She put a hand over his mouth. “You asked me to marry you. Were you serious?”
She took her hand away. He didn’t say anything. His lips formed what would have been the start of a word, maybe a sentence, but he didn’t actually speak.
She’d scared the words right out of him.
“Uh . . . that came out of nowhere,” he said.
“Is that a no? Were you just saying it before because you thought you had to say it?”
“No! I mean, not no to the original question, obviously, no to that last—” He took a deep breath. “Let me start over. Claire . . . look, you just startled me, that’s all.” He took her hands, both hands, and twined their fingers together. Then he leaned forward and rested his forehead against hers. “Of course I mean it. I always meant it. I will always mean it. I just thought . . . I thought you wanted to wait.”
“I did,” she said. “But if these past years in Morganville have taught me anything, it’s that sometimes you have to just . . . jump. It’s not safe. It’s never safe. But sometimes you have to live dangerously.”
He laughed a little. “You’re talking my language now.”
“You said I wanted to wait. You didn’t?”
“We should probably go back to that earlier thing about me being a guy, right?”
“I got that part.” She kissed him, just a tingling brush of lips, their foreheads still touching. “You waited anyway.”
“Well, yeah. Because you’re worth waiting for.” He said it as if it was simple and self-evident, but it made her shiver. It was such a strong, sexy thing to say, and she knew he meant it. He would always mean it. “If you want to get married now, tonight, then let’s find whoever passes for a justice of the peace in Blacke.”
“Wouldn’t that be a story to tell the kids,” she said, and then she held her breath, because she’d said it without really thinking, and she was waiting for him to get weird about it, to pull back, to say something like whoa, girl, hit the brakes.
But instead he just smiled and said, “I’m pretty sure we’ll have lots of stories to tell the kids. Almost none of them are going to be appropriate.”
“Good.”
“Excellent.”
“So. Justice of the peace?”
“No,” she said. “How about we do it in Morganville, once this is over? Do it right. For real.”
“You mean, gown and tuxedo? Because I was getting used to the idea of saying I do in sweatpants I borrowed from some toothless old country coot. It’s different.”
“It’s different in an utterly bad way.”
“Would that be the eighties definition of bad, as in great, or . . .”
“Shouldn’t we catch up?” she asked. Because the others had disappeared inside the darkened library building ahead, and she had that feeling again, of people watching from the shadows. Vamps, most likely. She supposed they were listening, too.
“In a second,” he said, and pulled her close, body to body, fitting in all the right places to start a breathtaking fire inside her. “You know they’re watching us, right?”
She nodded.
“Let’s give them something to watch.”
And then he kissed her, all passion and intensity and heat and dark chocolate sweetness melting on her tongue, but not just sweet because there was spice in it, too, bursts of searing pepper, and he made her hungry, so incredibly hungry to feel his skin on hers that it almost drove her crazy.
Almost.
“Good effort at making me want to rip your clothes off,” she said when he let her breathe again.
“Didn’t work?”
“Oh, it worked. I’m just better without an audience.”
He kissed her gently on the nose. “I’ll hold you to that later.”
When they opened the door of the library, they found themselves catapulted back into the past. The windows had been blacked out to hide the lights, but apart from the fact that the electricity was on, the Blacke Public Library hadn’t changed very much. The same battered wooden tables, the same sturdy chairs, the same scarred linoleum floors and doubtful carpet. It was neater, though. And it wasn’t full of Blacke citizens standing around with weapons.
Instead, people were standing around in groups of two and three, whispering, and not displaying visible armament. They were mostly watching Morley, who had leaped up onto one of the study tables and was pacing around, hands behind his back, with the duster swirling around him. Claire half expected him to have jingling spurs. He certainly had the cowboy boots, and they looked old enough to have survived the Civil War and been on the march ever since.
Shane must have been thinking the same thing, because he said to Morley, “Nice outfit. Whose smelly old corpse did you steal it off of?”
It was hard to read Morley’s expression, since he wore his hair long and wild and it concealed his face pretty well. “I could ask the same about your ill-fitting rags, boy. Though I doubt you killed anyone. Perhaps mugged. I doubt you have the stomach for it.”
“Oh,” Shane said, with a grin that was at least half wolf, “you might be surprised.”
“Do tell,” Morley invited. “By all means. Oliver, where do you pick up these . . . feral children?”
“You remember Shane,” Oliver said. He’d stripped off his blanket toga, and Claire quickly turned her back as she saw the white flash of skin. With no hesitation at all, he was stripping and putting on clothes that had been laid out for him. She heard cloth rustling and zippers fastening, and finally risked a look over her shoulder. Yes, he was dressed, in a pair of jeans that actually fit him and a plain dark shirt that he somehow made look edgy. “And Claire. And, of course, Michael and Eve.”
“Charmed yet again, I’m sure,” Morley said. He didn’t sound charmed; he sounded utterly impatient. “Weren’t some of you vampires before? Oh, never mind. Boring. To the point, then. You brought Ayesha to us, and I thank you for that, but I notice you’ve not rescued anyone else. Thoughts?”
“Several. None that don’t involve you screaming.”
“Don’t be so limiting, I’m sure you can imagine several that involve me begging as well. Did you run away, Oliver? Leave your pride of caged cats behind?”
“Fallon’s got them,” Oliver said.
“Ah.”
Silence fell. Morley jumped down from the table and leaned against it, eye to eye with Oliver for a change. He pulled off his hat and dropped it on the table and ran both hands through his wildly messy hair. “Well?” he finally said. “He was never my problem, nor yours, nor even Amelie’s or even her dead father’s. He was your madman’s doing.”
“Myrnin,” Oliver said. “Yes.”
“Wait,” Claire said. “What do you mean, it’s Myrnin’s problem? He had nothing to do with it!”
“Oh, he did, girl, he most certainly did,” Morley said. He sat down on the table and gave her an amused stare. “He’s never told you the story? Ah, well, probably because it isn’t to his credit, I imagine. So poor, sad, unstable Myrnin was all alone after his vampire maker was killed. And he became friends with a clergyman, a very learned one, who was also a secret student of alchemy.”
“That was Fallon,” Oliver said. “In case you might miss the obvious.”
“Quiet, it’s my story. Yes, it was our dear friend Fallon, who most earnestly wanted to cure Myrnin of his madness . . . and his curse. He found, most horribly, that he only made things worse, and next thing you know, Myrnin’s drained Fallon like a cask of wine. As ever, he immediately regretted it, and decided to resurrect him, within the doors of Fallon’s own church, no less. A thing Fallon most assuredly did not want to do, resurrect—at least not as a vampire. But our dear madman dragged him kicking and shrieking back to life. Broke him most sincerely, I’m afraid . . . and then left him to fend for himself.”