said. “But I dotaxesfor a living. I’m just not equipped to believe that vampires are real. So I didn’t. Not until…”
I trailed off, looking away. He remembered what had happened between us in the kitchen as well as I did.
“And my always needing to ask permission before entering someone’s home? And the way I repeatedly refused to eat or drink anything when you offered?” he pressed. Though his voice was gentle, not accusatory. “None of that made you wonder if maybe I was telling the truth about what I was?”
I winced. “It should have,” I admitted. “But I thought you were just being polite about entering. And that when it came to food, you just had a lot of dietary restrictions. Like me, I guess.”
“I do have a lot of dietary restrictions,” he quipped, smirking. “But it’s because I literallycan’teat anything except for…”
He had the decency not to finish that sentence. He knew I knew what he meant.
“Yeah,” I said, quietly.
“I can leave,” he added. “This house, I mean. If you don’t want me to stay, I can go.”
I looked out my bedroom window. The blizzard still raged. In the hours I’d spent researching vampires the sun had set completely. It would be impossible to see anything, even if the winds died down.
“It has to bereallydangerous to drive in a storm like this,” I said. “Even if you had a car, how would you get it out of the driveway?”
“I don’t need to drive,” he said. “I would just fly back to Chicago, the same way I flew to the grocery stores.”
My heart thudded hard against my rib cage. When he’d told me he’d flown to the store, he’d meant that literally, too. I tried to recover quickly. “Chicago is a lot farther away than Pete’s Groceries.”
“I’ll be fine,” he said. His bright blue eyes were so earnest, the mask he liked to hide behind slipping again. “The last thing I want to do is make you uncomfortable.”
“But there’s ablizzardout there.”
“Yes. But if you’re frightened—”
“I’m not.” All at once, I realized it was the truth. “A bit weirded out? Absolutely. Frightened?” I hesitated. “Maybe a little. But rationally, I know I shouldn’t be. I mean, how many different opportunities have you had to drink my blood without my consent since we’ve met?”
I’d meant it as a rhetorical question, but he answered immediately. “Thirty-seven. No, wait—thirty-eight.”
Wow. “Uh…okay, you having a ready answer to that cuts against the point I was trying to make. Which is that if you were going to hurt me, you’d have done it already.”
“Even before I got most of my meals from blood donation facilities and still fed directly from the source, I was particular in choosing my victims.” His eyes shone with sincerity. “Even at my most depraved, I never would’ve hurt someone like you.”
I knew I shouldn’t let myself be taken in by this show of vulnerability. I might not want him to fly in a blizzard, but if I’d wanted to keep a barrier between us before I knew what he actually was, I wanted to keep a ten-foot wall between us now.
But I wasn’t made of stone. “I’m not kicking you out into a blizzard.”
The tension he’d been carrying left him all at once. His shoulders relaxed, and relief flooded his features. “Okay.”
“But,” I continued, holding up a finger, “I’m not kissing you again. Ever. Or doingother stuffwith you, either. It’s one thing to be snowed in with a vampire. It’s another to—”
“I got it,” he cut in. Was that disappointment I saw in his eyes? “To be perfectly honest, kissing you was probably a mistake on my end, too.”
Thatshouldn’thave hurt. After all, I’d just told him the same thing. And yet a small part of me folded in on itself, anyway. Against my better judgment, I asked, “Why was it a mistake for you?”
He paused, jaw working. “It just was.”
An awkward silence filled the room after that. The ticking of the bedside clock, the howling of the wind outside, served to underscore just how very alone we were.
“You’ll sleep in the kids’ room,” I said, as if we hadn’t already established where he’d be sleeping. Somehow, it felt important to reiterate that we would be staying in opposite ends of the cabin. The place wasn’t huge, but we had to as stay far apart as possible until we could finally go home. “And I’ll—”
“Sleep here,” he finished for me. “Got it.” He stood up and took a small step towards me. I wasn’t a short person, but when he stood next to me like this, he practically towered over me. Everything about this man was just solarge. “Sleep well, Amelia. I’ll see you in the morning.”
