Total pages in book: 148
Estimated words: 139178 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 696(@200wpm)___ 557(@250wpm)___ 464(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 139178 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 696(@200wpm)___ 557(@250wpm)___ 464(@300wpm)
Aware of Kat taking a seat at the balcony table, he quickly cleared the rest of the items he’d marked as being important, then pushed back his chair…and paused. Though he’d long ago become used to walking again, to no longer needing a wheelchair or even a cane, he did continue to have moments like this, when he was hit with the wonder of being able to do something as everyday as push back a chair so he could rise to his feet.
Kat looked up as he appeared on the balcony a minute later, her eyes gleaming. “You are thinking of what once was,” she murmured and held up a hand, the black lace of her glove a delicate filigree. “Good or bad?”
“Good.” After brushing her fingers with his own, he shifted so that he was the one behind her, then wrapped her up in a hug from the back.
Her smile was more innocent and open than the world ever saw, the kiss she dropped on his bare forearm affectionate. “Tell me.”
So he did. “Just gets me now and then, all the things I take for granted when, once, it would’ve been so out of the realm of possibility as to be beyond a fantasy.” She knew of the years he’d spent in a hospital bed, unable to move, reliant on others for care—or a lack of care.
He also knew she preferred not to go back into her own past. She’d once told him that it had been a time of “pain and misery and brokenness” and not anything she wished to recall. However, she’d never stopped Vivek from talking about his memories.
More than that, she understood.
“Only those who have experienced infinite darkness understand the beauty of light, lover mine,” she said tonight. “And only those who have been burned by blistering light understand the calm to be found in the night.”
Rubbing his cheek against hers with an affection he couldn’t have imagined being permitted when they first met, he just held her for several long minutes as the stars sparkled overhead and the candles glowed.
When he released her at long last and moved to the other side of the table, it was only because he knew she needed to eat. “So,” he said, lifting up a deep-green-hued bottle with a golden label curling at the edges from the time it had been stored. “Wine first, followed by blood?” Their dinner was a smaller bottle, with a stark black-on-white label that he didn’t recognize.
After inclining her head, Kat said, “The blood is from a new café founded by Ana. She is going for avant-garde flavor combinations.”
Vivek looked up from pouring the wine. “How bad?”
She sighed. “I really wish you would not know me so well—it makes me feel a terrible creature.”
Chuckling, he took his seat. “Your secret is safe with me, sweetheart.”
Kat found it endlessly amusing that he called her his sweetheart. She wasn’t the kind of woman who attracted such soft sobriquets, but her eyes always smiled when he said it, so he made sure to say it often.
Tonight her lips, plump and stained a red to match her gown, twitched. “I am glad she has found a passion, but alas, her fusions are…unusual. Though I was, of course, her first major customer, and so we will be partaking of a bottle a week.”
He took a deep breath. “How bad can it be?”
“Tonight’s flavor,” Kat said after a sip of her wine, “is cabbage and cheese.”
Vivek almost coughed out his wine. “Tell me you’re joking.” When she just looked at him, he threw the bottle a look of unfiltered horror. “At least tell me you brought a second dinner.”
A husky laugh before she picked up a bottle she’d hidden under the table and put it beside the cabbage-cheese-blood monstrosity. “Your favorite.”
“Um,” he said, “have you counseled Ana that murdering her competitors is bad business?” The other vampire wasn’t exactly the most stable of personalities.
“I went further and informed her that I would be most displeased should she attempt to succeed in business by murdering her competitors. As it is, it proved unnecessary—she told me she’s not going for the same ‘lowbrow’ clientele as those who might consider themselves her peers, only the ‘boldest gastronomes.’ ”
“I mean, what do us lowbrow types know?” Vivek shrugged. “Cabbage and cheese might be the next big thing.”
Katrina’s laughter lit up the night.
They talked, tried the cheese-cabbage blood—horrible wasn’t quite the right word for it—then moved on to their actual dinner while discussing their days and the night to come.
At some point, Katrina said, “Do you mind, lover?”
One hand tangled with hers on the table, he said, “What, sweetheart?”
“That you’ll never have a child of your blood, as Raphael and Elena will now have?” An unexpected vulnerability to her tone, a fracture in the cool control she wore like a second skin.