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“Like you're trying very hard not to do something.”

His mouth twitches. “I am.”

I smile and pull him closer.

He’s careful for a while. I can feel him being careful, every stroke slow and measured, watching my face for every flicker. It’s good, and then it’s better than good, warmth building low and slow until I’m moving with him without thinking about it. Then I wrap my legs around him and pull him deeper and say his name, and his control gives way.

His fangs come down again. His eyes go black. He stops holding back. He moves harder and deeper, and it’s so much better. He presses my wrists into the pillow above my head with one hand, and looks at me, a question, and I nod, and he holds them there. He kisses me hard and deep and talks to me the whole time, low and rough against my mouth, and none of it is calm, none of it is precise. He tells me I’m beautiful. He tells me he’s thought about nothing else since the Solstice. He tells me he sat in his office until dawn the first night with my number in his phone, and didn’t call. He says my name like it’s the only word he has left.

I’m close. I’m so close I can’t see straight, and his mouth is at my throat again, his fangs resting on my skin, and he’s shaking.

“Tara,” he says against my pulse. “May I?”

“Yes. God. Yes.”

He bites.

It’s two bright points of pain on my neck, sharp enough to make me cry out, and then it isn’t pain at all. It’s pleasure, and the slow pull of him drinking, and warmth pouring out from the place where his mouth is, and I come apart under him. It goes on and on. I can hear the sound he makes against my throat, low and broken, like a man who’s been thirsty for a hundred years. He takes three swallows, maybe four. I count, because I want to remember. Then he lifts his mouth, and I feel his tongue pass once over the place he bit, careful even now, and he follows me over the edge with his face pressed into my neck and his whole body shaking in my arms.

Afterward, he’s quiet.

I lie on my side with my head on his chest, in the stillness where a heartbeat should be. His hand moves slowly up and down my back. I feel a little lightheaded, the way he said I would and I can’t decide whether it was the orgasm or the blood.

I expect him to get up. I expect him to put his shirt back on and become the man who explains payroll.

He doesn’t. He just lies there, with his hand on my back, and he doesn’t look composed at all.

“You’re quiet,” I say.

“Yes.”

“Is that bad?”

“No.” His hand stops moving. “I stopped expecting you,” he says. “A hundred years ago. I’d had three hundred years of looking, and I decided I was done. That it wasn’t going to happen for me, and I’d be better off not waiting for it. And I was. I was fine.” He’s quiet. “And then you walked into my club and told a poisoner to stop.”

I lift my head and look at him.

All that calm. All that control, that perfect patience I’ve been teasing him about for four days. I thought it came from being sure of everything.

It came from learning to live without the one thing he wanted.

“Well,” I say. “Sorry I’m late.”

He stares at me. Then he laughs, a real laugh, startled out of him, and pulls me back down against his chest and holds on.

We stay like that for a while. Eventually, he gets up and collects my clothes from the floor beside the bed and hands them to me one piece at a time. He buttons my jeans for me, which isn’t necessary. He looks at the two small marks under my jaw for a long time, and touches them, very gently, with one fingertip.

“Merek’s outside,” he says.

“How do you know?”

“I can hear his truck.” He hands me my phone. “He’s been there twenty minutes. He hasn’t texted. He’s being polite.”

“Is that a thing you guys do?”

“Apparently it is now.”

Merek’s truck is idling at the curb out front, with the window down and his arm on the door. Under the streetlight, the ember lines on his forearm are glowing a lazy orange.