I might pay you and others.”
She watched him, eager for his answer.
“Take off your gloves, Miss Parker.”
“I…”
“Please. Humor me.”
She swallowed again but did as he asked. She pulled the black silk from her hands and laid them on the table.
“Give me your hand.” He reached his out for her, skin as pale as white ash. His pointed nails looked as dangerous as they always had. She hesitated, and he asked again. “Please.”
Carefully, she laid her hand in his. She pulled in a breath at the sensation. At the feeling of him against her. Skin to skin. Soul to soul. He lifted her hand until he had his palm to hers, her fingers against his as if through a pane of glass. His fingers were long and powerful, and they dwarfed hers. He laced his fingers into hers.
Finally, he answered the riddle. “I wish to either live…or to die. I care not which.”
There came that hunger once more. A hunger not only for blood, but for life. For love, for happiness, and for solace. He wished to feel alive. Across from it was balanced with a hunger for the grave. For true peace. For rest that he had been denied.
“I am neither alive nor dead.” His voice was quiet. “When I said I had hoped my life might end when I touched you, I was not lying. To die is the greatest gift given a man, and it has been denied to me. I am spurned by the living and rejected by the dead. I am alone.”
“You have others like you. Walter and the others.”
“No. They are merely children of my poison. A perversion of both my curse and their former lives. They can die, Maxine. They can be destroyed. I cannot. Not even by you.”
“I…I’m sorry.”
“You pity me?”
“It isn’t pity. It is sympathy.”
“I am a murderer and a monster. Dozens in this city have died by my command. Thousands of your neighbors will be in the ground before my work is done. I have killed millions in my centuries. I will kill millions more. It is simply who I am. Do you feel such sympathy now?”
“I am aware of what you are, vampire.”
“Are you really?”
“The lives you have spent are the rain in a storm. Simply because I have not stopped to count the drops does not mean I do not comprehend the weather.”
“Such a poet you are.” He pulled her hand toward him, and she watched in fascination as he kissed her fingers slowly, one by one. “My precious Maxine. You have not yet asked me to spare your city.”
“Would you do it if I had?”
His lips twisted into a smile against her thumb. “No.”
“Then do not scold me for not wasting my breath.”
He chuckled and turned her hand to place a kiss against the sensitive spot in the center of her palm. She pulled in a hiss of breath through her nose. She shivered, and goosebumps crawled up her arm. He smiled at her reaction. “Do you want me, Miss Parker?”
“That is not an appropriate question.”
“Yet I have asked it all the same. And we have an accord.” He kissed her wrist, over her pulse, his lips lingering there for a long time. She watched him, her eyes wide, her pulse racing, knowing he must be able to feel it. He parted his lips, and for a moment, she was terrified that he meant to sink his fangs into her skin. Instead, he rolled his tongue along her vein slowly.
Her face exploded in heat. She must be beet red. She yanked her hand away from him, unable to take it anymore. She buried her bare hands in her lap. “Enough.”
He chuckled darkly. “Very well. But only because the meal has just begun.”
“No, I mean you are to stop—” She paused as another young gentleman arrived with food. The first course. She sighed. “I mean that you should stop such advances altogether.”
“Why?”
“Is it not enough that I have asked you?”
“You are afraid of what I make you feel, Miss Parker. It is cowardice that inspires your words, not revulsion.”
“I am not a coward.”
“Correct. You are not. And it is for that reason I refuse your request. It is a temporary fear. Like jumping from a cliff into a pond. It will pass once you realize you will survive the fall.” The vampire laughed and sipped his wine. “Eat, Miss Parker. Please.”
It was an arrangement of cheese and cured meats. It all looked quite tempting. They fell into another long