Lorcan grumbled something unintelligible underneath his breath and stood still this time, while I finished pinning the hems of his pants. We were in the living room of my newly remodeled duplex that I’d just moved back into. Newly remodeled because I’d somehow managed to fill the old duplex with self-propagating mold that overtook the whole building. It also talked.

  “Well, my dear, if you have some other idea to ensure our continued survival, I’m more than happy to entertain it. But, that spell you tried was a royal flop.”

  “It wasn’t a royal flop,” I countered, narrowing my eyes because I didn’t do well with criticism in general.

  “What would you term it?”

  “Just because the spell didn’t work, doesn’t mean it was a waste of time.”

  “What would you term it?” he repeated, clearly trying to make a point.

  “Betanya wrote in her journal that she thought this spell would reverse the blood curse. Thus, we would’ve been stupid not to try it.”

  Betanya Tayir was the only other Blood Witch to have ever lived in Haven Hollow and, luckily, she’d left her journals to her grandson, Henner, and he’d gifted them to me.

  “Regardless, it still failed.”

  “Right and now we know for certain that specific spell doesn’t work.”

  “That doesn’t help us much, does it?” Lorcan asked, starting to turn to look at me until I brandished another pin in the air, and then he kept noticeably still.

  “Every no gets us closer to a yes,” I pointed out.

  “Which means, I still have to visit Rupert and grovel for an extension to our grace period. In case you forgot, he gave me a month to finish the process of turning you into a full vampire.”

  “You don’t have to remind me. I have to live with this curse too, you know.”

  He jerked around and scowled down at me, and I stabbed him in the arm this time.

  “Ow!”

  “Stop moving!”

  “Stop stabbing me!”

  “I wouldn’t stab you if you’d stop moving!”

  He grew quiet, and I did too. Then he said in a soft, low voice.

  “Things could be worse.”

  “How exactly could they be worse?” I demanded, as I leaned back on my haunches and glared up at him.

  “I realize they are bad,” he started, but I interrupted.

  “Ahem, let me count the ways: One, my own coven probably wants to burn me at the stake. Two, you might go completely over the edge like Roscoe did and kill me in a crime of passion. And three, the powers of witch and vampire could create an explosive combination and turn me into a supernova of…”

  “Oh, enough!” he snapped. “We don’t need a litany of potential disasters that might befall us.”

  “Au contraire, mon-bloodsucking frère,” I sneered. “The litany of potential disasters might befall me, not you. I’m the only one in any serious danger here.”

  “Are you saying that losing my sanity and killing the lady of my heart wouldn’t be a potential disaster for me?” His hand flew to his heart—Lorcan was a good actor. “I’m hurt, Wanda. I really am.”

  “Let’s be crystal clear on one thing,” I countered, glaring at him. “I am NOT the lady of your heart and, if you killed me, your sanity would return and you’d be able to go along your merry way as though you’d never met me in the first place. I, on the other hand… well, I’d be dead. So, excuse me if I don’t consider those two scenarios equal in their disastrous consequences.”

  He shrugged inside the half-finished jacket hanging around his square-cut shoulders. “I concede you may have a point there.”

  “Besides, you could visit Rupert and get the extension without trying to enchant him with a bewitched suit.” I looked at him from head to toe and shook my head again as I sighed. “This is the stupidest idea ever.”

  “And yet…” He beamed down at me, where I continued to remain kneeling at his feet. And my face was, ahem, dangerously close to his nether regions. From the look in his eyes, he was well aware. How did this seemingly innocuous favor turn into such a sexually charged scene?

  “And, yet,” he continued, “Here you are, going through with it, all the same. If you think it’s such a stupid idea, you might have declined.”

  “And you would have just said, ‘Fine’?” I answered sarcastically. “Yeah, somehow I don’t think that’s how things would have gone.”

  “What would I do, Wanda? It’s not as though I can compel you to use your magic to help me.” Right, because vampires couldn’t compel witches to do anything. We weren’t like humans.

  “I’m doing this to help myself—very much like I attempted to cast Betanya’s spell. I don’t hold out much hope that any of it will work, but all we can do is try.” I waved my hands in the air, and Lorcan ducked the needle. “We have nothing else to lose.”

  “Every word out of your trollish mouth wastes valuable time when you could be working on something useful!” Hellcat’s gruff voice floated over from the back of the couch. His black furry body was draped over the upholstery, and he wrinkled his nose at my tailoring efforts.

  “I fail to see why I should endure a deteriorating standard of living because unavoidable circumstances transmuted you into an abomination on the face of the Earth,” Hellcat sniffed. Who knew what in the spell he was going on about. Usually, I just ignored him.

  “Oh, put a mouse in it.”

  “The annals of magic very assiduously avoid mention of Blood Witches or their heinous antics,” the little demon continued. “And why do you suppose that would be… hmmm? Let us puzzle the answer out together, shall we?”

  I didn’t look at him. “Let’s not.”

  “It is because, my goblin custodian, Blood Witches are a special class of magical catastrophe that no sensible witch, wizard, or warlock would suffer to live. Historical accounts make it startlingly apparent that Blood Witches—whenever the magical community had the extreme misfortune to encounter one—were systematically eliminated from the gene pool.”

  “Barbaric,” I mumbled.

  “And yet, that is nothing compared to what the vampires do to remove such blights of magic from circulation,” Hellcat continued.

  Lorcan glanced down at me, frowning. “Do you really put up with this treatment on a daily basis?”

  “Hourly.”

  He sighed, long and hard. “And you say I’m bad company?”

  “You are.” I bit back a grin and stood up. “The pants are done. You can take them off now.”

  Lorcan whipped around, and the sudden panic in his eyes dimmed once he watched me place the pin I’d been holding back in the cushion. Realizing he was now safe, his lips twitched.

  “You’re instructing me to take my pants off? Oh, you saucy creature!”

  The blood rushed to my cheeks. “I’m not instructing you to do anything… unless you want me to run your phallus through the sewing machine along with your cuffs,” I answered truthfully. For as attractive as Lorcan was, and he was damned attractive, I didn’t want to encourage him. Our… association was a complicated one, to begin with. Anything sexual was just one more complication that didn’t appeal to me one bit.

  His hands flew to his fly before he smirked at me. “Did you really just call it a phallus?”

  “What do you call it?”

  “I used to call him ‘Johnny-come-lately’, but owing to the fact that he hasn’t been doing any of that recently, now I just call him Archibald.”

  “Vampires are certainly strange creatures,” Hellcat commented.

  I turned back to my sewing table so I wouldn’t see Lorcan sliding the pants off his long, muscular legs. I had enough memories of his body branded into my long-term memory. I didn’t need more of them. “I’ll have the suit done by Thursday so you can wear it on Friday for your meeting with Rupert when you’ll attempt to bewitch him with my magic and he’ll subsequently suck you dry.”

  “We should be so lucky,” Hellcat grumbled. Then he turned to face me. “Perhaps then you can make good on your promise to remodel the garden shed as a suitable inhabitance for me.”

  “What?” I demanded.

  “Need I remind you it has been over three weeks since you made that fraudulent vow?”

  “No, you don’t need to remind me,” I snapped. “You’ve only reminded me every half an hour since.”

  “If I failed to remind you every half an hour or even every quarter of an hour,” he retorted, “I have no doubt you would conveniently forget all about it, or worse, claim you never made the promise in the first place!”

  “Ah, poor Hellycat is scared I won’t finish the shed,” I mocked, knowing he hated it when I called him ‘Hellycat’.

  He narrowed his eyes and lowered his voice to a dangerous purr. “I… am… NOT… scared.”

  “Hellycat?” Lorcan said after a second, his sumptuous lips breaking into a grin. Not that I noticed his lips were sumptuous, mind you.

  “Yes, it is quite the odious name derived from quite the odious woman,” the cat responded.

  I laughed at him. “Don’t worry. I’ll finish your catpad. I wouldn’t deprive you of a bachelor pad of your own. I know how much you’re looking forward to scavenging some lady familiars to entertain in your den of iniquity.”

  Lorcan chuckled under his breath. “Anything to get him out of the house, eh?”

  “If you renege on your bond,” Hellcat announced, “rest assured, I will have no choice but to report to your mother about your antics in this town since your exodus from Portland. She would be delighted to know you made a spirit corporeal again… and that you raised a zombie from the grave… and that you…”

  I turned a frosty stare on him. “Did you just hear me say I’d finish it?”

  Hellcat shut his mouth with a click. With another scathing sniff in my direction, he stood up on the back of the couch, stretched with elaborate care, and stalked out of the room.

  “You really need to get yourself a different familiar, my dear,” Lorcan remarked after Hellcat was safely out of earshot.

  “I’d love to, but he’s the only familiar that will have anything to do with me since the Crescent Circle Coven threw me out and, besides, familiars are for life.”

  “Such a pity.”

  “You’re telling me. Just try to ignore him. That’s what I do,” I finished as I put the last of my sewing implements away. Then I turned to fully face him. “Now let’s talk about this meeting.”

  “What is there to discuss?” Lorcan asked with a shrug.

  “What’s the plan… exactly?”

  He shrugged. “I put the suit on, complete with your persuasion enchantments worked into the fabric. Then I meet with Rupert and plead my case. What could be simpler?”

  “You might tell him what we found in Betanya’s journals? Maybe explain we have leads on how to resolve the situation without bloodshed.”

  He shot me a grin from beside the couch where, I suddenly realized, he was stripping off the half-finished suit and putting on his own clothes. His legs and torso were suddenly bare and encouraging me to stare at them. Good thing Astrid, my cousin and roommate, was in school.

  “Bloodshed… I like the sound of that.”

  “If you like the sound of ‘bloodshed’, then there’s no sense in you meeting Rupert at all!” I barked at him. “I could skip the work involved in making you the enchanted suit and you could just give me the final Kiss and save us all a lot of trouble.”

  The grin drained from his face, and his countenance went whiter than usual. For a second, he looked genuinely remorseful. Then he pulled himself together, buttoned his pants, and strode toward me, an expression of concern on his face.

  “My dear! I didn’t mean it like that. I was simply going along with the… light and playful tone of this charming day so far.” Luckily, the day was less charming and more overcast and lightly sprinkling rain. Otherwise, Lorcan wouldn’t be able to be out at all. Sun was disastrous to vampires.

  I turned back to the sewing table so I wouldn’t bear witness to his unclothed chest, which was in a word—impressive. Muscles littered the landscape of his body like afterthoughts.

  “Sorry. I’m a little on edge about this… I mean, I’m on edge around you.”

  “And why is that, my dear?”

  “Because Betanya’s journals paint a pretty clear picture that if we don’t find a way to reverse the curse, you’ll go mad and kill me yourself.” I paused as his entire expression fell. “And I guess I’m just having trouble deciding whether I’d rather be—a vampire or dead.”

  “Wanda,” he started.

  “Either way, there won’t be a Blood Witch in Haven Hollow much longer.”

  He moved closer behind me and a shiver went up my spine when I felt his warm breath on the back of my neck. He shouldn’t have been standing this close to me. It wasn’t safe, but his nearness sent an unaccountable thrill through my insides, all the same. There was just this… energy between us. It was hard to explain but there, all the same.

  Regardless, I refused to get sexually excited by Lorcan Rowe. Besides, he’d only come here to get fitted for the suit. And, truthfully, I wasn’t being fair. Owing to the Vampire’s Kiss, the magic that united the two of us, being near me was the only thing that soothed him. Proximity pacified the driving madness threatening to tear Lorcan apart. If I didn’t spend time with him, he’d smash the door down to get to me. And he wouldn’t be able to help it.

  The blood bond infected Lorcan with an insatiable need to give me his vampire’s Kiss, the final bite that would change me into a vampire. It would give him power over me as my sire and complete the process that began when he bit me after the car crash that happened outside his office, when he’d first turned me into what I now was.

  Until he finished the job, the blood bond between us made him unstable. Letting him near me, even at a platonic distance, was a calculated risk. He could attack me any second, yes, but at the same time, our nearness released the pressure that could build up to such an extent, he wouldn’t be able to control it.

  “With any luck,” he murmured, “by this time next week, our problem will be solved and we can stop thinking about things like…” His breath crept lower down my neck, towards my back. “Things like bloodshed… and bites… and kisses.” He jerked away and nearly gave me a heart attack.

  “Jesus, I thought you were going to bite me.”

  “No, my dear, I just… I inhaled too much of your scent and needed… some distance.” He was panting.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I am not certain how to answer that question.”

  “Ugh,” I started.

  “Have dinner with me on Wednesday night.”

  I dared to turn around, but he’d already retreated to the couch to get his shirt and he’d done it in a split second. I hadn’t even heard him move. “Are you asking me on a date?”

  “Would I be treading on your toes if I did ask you on a date? You know how I feel about you, Wanda.”

  I rolled my eyes to Heaven in half-hearted mockery. “Yeah. I know exactly how you feel about me and it doesn’t inspire confidence.”

  “Don’t turn this into jest.” His green eyes locked on me with startling intensity.

  “It’s not funny?”

  He shook his head. “No. I’m asking you to have dinner with me before I see Rupert, because I would sincerely enjoy the pleasure of your company. Not to mention… it would… relieve the anticipation of thinking about the meeting.” He paused for another moment. “And… it’s my birthday.”

  “Your birthday?” I asked, frowning.

  He nodded. “Yes, I was born on this day, the twenty-first of April.”

  “In 1789?”

  He chuckled. “No, dearest, that was the day I died and awoke a vampire.”

  “Then how old are you?”

  “Two-hundred-fifty-one.”

  He really didn’t look a day over forty. “Wow,” I managed.

  “Thus, you must agree to accompany me to dinner or you break the tradition of the birthday.”

  “And what tradition is that?”

  He smiled broadly. “That I get whatever I ask for all week long.”

  It was my turn to laugh. “Yeah, no.” But then I inhaled deeply and sighed. I mean—it was his birthday. “Fine, I’ll go to dinner with you,” I answered, feeling suddenly sorry for him, which I was more than sure was exactly what he’d intended. “I’ll have dinner with you on Wednesday night… but that’s it. Dinner. Nothing more. Not dessert. Not a nice stroll through the park. Nothing else.”

  His face lit up. “Excellent. You won’t regret it.”

  “I already do.”

  He swooped back in close to me and lifted my hand.

  “Thank you, dear lady.” His full lips touched my knuckles, and when he peered into my eyes, his countenance took on a different expression—a searching one. “You really are the lady of my heart, Wanda. Never disillusion yourself of that.”

  He bestowed a delicate kiss further up on my hand as I wondered at his choice of words.

  The lady of his heart?

  I held my breath, waiting for him to let go of my hand and leave, but he didn’t do either. Instead, he tugged on my arm and, pulling me into him, gave me a quick peck on the lips before he pulled away again and appeared to be trying to get control of himself. Before I could take another breath, he blew through the door and vanished into the night.

  Now that he was actually gone, I felt deflated, empty. Lonely.

  What the spell was wrong with me?

  I picked up my phone and surfed to my calendar. I hit Wednesday and entered, Lorcan, dinner. Another lick of excitement seared my heart, even as I forced it down again.

  No! I was NOT getting excited about going on a date with him. I didn’t want to get involved with Lorcan in any way, shape, or form. I wanted to deal with him only long enough to get rid of this blasted curse—nothing else. Once I was free from his influence, I never had to put up with him again.

  I tapped Wednesday again and very deliberately deleted the dinner date—from my calendar, from my awareness, from my life.