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Or at least, more willing to kill Wall Street maniacs, and steal all their stuff. I bet he has one hell of a stock portfolio, I think as I grab a fat chicken thigh and sink my teeth in.

And after that I’m not really thinking at all.

I’m too busy rolling my eyes in utter bliss, and biting down again. By the time I’m done I have juice and grease all round my mouth and all over my fingers, and the heap of chicken is now at least half rubble. Much to both Phone’s and Sten’s pleasure. “Now cut her some cheesecake,” she says, but for a moment he doesn’t seem to hear.

I glance up and he’s just standing over me, with this look in his eyes.

This hungry look—as if he didn’t just eat himself only a few hours before.

It makes me realize that I’ve been sucking on one of my fingers, and immediately stop. But then I make the mistake of licking my lips, and I think that has an effect, too. His eyes follow the slick slide of my tongue over my bottom lip. As if there’s somehow a juicy vein there for him to sink his teeth into.

Though of course I’m starting to wonder if veins and teeth are really what he’s thinking about. I mean, he’s not exactly said anything beyond his various declarations of love and devotion. And I have no real clue how either an ancient Viking or an evil vampire express themselves, sexually.

Or even if they want sex in any way I can understand.

But in that moment, none of these things seem to matter. I just go all hot anyway. My whole body flushes, and it’s followed by the most excruciating echo of that feeling in the library. That swell of pleasure, that sweet ache. The most intense orgasm of your many lives, my memories remind me.

And oh, great, now I’m back to square one.

You can’t just jump into bed with him, I tell myself. You’ve got to consider things carefully, you’ve got to see if this will work, you’ve got to be sensible. But then he goes over and cuts me a slice of cheesecake by grabbing a handful of it and holding it out, and somehow that just doesn’t help at all.

I almost bend my head and lick it off his palm.

I tell him I need sleep just to stop myself.

But there, in the darkness of my bedroom, I think of it still.

CHAPTER TWENTY

I make it about five days. Five days of intense dreams about his mouth on my throat, and sometimes ones in which my mouth is on his. Five days of dancing around each other in my now titchy (thanks, Mathilde) apartment, sure that it’s best to just let the memory of that bite subside. Once it has you can think straight, and decide for sure if you want to hint at something more, I think.

But the problem is that thinking straight doesn’t seem to ever happen.

If anything, the state I’m in only seems to get worse. By the sixth day I can barely speak to him. He tells me he has investigated Halsten’s latest lair but found no evidence of any enemies that might want to kill me, and I have to just pretend to be really engrossed in this spell I’m doing in order to hide my stopped throat.

It’s partly his fault, however.

He found a shirt with cut-off sleeves in Halsten’s lair, and put it on.

Now he looks exactly like he did in my dream last night, where instead of riding me to my doom across the sands of Sunset City on his motorbike, he did sex things to me. Lots of sex things. I woke up drenched in sweat and so slick between my legs I can’t even think about it without being mortified.

And I just don’t know how to say this to anyone.

I can’t tell Cassie or Nancy or Phone. Phone keeps tricking him into doing things she thinks I’ll find annoying in an effort to get rid of him. Yesterday she told him I love the music of Benson Boone, and persuaded him to play it over and over.

And Cassie and Nancy are still in the South of France, searching for his evil twin. When I last spoke to them I said they might find him on a yacht in the middle of the ocean, simply so they would go yachting themselves. They sent me a picture of them with their faces all determined, all their vampire-catching paraphernalia in their hands, while Seth and Jack made fancy cocktails in the background. They were wearing the tiniest fucking shorts I’ve ever seen in my life. I can still see them behind my eyes now.

Telling them this would make them think I’d gone round the twist.

Plus they’d stop having the vacation I’ve secretly corralled them into.

And I just can’t have that. I can’t.

Even though that just leaves Sten as a person I can tell, which is indisputably the worst idea of them all. I’m living with the man. He’s everywhere all the time. I say the wrong thing and this place is going to get real awkward real fast—and I have every reason to think this might happen. He’s from a time in which the sexual mores could be the weirdest fucking things ever.

And I feel like they must have been, going on how he behaves.

He just seems so fucking oblivious to any effect he might have on me.