Page 63 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

“I’m gathering information.”

“You are enjoying yourself.”

“I can do both things.”

His gaze rests on me for a moment, and some of the tension in his shoulders finally loosens.

“The blood. In there.” I nod at the door. “Where does that come from? Because I’ve watched you at six dinner parties and you have never once bitten anyone, and I would have noticed.”

Now he really looks at me, and I understand I’ve stumbled onto the thing that matters.

“That is the part the books get most wrong,” he says. “They want the biting. It sells.” He glances at the walk-in door and then back at me. “I don’t feed from people. Not as a rule. There is a supply, a discreet one, arranged the way anything is arranged when you have money and centuries to build the right acquaintances. It’s clean. It’s regular. It costs no one anything they’ll miss.” He turns his hands over on the table, an old and courtly gesture. “I decided a very long time ago that I would not build a life on frightening people to stay alive. It’s the one decision I’ve never regretted.”

“You buy blood bank blood.”

“Effectively.”

“Like a very upsetting Blue Apron.”

He blinks. An actual laugh, low and startled out of him, and I think it may be the first completely unguarded sound I’ve ever heard the man make.

“Yes,” he says, recovering. “Like a very upsetting Blue Apron.”

“So you can feed from people. You just don’t.”

“I can.” The dryness comes back over his face, but there’s something more careful underneath it now, and I’ve learned to watch for the careful. “When I must. When I’m injured, or when it’s been too long. It’s not something I do at dinner parties. It’s not something I do lightly at all.”

“Does it hurt?” The question is out before I’ve cleared it with any responsible part of my brain. “When you… Being bitten. Does it hurt the person?”

He goes still in a new way. It’s the way he went still the night of the storm, when I looked at his mouth and he noticed me looking.

“No,” he says quietly. “Not the way you’re imagining. It’s not painful. It’s the opposite of painful, if it’s done with any care at all. Which is precisely why I’m careful about when I do it.”

“The opposite of painful.”

“Penny.”

“I’m just gathering information.”

“You are gathering a very specific kind of information.” The red comes up in his eyes, just slightly. “And you’re doing it in my kitchen, at night, wearing that.”

I look down at myself. I’m wearing jeans and one of my good soft sweaters, the deep green one, and I chose it this morning at six a.m. with a copy of a vampire book open on my lap, so I’m going to have to be honest with myself about my own motives at some point. Just not right now.

“So the opposite of painful,” I say, “is something you could describe in more detail.”

“It is something I am choosing not to describe in more detail,” he says, “because I have spent four hundred years learning restraint, and I have learned in the last few weeks that all of it was practice for you.”

My heart skips a beat, and I remember exactly who’s listening.

“Can I see them?”

He knows immediately what I mean.

“Penny.”

“The teeth. Fangs. Whatever the preferred terminology is.”

“Fangs will do.”