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Her wrinkled brow told him she wasn’t convinced. She was quiet a moment, as if contemplating his words. Then she said, “What the hell was that?”

Unable to restrain himself from touching her face, he traced the outline of her lower lip with his thumb. So soft, so perfect.

“I told you, you are stronger than you realize. And many of the heightened senses I enjoy, you do as well.”

“OK, but—”

That light returned, and this time, it moved toward them.

Tearing herself from him, Alessandra began gathering her mutilated undergarments and thrusting her head into her dress. For his part, Kenton wasn’t as keen on getting dressed, but he supposed at this point there was no help for it.

When the light shone on them a few moments later, he’d managed to get his pants on at least.

“Who’s there?”

Shoving his hands into his shirtsleeves, Kenton didn’t bother attempting to close it. After all, there were no buttons to speak of. He moved Alessandra behind him.

“Just two wayward lovers, my friend.”

“This is federal—”

“We’ll be on our way,” he said.

“Miss Fiore?”

The guard had come up to them at an angle that made it impossible to hide her face.

“Oh God,” she groaned.

“You’re the new professor at the university.”

The man’s censure was as painfully obvious as Alessandra’s discomfort.

“He’s the security guard at the college too,” she whispered to him. “Not good.”

Kenton leapt down the stairs and walked up to the man, likely in his fifties with a belly to attest to years of beer drinking, and grabbed his wrist.

“What in the—”

Without pause, Kenton lowered his fangs, pulled the resisting man’s wrist toward his mouth, and drank. He could hear Alessandra jumping down from the train car behind him. By now, the man had stopped struggling. Though he did not need to feed, Kenton relished the hot copper taste nonetheless.

“Kenton, stop! What are you doing?”

The intensity of her response reminded him of Alessandra’s heightened sense of danger at the hands of a vampire. “You can’t kill him—”

Her panic cued the end of his meal. Releasing the man’s wrist, he took out the ever-present handkerchief from his pocket and wiped away the spot of blood.

The puncture wound had already healed.

Coming out of the trance the feeding had put him in, the guard looked at them as if seeing them for the first time.

“What . . . what’s going on here?”

Kenton pulled his shirt closed with one hand and grabbed Alessandra’s wrist with the other. He could feel her eyes still on him.

“Thank you, sir, for checking on us. As I said, we were just taking a leisurely walk out here—”

“It’s not safe to be near the tracks at night. I suggest a walk down there.” He pointed to the sidewalk that led toward the town’s center.