Author: Molly Harper

“Jane, I know you were frightened—”

“I was terrified, you ass!”

He was across the front seat with my face between his palms before I knew what hit me. Despite being extremely pissed, I’m not going to say I didn’t like kissing him. Or that I didn’t kiss back. Because, damn. I mean, damn, he was some kisser. If our first kiss was sparklers and fireworks, this was a full-scale nuclear detonation. My whole body was involved—face, lips, hands, thighs, legs. I don’t think he was actually touching all of those parts. I just know they were involved.

The sweep of his tongue across my lip was subtle at first, then increasingly demanding, until I couldn’t tell where his mouth started and mine ended. He pulled me onto his lap, anchoring my ankles on either side of his thighs with his hands, stroking exposed skin with his thumbs. I tugged at his hair, pulling his head back so I could kiss that little thumb-shaped depression in the middle of his chin. Gabriel grunted, protesting my mouth leaving his. He brought me back to his lips, one hand cradling my head as the other kept my hips pinned to his.

A minivan pulled into the spot next to ours. I could hear the gasps and then giggles of the three teens who were piling out with their parents.

One of the kids yelled, “Jeez, get a room!”

I broke away from Gabriel, moving across the seat, ignoring the snickers of the kids as they walked away. I stared at him for what I’m sure was an alarming amount of time. I hadn’t had a kiss like that in, well, ever. I’d finally found something simple and natural about my relationship with Gabriel: making out with him.

Yay for me.

Just as I’d managed to produce that coherent thought, he was back on my side of the car again and giving me a repeat performance. It caught me off guard, and I accidentally bit down on his bottom lip hard enough to draw blood. The good news was he liked that, so I came off as provocative, not inept.

“If that was an attempt to shut me up, screw you,” I panted after he’d let me go a second time.

Through my hair, where his face was buried, he muttered, “I did it because I wanted to. Shutting you up was an added side benefit.”

I shoved at his shoulders. “Ass.”

“You said that already,” he said, his fingers tracing the lines of my jaw.

“Meant it this time, too.”

“Jane, I know you were frightened. I know their methods of questioning can be a bit brutal, but that was necessary,” he said, pulling me tighter against his chest. I rested my forehead against the hollow of his throat, happy to find comfort even for a few moments. Having your brain scoured is an emotionally unsettling experience.

“I know you’re angry with me for bringing you here,” he murmured. “But failing to answer the council would have caused far more problems. And as your sire, I’m responsible for presenting you to the panel. I’m responsible for watching over you in these first weeks. Obviously, I haven’t been doing a very good job.”

“That’s pretty insulting,” I said, poking his ribs.

Gabriel finally said, “I’m sorry.”

“Excuse me?” I said, cupping my hand around my ear. “What was that?”

“I’m sorry,” he said again. “I’m sorry for being so abrupt with you at your house. I’m sorry for blowing up at you over spending time with Dick. I’m sorry for being so…unsettled around you. I’ve never spent time with a childe I’ve made. There are complications I didn’t expect. I have this overwhelming need to protect you, and you’re making it very difficult.”

“Why haven’t you ever spent time with a childe?”

“It hasn’t been possible,” he said in a voice that brooked no further questions. “And even if you weren’t my childe, I would feel this way. We’re connected, you and I. That’s why seeing you with Dick tonight was so unnerving. He’s always had a way with the ladies, and you’re exactly the kind of woman he enjoys corrupting. The idea of some other man touching you, kissing you, smelling him on your clothes, your skin. I couldn’t take it. Between that and the council summons, I overreacted.”

“So, it’s not that you like me, it’s that a biological function is making you jealous,” I muttered.

“Yes, wait—no!” he howled. “Why do you always reduce me to a blithering idiot?”

“This is blithering?” I grinned.

“For me,” he admitted.

I had to concede that one.

“You smell him on me?” I asked, sniffing my shirt. “What does he smell like to you? To me, it’s all lust and bergamot.”

“Uselessness,” he grumbled. He tipped his forehead to mine and kissed my temple, my forehead, the bridge of my nose. He buried his face in the crook of my neck, inhaling deeply. “I do enjoy your scent, though, and I like you. Very much. I want to protect you. If anything happened to you, I don’t know what I would do.”

I lifted my head to eye him warily. “You’re not going to do something weird with my dryer lint, are you?”

“I never know what is going to come out of your mouth,” he said, staring at me. “I enjoy that, in a morbid way. I am saying that even before I turned you, your scent was part of what kept me close to you.”

“What did I smell like?”

“Mine,” he said, kissing the hollow of my throat, the tip of my nose, and finally my mouth. “You smelled like you were mine.”

“Can you take me home now?”

“Are you tired?” he asked. “Sophie’s methods can take a lot out of you.”

“No, I don’t want more people to see me making out with some random guy in the Cracker Barrel parking lot.”

“I’m hardly random,” he said, sliding into the driver’s seat. “I’m your sire.”

“Well, people don’t know that, because they don’t know I’m a vampire,” I said, rubbing my wrists. “I’ve already got ‘jobless’ and ‘publicly drunk’ going. I don’t need to add ‘parking-lot ho’ to the list.”

“One day, you will explain to me what that means, and I don’t think it will make me happy,” he muttered, turning the ignition.

Just when I thought our “date” couldn’t possibly get worse, we arrived at my house to find my Daddy waiting on my porch swing with a Meat Lover’s Pizza. I hadn’t had fatherly approval for a “gentleman caller” since I was a senior in college. This was not going to go well.

Gabriel nodded to the porch. “Do you know this man?”

“That’s my dad,” I said. “I still haven’t told him.”

“I know,” he said. “I can leave now.”

“No, the two most influential men in my life are going to have to meet sometime.”

“Hi, baby,” Daddy said, kissing my cheek between bites of pizza. “Your mama had a sales party thing tonight. Makeup or lotion or home decor or some such thing. I never can keep them straight. I don’t object until they try to talk her into hosting the things herself. I thought I’d surprise you, but it seems you had plans for the evening.”

“That was sweet. Gabriel Nightengale, this is my father, John Jameson,” I said, waving him and Gabriel in through the front door and leading them to the kitchen. “Daddy, Gabriel is my—”

Sire? Interfering pseudo-mentor? Guy most likely to be my first ugly undead breakup? I settled for “Friend.”

“Pizza?” Daddy asked, opening the box to display his cholesterol-laden treat on my counter.

“Oh, no, thanks, I couldn’t,” I said.

Daddy arched a brow as I pulled out a counter-height barstool for him. I never turned down pizza. Ever. “You’re not going on some crazy diet, are you?”

For a brief, wonderful instant, Gabriel looked stricken. I laughed. “No, we already ate, smart alec.”

“If you’ll excuse me for a moment,” Gabriel said, disappearing out the kitchen door.

“Gabriel Nightengale, that name sounds familiar,” Daddy mused, chewing on a pepperoni. I could tell from the look on his face that he was searching his massive but not quite reliable memory banks for information.

“Um, he has a lot of family around here,” I said, not bothering to add that most of them were in the cemetery. “They’ve been in the Hollow a really, really long time.”

Daddy returned to chewing. Leaning against the counter, I asked, “So, what’s new with you?”

“Same old, same old.” He grinned, snagging a second piece. “Summer classes. Started writing another textbook I won’t finish. Your mama’s already getting ready for next year’s historical tour.”

“I’m not putting River Oaks back on the tour,” I said. “Aunt Jettie wouldn’t have wanted that.”

“Mama’s not going to ask,” he said. “To be honest, she wouldn’t know how. Your mother is at a loss for how to handle this job thing, pumpkin. She’s upset and scared for you, but she’s embarrassed, too. She worried about you being single and living on your own, but she’s never had to worry about you on the job front. She never thought you’d be in this…position. She wants to help, but you’re refusing to let her just swoop in and take care of everything. She feels as if she’s lost her…bargaining power with you.”

I snorted. “Subtly put, Daddy. Try using fewer pauses. They imply you’re searching for the word that will hurt me less than the ones she actually used.”

“Your mother is a complicated woman,” he said simply.

“And by ‘complicated,’ do you mean ‘manipulative’ and ‘emotionally crippling’?” I asked.

“Air-quote fingers aren’t attractive on anyone, honey,” he said, using his authoritative teacher voice. “She may be a little high-strung, but she’s still your mama.”

Daddy wrapped his arm around me. My head fell to his shoulder, in that hollow made just for me. “You know she loves you,” he said quietly.

I sighed. “Yes, I feel the crushing weight of her love from here.”

He cleared his throat, which I could tell meant he was trying not to laugh. “She doesn’t know how to handle a situation unless she’s in charge. Just don’t expect me to pick a side between the two of you.”

“Even though you know I’m right?”

“Janie.” There was the authoritative voice again.

I looked up at him, making the doe eyes. “It was worth a shot.”

So, we talked. Eager for normalcy, I savored the mundane details of the life that I’d been missing. None of the freshmen in Daddy’s summer class could write a complete sentence, which was nothing new. My second cousin Teeny’s face-lift had gone wrong, which just went to prove that plastic surgery is one area where you shouldn’t bargain-shop. My future grandpa Bob, Grandma Ruthie’s fiancé, was in the hospital having his hip worked on—which meant it was time for his monthly weeklong hospital stay. Why was this sweet man engaged to my grandma? I could only imagine that after surviving gall-bladder removal, knee replacement, dialysis, and chemo, Bob actually wanted to die, and he saw marriage to her as a legal form of assisted suicide.

While Daddy described Grandma Ruthie’s legendary surgical-ward histrionics, Gabriel returned to my kitchen door lugging a ratty cardboard box. I sincerely hoped vampires didn’t substitute pig pieces for flowers and chocolates. But I couldn’t smell anything bloody, just the musty scent of old cigarettes and B.O. With his amazing vampire speed, Gabriel managed to shove the box into a nearby coat closet without Daddy’s realizing it existed.

Daddy went into suspicious-father mode, managing to question Gabriel without making it look as if he was interrogating him. And Gabriel, far more accustomed to lying than I, performed beautifully. He deflected all possible vampire giveaways without an iota of irony. He complimented my father on raising such a “fascinating” daughter. He even praised Daddy’s textbook.