remember happening in the car.”
She felt her face get hot and her nipples tighten but shook her head, swallowing hard. “In a minute. I want to test a sample of your blood and do some research, so I can see if I can figure out exactly what is happening with you. The magic versus science conundrum is fascinating.”
“Fine,” he drawled, rolling up a sleeve.
She took a quick blood sample, careful not to look into his eyes when she did it, in case he magically made her clothes disappear just from the heat of his gaze. Not that she didn’t want that to happen, exactly, but right now she wanted to take refuge in science while she figured out exactly what was happening to her.
She reached for a bandage, but he stopped her with an amused glance.
“Oh. I forgot,” she murmured as she watched the tiny puncture mark on his arm vanish. “How wonderful that must be.”
“Wonderful,” he repeated, and when she glanced up at him, he was staring at her breasts. Her breath stuttered, and she quickly backed away and retreated to her equipment.
“If I find that your red blood cells are a different size, shape, or color from those of normal human red blood cells, that gives us a place to start. Of course, I’m limited by what I can do here, since we can’t exactly go to the hospital and run tests.”
She tapped her finger against her chin, thinking. “Too bad, really, because a sample of your bone marrow would tell me so much. But I don’t see how we can do that, just yet, and anyway, if we start here, we can determine what we might want to do next. Does that make sense?”
He said nothing.
“Bane! You have to at least answer me—” She turned to face him and saw immediately why he hadn’t replied. He was sound asleep, and Bram Stoker, who’d apparently abandoned her mid-blood-test speech, was sprawled out on the rug next to the couch, out cold with all four legs in the air.
“And, yet again, I have bored you to sleep. This is not the best basis on which to build a relationship,” she murmured, and then she froze, blood vial still in her hand.
Relationship?
With a vampire she just met, she was thinking the R word?
“Okay, that’s it. I need food. I’m delirious.”
She carefully put everything on the table and quietly, so as not to disturb them, walked to the door, and slipped out, carefully closing it behind herself. If Mrs. C didn’t have any food handy, she’d order something delivered, but she needed to eat something now and then maybe catch a nap before her brain got any fuzzier.
There was plenty of time for everything else later.
The hallway was deserted, but then again, it was mid-afternoon, so probably everybody not human in the house was sleeping. She resisted the urge to go check on Hunter and wandered downstairs toward the kitchen, where she found Mrs. C presiding over a pot of soup and pulling fresh loaves of bread out of the oven.
“Oh, wow, I might actually faint dead on the spot from how good that smells,” she moaned, leaning against the doorway. “Can I help with anything? And maybe get something to eat? I’m starving.”
The housekeeper/cook/all-around everything, from what Ryan could tell, was pink-cheeked from the oven’s heat. She smiled at Ryan and waved her to a chair.
“Have a seat, Doctor. I’ll dish you up a bowl.”
“Oh, no, please don’t wait on me. I can—”
“You can sit yourself down and let me enjoy the pleasure of serving food to a lovely guest is what you can do,” the woman said firmly, so Ryan hastily sat herself down and watched as Mrs. C carved a big hunk of steaming hot bread that smelled deliciously of rosemary and put it on a plate.
Then she handed the plate to Ryan and pushed a ceramic crock and a butter knife across the table. “Get started on that, and I’ll dish you up some soup. Do you like potato leek?”
“I love potato leek,” Ryan said, and then she was too busy moaning with pleasure as she bit into the bread to talk.
Mrs. C put a large bowl of creamy soup, chock full of potatoes, leeks, and plenty of herbs, down in front of Ryan with a soup spoon.
“There you are. Eat up. Would you like some sweet tea?”
Sweet tea was the Southern drink of choice, but Ryan had never quite gotten the taste for it. It was