Page 20 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

I touch Julian’s sleeve to get his attention, because Hollis is trying to give him a jar of something, and my fingers land on the bare skin of his forearm.

It’s like touching the inside of a window in January.

He isn’t warm. He isn’t anything. The pub is a hundred degrees, and Julian Volkov’s skin is cool and perfectly dry and does not warm under my fingers at all. Two things happen in me at once and they have no business happening together. One is a small cold thread of that is not right. The other is a shiver that starts at my wrist and goes somewhere I’m not prepared to think about.

I take my hand back.

“Sorry,” I say. “Cold hands.”

“They are not,” he says.

Neither of us says anything else. Hollis puts the jar down between us like a man ending a hostage negotiation, and the evening moves on.

I don’t notice I’m doing it until I’ve done it four or five times.

Rennie corners me about the corn verdict. I turn to answer him—and my eyes go to the chair by the fire, to check that Julian’s still there. He is. He’s listening to Old Dennett again.

Bess flags me over to weigh in on the scoring—there’s a controversy, there’s always a controversy—and I go, and halfway through I glance back across the room. Julian’s at the counter now, refilling old Gus’s water because Gus can’t reach, and the sight of it, the huge careful man bending to pour water for the small old one, makes my chest ache.

The Patels finally arrive and I get pulled into the whole business of the saffron rice and the wedding and whether I can do the thing they want with the paneer. It’s a good twenty minutes before I surface—and the very first thing I do, before I even set down the sample plate, is look for him.

He goes out at twenty past eleven to help Theo bring a keg up from the yard. I look up when the door shuts. I look up when it opens again and find some cousin of the Whitcombs, and go back to stacking bowls with tremendous focus.

Then I look up again.

“That’s the fourth time you’ve done that,” Lucy says, without lifting her eye from her camera.

“Done what?”

“Checked the door. Four times since he went out. I counted, obviously, because I’m a professional and I have nothing else going on.”

“He’s helping Theo.”

“Mm.”

“I’m just checking.”

The door opens. I look up. And I keep looking, all the way across a crowded room, at a man carrying a keg on one shoulder like a sack of flour. My face is warm. I don’t care.

The next time I look for him he’s by the door talking to Theo with Hollis’s jar in his hand and his coat on. He’s leaving. My stomach drops, just slightly, just enough to notice, at the sight of Julian Volkov with his coat on.

Oh, I think. Oh, no. This is a problem.

I put down the bowls and cross the room before I decide to move. I’m just doing it, the way I do everything with Julian, one impulse at a time and no plan at all.

“You’re leaving,” I say.

“I am. It’s late.” He looks down at me, and the lanterns are low and gold behind him and he looks, for one strange second, like something from another century entirely, standing in a doorway. “Thank you, Penny. I haven’t sat in a room full of people and enjoyed it like this in a long time.”

I meet his gaze, searching for something he won’t tell me without my asking. So, naturally, I do.

“Why did you enjoy it?”

Julian’s head tilts in that small, considering way, and his eyes are the warmest thing about him. “You make it difficult not to enjoy myself.”

My stomach drops again, and I suddenly realize I’m holding the edge of his sleeve.

“Julian—”