“Works for me,” she says, her grin mischievous.
I give her a little snort. “Giving me nightmares works for you?”
“It really does.” She chuckles like we are playing around here, but this is our careers we are talking about. Our art. “This isn’t a game, Colette. If we don’t nail this book, we will both potentially lose our livelihoods.”
She sets herquill down with slow movements and tucks her lips up to one side. I want to nibble on them.
No,I do not.
Turning in her overly poofy chair to look straight at me, she laces her fingers over one knee. Her purple skirt bunches a bit and shows her stockinged feet and ankles. She’s wearing striped stockings that alternate between wool and lace and?—
“Are you even listening to me, vampire?”
I swallow and look her in the eye. “Of course, I am.”
She cocks her head. “I was saying that if we don’t have fun with our art, why would we even do it?”
“Art isn’t for fun.”
Her mouth opens so quickly that it makes a tiny popping sound. “It most certainly is. It’s entertainment. Exploration. Excitement. All theEs!”
“I will give you exploration,” I say. “We dig deep into our souls and our hearts and discover shadows, layers, commonalities, and varied hues of life.”
She gives me a withering look. “Don’t you think you’re taking yourself a little too seriously?”
“You don’t take yourself seriously enough.”
Waving off my words, she sighs. “Just write thenew bit and then hand it over. My stomach is telling me it’s pastry time.”
I roll my eyes and finish the chapter. When I hand it over, she gives me a curtsey, which infuriates me for two reasons. One, she’s being sarcastic. Two, her perfect breasts bounce when she does that and I can hardly stop from salivating like a hound on the hunt. My tongue finds the tip of one fang and I refuse to allow myself to imagine biting her right below her collarbone…
She gets to work on the draft once more, and suddenly, she’s looking up at me.
“Can you, um, do something? You’re making me nervous.”
I blink. I was staring like an idiot. “Ah, yes. Sorry.” There’s a viola on a stand across the room and I gesture toward the wooden instrument. “May I?”
“Oh yes! You play?”
“Poorly. Don’t get too excited.”
“Too late.”
I lift the viola and its bow. When I set the body of the instrument against my shoulder, the scent of Colette’s perfume tickles my nose. I exhale and set the bow against the strings. With one slow movement, I test thecondition of the strings. Very good.
“I don’t play well either,” Colette says, “but it was a gift from my father before he passed, so I keep it in good condition to honor him.”
“That’s lovely.” Colette may be irritating to the extreme, but she is a good person.
I start playing one of Lazourge’s laments, a soulful piece about a man cursed to become a wolf for all but one day each moon. He bids farewell to his brother and his land and has no hope of living life as he had always hoped. The music rises and crashes down, albeit quietly, mournfully. The last bit trails out on a minor note that is delightfully bittersweet. He learns to love the wild even as he is grieved to lose his human life.
I open my eyes to see Colette watching me, open-mouthed. “Wh-what was that? It was the saddest song I’ve ever heard.”
Tears are streaming from her big eyes and my fingers twitch, longing to brush them away.
“It’s Lazourge,” I say. “HisWolven Lament.”
She studies my hand on the viola’s neck. “I’ve heard of him. One of my brothers used to sing his one about apples.”
