8. Barnaby

Chapter eight

Barnaby

That human woman is much more appealing than she has any right to be. I found her annoying at first with her pestering questions and sunny demeanor, but I understand much more about her now. She is devoted to her work and derives most of her life’s pleasure from it. Having it ripped away from her has clearly taken its toll, though she tries to hide it.

I can understand such a thing. I have always been a bookseller, and my joy is sharing my passion for the written word and recorded knowledge with those who seek it. Decades with the coven stole that from me—just one more reason that they were the darkest years of my time on this earth.

Sitting in such close proximity with Maisie’s scent, though, was nearly torture. All I wanted was to sink my fangs into that throbbing vein in her throat. And yet I invited her to spend even more time together, to sip on her sweet smell even longer, though it will be painful not to drink from her.

I am a glutton for punishment, it seems.

It is only a few hours later that I step out the front door and lock up the shop behind me.

“Hi.”

I whirl at the sound of Maisie’s voice. She’s sitting on the step leading up to her apartment and gives me a tiny wave.

“Have you been waiting for me?” I ask.

She bobs her head. “I just felt like there was so much more I wanted to ask you. If you’re amenable to doing it tonight.”

I swallow hard. I thought perhaps I’d have an evening to recover from how delicious she smelled earlier today, but I have no reason to turn her down.

“I will need to go home and feed soon,” I hedge, “but I am available for another hour or two.”

Her smile lights up her face in a way that’s surprisingly appealing. Her teeth aren’t perfectly straight or perfectly white—they’re very average in both senses, which I find adorable.

“Great. Do you want to come up for a drink?”

I give her a deadpan look. “Unless the drink on offer is your blood, I think I will decline.”

A laugh bursts out of her, and though she stifles it with her hand, she still can’t hold in a final snort of amusement.

“All right, all right, I won’t offer you a beer, then, if you come up.”

That wasn’t how I expected her to react to the threat of being fed upon, but I’m pleased by the result. She doesn’t find me frightening, and that gratifies me.

“I will come upstairs,” I say.

With a grin, she opens the door to her apartment and ushers me in behind her, as if I don’t own the place myself. I follow her up the stairs, unable to look away from the sweet sashay of her hips as she leads me to the top.

Underneath those baggy clothes, I wonder what she really looks like.

“I’m going to have a drink,” she says, “but please, take a seat.” She even pulls out a chair for me at the small table before she heads to the fridge and pulls out a glass bottle.

When we’re seated across from each other again, she uses a bottle opener she must have purchased with the money I gave her and leans forward on the table.

“So what happened after you were turned?” she asks. “You didn’t tell me that part.”

“I thought we were here to talk about your life.” The last thing I want is to tell her all the terrible details of that time. I did many, many things I’m not proud of, and I would very much like to forget those years myself.

She squints. “Hmm.” After taking a long drink of her beer, Maisie sighs and leans forward on one hand. “Not much to tell. I have pretty normal parents. Still married, still embarrassing. I also have a little brother finishing up his master’s degree.”

It sounds as if she has a normal family, which explains some of her emotional steadfastness .

“I wasn’t a cool kid growing up because I loved the computer too much. Played a lot of video games, and started trying to make my own when I was in middle school.”

“Middle school? And you were creating games of your own?”

She laughs. “Well, I tried to make games of my own. It wasn’t always successful. I only managed to make a bad version of Snake before I took a class at the local college in high school.” She rubs her hands together eagerly. “That was really where it started. I started making changes to the games I liked, so I could play, uh...”

She trails off, her eyes darting away from mine.

Now I’m curious. “So you could play...?”

Maisie blows out an irritated breath, scattering a lock of her curly hair. “I wanted to see the character naked, okay?” She turns her head away. “So, I installed a mod that made everybody in the whole game naked.”

I can’t help a laugh, and it feels somewhat rusty rolling off my tongue. She altered an entire video game to fuel her perversions.

It’s incredibly charming.

“What?” Maisie blows her cheeks out, affronted. “I was in high school. What do you expect?”

“No, no.” Another laugh tumbles out of me. “I’m not making fun of you. It is a wonderfully genius idea for an adolescent.”

She snorts into her hand. “I love when you use words like that. Adolescent .” She drinks more of her beer. “Well, it wasn’t that genius, because eventually I got caught playing it on the school computers. That was the beginning, and now, here I am.” The happiness on her face fades. “Potentially without a job, depending on how this investigation turns out.”

I don’t like that her sweet demeanor has disappeared. I much prefer it when she’s smiling and telling a story.

“How did you get your current job?” I ask instead, guiding us back onto a safe path.

“Well, I knew this guy, Wade. We’d met once before, actually, on a dating app.”

I’m surprised by a twinge of envy. Of course Maisie has dated on one of these apps . She is a fine young woman in the modern age, and certainly too young for someone like me, even if I were still mortal.

“Anyway, Wade and I weren’t compatible at all”—this instantly soothes me— “but he did help me find this job. Now he’s my boss, which in this case, wasn’t so good.” She sighs into her palm. “I feel like I disappointed him, as my friend and my supervisor, and that’s the worst part.”

I can understand this sentiment. It’s one thing to make a mistake that only affects yourself, but to make life harder for those you care about?

It’s the reason I left the letter where it was. The last thing I ever want to think about is how I disappointed Beatrice—how she lived her life and grew old thinking I was dead, and by the time I saw her obituary in the paper, it was far too late to ever mend the bridge again.

Maisie

I’ve bared my soul to Barnaby, and now he sits across from me, looking pensive.

“If this investigation concludes that it was not your mistake, you can go home?” he asks.

“Yep. But if they find it was a mistake on my part...” I don’t want to think about the worst possible outcome. “Maybe a pay cut. A demotion.” I shiver. “Which I don’t mind. As long as I get to keep my job.”

Quite suddenly, tears bubble up behind my eyes. Maybe it’s just the beer, but the reality feels too close.

“I can’t do anything else,” I say, rubbing my face with my fists to keep it at bay. “I don’t want to do anything else. I love my work. I love watching videos of players playing my game and having fun. I can’t lose that!”

Unable to hold it back anymore, I drop my head into my arms to hide my crying. I don’t know what Barnaby’s expression looks like, and I don’t want to know. He’s probably embarrassed at me bawling my eyes out over nothing.

I hear footsteps, and then a gentle hand lands on my shoulder. My head shoots up.

“From everything you’ve told me,” Barnaby says in a quiet voice, “you are good at what you do. I’m sure they will find you innocent.”

His kind words only make me cry harder. I don’t know how long this has been building up, but now that I’m letting it out, it’s coming like a flood. I turn in my chair to look up at him as tears stream down my cheeks.

“Th-thank you. I j-just...” I can’t even get the words out.

Barnaby crouches down next to my chair, and before I can react, he slips his arms around me. My body goes still as he brings me in close, pressing my cheek to his chest.

He smells incredible. He’s both hard and soft under me, and his calm, easy breathing immediately calms me. His big hand strokes my back as I shake with another sob.

“It will be all right,” he murmurs, speaking into my hair. “You won’t be stuck here forever.”

I want to object, to tell him that since I met him, I don’t feel stuck here. But at this stoic man’s tenderness, at his sympathy and affection, I fall apart, and my words escape me.

I cry like that into his chest while he rubs circles on my back. Finally, when my tears start to dry up, Barnaby releases me—but he remains there, kneeling by my chair as I sit up and try to regain my composure. While I sniffle, he reaches out and pushes a stray curl of hair away from my face.

“Thank you,” I mumble, rubbing my eyes now that they’re all scratchy and dry. “I didn’t realize how much I needed a hug.”

Barnaby’s lip quirks into something that could be a smile. “I’m glad to have helped.”

Why are his lips so... appealing? As if he can read my mind, he flicks his pink tongue out and licks them, and I’m drawn to it like a fucking magnet. Our faces are already so close together, it wouldn’t take much to lean forward and—

I don’t realize I’m already tilting my chin up toward Barnaby’s until he tips his head down closer to me, too. Is he thinking what I’m thinking? Oh, I hope so.

Yes. I think he’s about to kiss me.

When our lips meet, it’s quiet and gentle, just a light press of skin on skin. But the intimacy of it, this sudden crossing of the high barrier between us, nearly blows me over.

Instantly my body is on fire, and all I want is more . This tiny taste of his lips has ignited something bigger, so tentatively, I press harder with my mouth. Barnaby returns my pressure easily, quickly, with even more force.

Fuck. Even without tongue, his kiss is wonderful. He works expertly over me, caressing my lower lip first, and then my top one. His hand lands on my cheek, guiding my head even closer to his, pushing us more firmly together. I whimper against him, this surprising and delightful touch more than welcome in my sad state. To be seen as attractive, to be understood, to be heard and felt, almost pulls more tears from my eyes. I raise my arms and wind them around Barnaby’s neck, falling further into him as our kiss deepens.

And then his tongue strokes my lip, and a moan escapes me as my mouth opens for him. But he doesn’t rush—no, a man like this doesn’t invade right away. He simply explores, testing me, creeping in and then darting back out again in an invigorating, tantalizing tease. I could just melt into a puddle as his other arm loops around my back to anchor me, his hand sliding from my cheek to the nape of my neck to deepen our kiss.

When his tongue slips between my lips at last, everything inside me clenches. Somehow this simple kiss has become monstrously erotic in mere moments. It’s easy to picture how Barnaby would feel without his starchy vest under my hands, how his arms would caress my bare skin. I sag in my chair, putting all my weight on him, and he gladly takes it as our tongues twine together, lips wet and no longer tentative. I can barely breathe with how ferociously Barnaby is gobbling me up, his hand applying even more pressure to the back of my head as he pulls me off the chair and fully into his arms.

Finally, I have to come up for air. When I open my eyes, I find that his are huge and dark, his pupil filling his entire iris. There’s an odd glow in them, something that’s distinctly inhuman, as I slide fully into his lap on the floor.

“Maisie,” Barnaby murmurs, his voice suddenly quite deep, almost ethereal. “You smell so damnably good.”

I blink. I smell good?

Before I can ask, he hauls me up to my feet. Immediately I’m set off-balance as he wraps me up in his arms once more, his whole tall body bending down to meet me for another deep, enthralling kiss.

I’m drowning in the most exquisite way possible, and I think it would be fine if I met my end here, swallowed up by Barnaby Hallow.

Barnaby

Hell, I shouldn’t be doing this. I shouldn’t be here, in my tenant’s apartment, kissing her until her lips are swollen and her cheeks are pink. I shouldn’t be getting closer to this woman who smells so divine, whose pulsing veins make me hungry in more ways than one. Touching her body this way, my hands trailing up and down her sides and sliding over the curve of her hips, is treading on dangerous ground. I’m already imagining touching her this way without clothing between us, and I’m getting hard as a rock under my slacks, all while my fangs protrude from my gums.

Maisie tempts me. She invigorates me. She’s drawing up a part of my soul that I thought had long gone dormant—the part of me that craves pleasures of the flesh as much as it craves blood. It’s been a hundred years since I kissed a woman, not to mention slept with one. It’s too risky to be intimate with a human when it brings my true form so close to the surface. I feel it lurking just underneath, salivating at the scent of Maisie, imagining sliding inside her while my fangs sink into her throat.

And yet I can’t find the willpower to pull away. I’m a victim of my need, unable to stop what’s already been set in motion. My hands creep under the hem of her shirt, encircling her waist, the pads of my fingers sampling the softness of her bare skin. Of their own accord, my hips press into her, though I am much taller. Likely she can feel my carnal desire against her belly—and yet Maisie doesn’t object. No, she’s tumbling even deeper into my arms, willingly giving herself over to the demands my mouth and hands are making of her.

I suckle her lips, teasing them with my fangs, and she lets out another sweet whimper as my fingers caress her body. Her own hands skate down my shoulders to my waist, and to my surprise, she pulls me even tighter against her.

So my erection is both noticeable and welcome. This fills me with a nearly overpowering heat, knowing that she’s attracted to me, that she’s as turned on by me as I am by her. She is young and virile, soft and pliant, and oh so very human.

Human . She is merely mortal. She is a woman but she is also prey, and the monster is surging closer and closer to my consciousness.

If I don’t stop now, it may reveal itself, and then I will never get to taste her again.

At last, at the terrible image of Maisie’s face when she sees my true form, I regain control of myself. I pull away from our kiss hastily, seizing her by the shoulders and shoving her back a step. Maisie lets out a squeak of surprise as I force a solid foot of distance between us. We’re both panting, chests heaving, and electricity crackles everywhere we’re touching.

“I’m sorry.” I drop my hands and take yet another step away. “I’m so sorry, Maisie.”

She blinks, confusion in her eyes, which are still red from her tears earlier.

“Sorry? For what?” She tries to return to me, but I keep my arms up, shielding myself. Her brows furrow, and her mouth tilts down. “What happened?”

“Nothing.” I turn from her and stalk toward the stairway that will lead me out of her apartment.

“Barnaby?” When I glance back, her lip is trembling, and the shakiness of her voice nearly breaks me. “Where are you going? What did I do?”

She thinks she has done something wrong. At the very least, I must assuage that.

“You didn’t do anything.” My voice comes out deeper, harsher than I intend, because the need to feed is so strong. “I made a mistake.”

“A mistake?” Tears gather on her lashes again. “But... you...”

“I know. And I’m sorry.” It feels idiotic to be apologizing again, especially when I don’t regret kissing her at all.

No, what I regret is that I ever became a vampire. That I ever left that party with Eleanor. That I allowed myself to be tricked like a newborn calf and doomed myself to this life where my desire can never be gratified—where I would cause fresh weeping in a beautiful woman.

But I leave her there anyway, fleeing down the steps to the sound of her crying.