The slide of cool flesh against mine and the rasp of teeth against my lip were soft and affectionate. He was coaxing a response from me, teasing me into relaxing against him. He pressed a kiss to my chin. His hand slid under my shirt and over my ribs, up to cup the weight of my breast in his palm.
I was trying to figure out how to reach for his zipper in this position when I heard an exaggerated throat clearing behind me, from the kitchen door.
“So, are we still claiming that we’re just business acquaintances?”
8
Vampires are wily, seductive creatures. Even if you think you are resistant to their charms, you are most likely thirty seconds from losing valuable undergarments.
—The Care and Feeding of Stray Vampires
Cal turned, with me still attached to him like a human barnacle, to find my sister leaning against the frame of the kitchen door, struggling to hide the look of smug triumph on her face.
“At least this time the hair is deserved,” Gigi said, gesturing at the tumbled mess on top of my head.
Cal snapped out of his lustful haze and set me on my feet. He carefully adjusted his jeans and fastened the top button. Vampires were incapable of blushing, but if Cal had had the blood flow necessary to tint his pale cheeks, he would have been roughly the color of a fire hydrant. He kept his back to Gigi and seemed unsure of how to stand. Taking pity on him, I stepped around him and stood as a sort of human shield against upsetting man-nipple exposure.
“Aren’t you early?” I asked.
“Well, where’s the fun in showing up when you’re supposed to?” she asked. “You don’t see nearly as much. By the way, was that Paul’s truck I saw pulling out of the driveway?”
“Gladiola.”
She blanched at the use of her proper name. “Sammi Jo’s grandmother dropped by for a surprise weeklong visit at dinnertime. I had to get out.”
I gave her a sympathetic little smile. “The one who tried to baptize you with bottled water?”
“Is that common practice now?” Cal asked quietly.
Gigi heaved a dramatic sigh and stretched across the couch. “Grandma McCuen says I’m a bad influence on Sammi Jo because we don’t go to church regularly.”
“Well, Grandma McCuen is a closet drinker who lost her car title at the bingo hall. I wouldn’t worry too much about her opinion.”
Gigi snickered and nudged me with her hip.
“This is Cal, by the way,” I said, pointing over my shoulder. “I’m not sure whether you were properly introduced last time.”
Cal nodded stiffly. “Teenager.”
Gigi gave him a mocking little salute. “Shirtless wonder.”
And there we went with the vampire nonblushing again. I would have corrected my sister, but frankly, if she was teasing Cal, she wasn’t teasing me. It was like having a human—well, vampire—shield against adolescent disdain.
“So, you’re a vampire. What’s that like?” Gigi asked, ignoring Cal’s indignant glare.
He parted his lips, his fangs dropping dramatically. “Like being a human, only better and for much longer.”
Gigi laughed, despite the dental display. And I couldn’t help but marvel at her ease with the walking national treasure of Greece. Why was it that my sister cowered when confronted by long division, but bared vampire teeth fazed her not one bit? I supposed that next to SATs, classroom queen bees, and constantly evolving body parts, the undead probably weren’t all that intimidating.
Apparently finished with risking suicide by sarcasm, Gigi turned on me. “I’m starved.”
“You’re always starved.”
“Dinner at Sammi Jo’s was sort of skimpy. Grandma McCuen believes that girls should be served half as much as boys at mealtimes because boys ‘work so hard.’ ” Gigi rolled her eyes.
“Don’t Sammi Jo’s older brothers stay home all day playing Xbox and smoking weed?”
“Apparently, it’s very hard work.” She made doe eyes at me and fluttered her lashes. “Elvis pancakes?”
I pursed my lips, surprised that Gigi was willing to bend her stance on sweets. It must have been a very stressful week at Sammi Jo’s. “I thought Elvis pancakes were verboten after the Great Carb Embargo.”
She put her arm around my shoulders, nudging my hip again as she jutted her chin toward Cal. “Well, I thought you didn’t bring work home with you. Rules were made to be broken.”
—
I didn’t know how Gigi did it, but somehow she managed to get Cal to (a) put a shirt on and (b) join us in the kitchen while I cooked a completely unhealthy late-night snack. He tried to leave several times. His feet were pointed out the door and in motion, but she was just so damn sweet, asking detailed questions about how to heat a packet of donor blood and offering to put it in a fancy wine glass for him, that he couldn’t find a way to back out of the room without feeling like he was kicking an adorable adolescent puppy. If he wasn’t careful, he’d wake up in the morning to find that she’d painted his toenails sparkly pink.
Scooting closer to me so that he could put distance between himself and my sister, Cal asked, “So, what separates Elvis pancakes from all other inferior pancakes?”
“Peanut butter and bananas,” I told him as I mixed Bisquick with milk.
He grimaced as I mashed two bananas and creamed them with the batter. “That doesn’t sound terribly healthy.”
“Hey, I used to prep the griddle with bacon grease until Gigi started counting calories.” I chuckled, stirring peanut butter ice-cream topping into the batter just before pouring three small pancakes onto the griddle. She frowned at me, reminding me that we’d agreed not to discuss her frantic “I can’t button my jeans!” episode.
I snickered and blew her a raspberry kiss as I flipped the pancakes. “She also makes me use light syrup.”
Cal took a sip of the blood. I plated the pancakes and slid them across the counter. He blanched at the sight of the dripping flapjacks. “How does one stumble onto this treasured family recipe?”
I watched as my sister dolloped knobs of butter onto each flapjack, then drizzled lacy loops of syrup over her handiwork. Sliced bananas and more ice-cream topping followed as a final touch. “Gigi’s school had a dessert fundraiser a few years ago. And Gigi insisted that we try to make banana pudding for two hundred people. It was hell—sticky, messy, banana-flavored hell. We ended up with half a mashed banana stuck to the ceiling and about ten bunches of leftover bananas. We made banana bread, banana pancakes, banana milkshakes. Anything to get rid of the bananas. I thought that adding peanut butter to the pancake batter would make it even better, because, well, I was flipping sick of banana. And thus, Elvis pancakes were born.”
“Hey, you were just starting off. You hadn’t grasped the concept of bake-sale-scale cooking yet.” Gigi chuckled, spearing a bite of pancake.
Cal’s brow furrowed. “Starting off?”
“As my parent and/or guardian.”
I beamed as Gigi pushed her plate toward our guest. “You wanna try some?”
Cal shrank back from the plate. “I’m pretty sure those would look disgusting even if I was human.”
“They’re delicious,” Gigi said, her cheeks puffed slightly with syrup-soaked pancake.
“They will make me vomit.”
Gigi swallowed loudly and gave him the stink-eye. “Well, that’s rude.”
And for the first time, Cal actually seemed concerned that he had offended a lowly human. He shook his head and explained. “No, no. Vampires lack the enzymes to digest solid foods, which is part of the reason we instinctually shy away from it. It smells rotten to us and tastes worse. If I were to take a bite, I would be overwhelmed with the scent and taste of something like roadkill, and I would throw it right back up.”
“Thank you for describing that. Vomit talk always gives me a big appetite,” Gigi said, rubbing her stomach. I burst out laughing, which made Gigi giggle. And as Cal looked on, perplexed and irritated, the pair of us sat at the table and cackled like a couple of hyenas.
“What’s wrong?” I asked him as Gigi snickered on.
Cal frowned. “You’re laughing at me.”
“But not in a serious way. We’re just teasing you. You have no problem teasing me when it’s just the two of us,” I reminded him.
“I guess I’m not used to being mocked by more than one person at a time.”
Gigi reached over to pat his arm while stabbing more pancake with her other hand. “You’ll get used to it. That’s what families do. Families are the people who will always call you on your crap and will laugh at you no matter how serious the situation. Because you know they don’t mean it.”
The little lines etched in Cal’s face deepened. I could tell that he was trying to find some graceful way to remind Gigi that he wasn’t family. He wasn’t even a friend, really. He was just the guy sleeping in a tent in our basement. And honestly, I was grateful to him for not just blurting it out, so I said, “I’ve been telling her she should stitch that on a sampler, but she doesn’t like handicrafts.”
“Needles intimidate me,” Gigi admitted.
Cal snickered, and the little lines smoothed back out. Gigi proved to be quite the conversational buffer, peppering Cal with questions and observations about his vampire status. She’d never met a real “live” vampire before. I’d made sure of that. And now that she was face-to-face with one, she wanted to know whether he fed on live donors, what his sleeping arrangements were like at home, where he’d traveled. It was the best possible way to avoid the postmauling awkwardness. Except that Gigi’s questions seemed to be giving Cal a headache. His eyes were glazing over, and the corner of his mouth was starting to twitch. But instead of giving in to his tendency to be grumpy and taciturn, he turned the tables on my sister. He asked about her classes at school, her friends, her previous run-ins with Sammi Jo’s grandmother. He basically talked her into the ground, until she was practically dropping off over her plate.
“That was impressive,” I told him as Gigi bid us good night and trod up the stairs. “I’ve never seen Gigi outtalked by anyone.”
“She seems to be a level-headed, good-natured girl. I think you’re past the worst of it.”
I dunked a tea ball full of my own rosehip-and-raspberry tea into an “I Heart My Big Sister” mug. “Worst of what?”
“Adolescence,” he said, shuddering. I chuckled. “She’s a lucky girl, to have you taking care of her.”
“I’ll rest on my laurels when she’s thirty, living independently, and not working a job that involves a webcam,” I muttered, blowing over my tea.
He gave a violent shudder and backed toward the basement door. “And on that note, I bid you good night. I’ve got some paperwork I need to go over before I turn in at dawn.”
“Where are you going?”
Glancing at the stairs, he said softly, “With Gigi here, it would be better if I were to go back downstairs. But I appreciate your offer to upgrade me to a ‘family room.’ ”
That set me back on my heels. He was right, of course. What did I expect? That we would continue what we’d started in the foyer while my baby sister slept twenty feet away? I cleared my throat and tried to school the edge of disappointment from my features. “Do you have everything you need down there?”
He pursed his lips, his eyes shining mischievously. “Well, not everything I need … but yes, I’m comfortable. Are you going to be all right? No lingering feelings after what happened earlier?”
Was he talking about my assault by his mysterious vampire intruder? Or Paul’s visit and the subsequent kissing? Because one had my nerves in an uproar, and the other was just damned annoying. Now, if I could only decide which was which …