Velvet (17 page)

And—it was kind of nice, actually, to be held. I mean, I hadn’t really touched a lot of people recently. In the hospital, I wasn’t allowed to have contact with my mom, because the risk of infection was too high, for her. After that, I just didn’t really want anyone to touch me.

But it was nice, standing here with him. It was more than nice.

Suddenly, I was afraid to look at him.

“You’re right,” I mumbled at his feet. “That was fun.”

His hands tightened around me for a moment, and I risked a glance up. He was smiling lightly, eyes still burning silver. “Told you.”

We looked at each other a moment too long, and both became aware of it at the same time. He cleared his throat, letting me go, and glanced up the hill.

“You hungry? There’s lunch in the truck.”

I nodded and we sat and switched our skates out for boots, but when I tried to stand again, he nudged me so that I fell over onto the sled.

“What?” I asked, confused. “Aren’t we going back?”

“Yep,” he said, and picked up the handle.

“What, are you gonna
pull
me up the hill?”

He frowned at me in an amused sort of way. “Caitlin, I don’t think you’ve really grasped the fact that I’m not fully human.”

And with that he started jogging, pulling me behind him like I weighed nothing. I thought about mentioning that I might be human, but I could still
walk
, and then I realized he was pulling me up the hill faster than I could have run it, and I would’ve had to rest many, many times.

When we reached the top, I hid my amazement with sarcasm. “Am I allowed to stand now?”

He reached a hand down to me in reply. I took it and stood, watching as he threw the sled in the back of the truck before pulling out a small cooler. We hopped up onto the hood and he produced a thermos from out of nowhere. Adrian was like a sexy, scary Mary Poppins.

“Your aunt said you like hazelnut,” he said, pouring me a cup of steaming coffee into a little tin cup.

“I do.”

I was sort of touched that he’d taken the trouble to find out. For as much vampire trivia as I’d learned recently, there was a lot about
him
I didn’t know.

He pulled out sandwiches wrapped in cloth napkins, little bags of fresh vegetables, and apple slices. I felt like I was in first grade again.

“So you’re a chef as well as a vampire?”

“God no—I can barely slap together a PB&J. Mariana made the lunch. She’s a bit of a foodie.”

Part of me was really amused that Mariana had deigned to make a meal for little old human me, but all I said was, “Oh, good. It would be boring if you were incredible at everything.” I winked at him to let him know I was kidding. “Speaking of food, my aunt wanted to invite you over for Thanksgiving. I told her you probably wanted to eat with your own family. You totally don’t have to come if you don’t want to.”

He leaned back against the windshield, one arm tucked behind his head, which made his shirt pull up just enough for me to see a slice of rock-hard abs. The wind ruffled his hair and he looked like he should be in
Vogue
’s winter issue.

“I’d love to, but Julian’ll be in town, and we already decided we’d have a big family dinner. I’d invite you over, but we always drink during the holidays.”

It took me a second longer than it should’ve to realize he didn’t mean alcohol.

“When it’s bagged, and there’s a fresh supply sitting right across the table—” He shook his head. “It’s just not a good idea.”

“Sure,” I said, a little more high-pitched than necessary, and took a sip of coffee.

“But that brings up a good point: what to do about holidays. I suppose it’s a little early in the relationship to spend Christmas Day together, but what about Christmas Eve?”

What odd conversations we had. “Sounds good. I’m sure my aunt and uncle would love having you over. Well,” I amended, “I’m sure Rachel would love having you over. I think Joe’s still warming up to the fact that we’re an item.” He smiled and I blushed. “What about your family? I should probably spend some time over there, so everything looks equal.”

He seemed to consider this. “How about we come over to my place that afternoon and your place that evening?”

I nodded and took another bite of sandwich. He set down his apple and hopped down from the truck. “That reminds me—happy birthday.”

I looked at him funny. “My birthday kind of already happened.”

“I know, but I ordered your present and it just came yesterday.”

“You got me something?” I asked, mouth full of sandwich.

He just smiled and rummaged through the backseat of the truck, returning with a brown-paper-covered box wrapped up in a red bow. He set it on the hood with a heavy thud.

“Geez, what’d you get me, a bowling ball?”

“I would be frightened to see you with a bowling ball in hand.”

“Hey! I am completely average at bowling.”

He smiled. “Open it.”

I felt weirdly nervous as I set my sandwich down and untied the bow. The lid popped right off and I pulled out one of a dozen framed vintage couture gown designs. Really, really
old
couture gown designs.

“Wow,” I breathed. “Where did you get these?”

“Mariana was apprenticed to a
couturier
once upon a time. I found them in the attic when I was a kid living at her old place in Paris, and she said I could take them.”

I looked in the corner of the sketch and found a date. “But—these are from 1923.”

He raised his eyebrow, as if waiting for something to dawn on me.

It finally did.

“Ha! Right. ’Cause Mariana’s, like, a hundred and fifty years old. Got it.” He smiled and took another bite of sandwich. “But wait, how did you know I was into sewing?”

It wasn’t really a secret, but I also didn’t broadcast it at school. All the sewing stuff I’d brought with me to Stony Creek was boxed up in my room, and as far as I was aware, he’d never been in there.

He looked a little uncomfortable. “When our father picked you as his next target, we researched your family—standard procedure. We learned that your mother was a seamstress and that you both donated quilts to the neonatal ward at the hospital.”

“Oh.”

I wasn’t really sure whether that was reassuring or creepy. We finished up lunch and headed back to the ranch. Adrian was right—it had been a fun day. But his comment about researching my family just drove home the fact that I was an assignment to him. Maybe we were actually friends, too, but we certainly weren’t anything more. That shouldn’t bother me—I tried to convince myself that it
didn’t
bother me.

But on some level, it did.

10

HYDROPHILIC INTERACTIONS, SIBLING RIVALRY, AND CHRISTMAS SHOPPING

I threw my pen dagger-style at my chemistry book, because my chemistry book deserved it. I was sitting in the de la Mara’s monstrous library on one of the many overstuffed couches, surrounded by bearskin rugs and spiraling, two-story bookshelves.

“What in particular do you not understand?” Adrian asked, rappelling down from the ceiling and hovering above the coffee table where my homework was spread out. He was wearing military-issue pants, fingerless black gloves, and a tight black T-shirt. I’d spent the entire afternoon trying not to laugh at how absurd he
should
have looked rappelling around a library in partial military gear. Somehow, he pulled it off without looking like an ass. In answer to his question, however, I pointed at the textbook.

“That. I don’t understand that.”

He looked over at me, his body completely parallel to the ground. “You don’t understand the entire book?”

I looked sad. “Yeah.”

He nodded contemplatively, then grinned. “All right,” he said, grabbing me. “Up.”

I yelped as he pushed off from the coffee table, propelling us twenty feet in the air. Coming to a stop, he grabbed on to the lip of a bookshelf, bent his knees (while I clung to his neck for dear life—he was the one strapped in, not me), and catapulted us across the library toward the door, landing gently. Setting me down, he opened a large steamer chest and pulled out a harness similar to the one he was wearing, except ten sizes smaller.

“Put this on.”

“Why?” I asked suspiciously.

He looked at me like the answer was obvious. “We’re going to study.”

I’d recently had the epiphany that when Adrian said things that didn’t make sense, it was faster to just go along with it—eventually he’d always come around to explaining himself. I stepped into the harness and pulled it on. He helped cinch the straps so that I wouldn’t fall out, then grabbed a connected pair of cords hanging from the ceiling and attached them to the carabiners at my hips.

Still holding on to the cords, he looked down at me. “When you want to ascend, just jump and the line will recede with you. If you want to go down, release the tension by pressing this button,” he said, pointing to a shiny black button on the side of the harness. “I’ll be moving us around the room, so you don’t need to worry about that. You ready?”

I blinked at him. “I think so?”

“Good.”

He grabbed my harness and threw me in the air like I weighed nothing. I rose almost thirty feet before gravity finally slowed me down. Adrian got a running start and jumped off the back of a couch, climbing through the air like a militarized Peter Pan until he was hanging opposite me.

“This is fun,” I said with a happy smile.

“You’re studying hydrophilic and hydrophobic interactions, right?”

“Yep. Hey, can you do a somersault in these?”

I leaned forward hesitantly, and the harness allowed me to pivot. Suddenly I lost my balance and fell forward, hanging upside down, and instantly realized I should have asked Adrian if the harness would stay
on
upside down. Luckily, it did. He grabbed hold of my ankle and pushed me upright, looking amused.

“Are you having fun?”

I just grinned.

“All right,” he said. “Now
hydro
means ‘water’ and
philos
means ‘love,’ so
hydrophilic
means ‘water-loving.’ That means if you are a water molecule and I am, say, a glucose molecule, I will be attracted to you because we’re both polar.”

He propelled himself forward and grabbed hold of the cords connected to my harness so that we were hovering a mere half foot apart. I knew he was only talking about regular old science-y chemistry, but his voice had this natural purr to it that made me want to make a lame joke about
chemistry
chemistry.

“
Hydrophobic
is the opposite,” he continued, blissfully unaware of my inner thoughts. “It’s ‘water-fearing.’ Although that’s misleading—it should be hydro-doesn’t-give-a-rat’s-ass. If you’re, again, a water molecule, and I’m an oil molecule, you have poles, but I don’t. We don’t repel each other, exactly; we simply don’t bond.” He pushed off from me and floated five feet away.

I frowned at the distance between us. “I think I like hydrophilic better.”

He didn’t catch on. Which was probably a good thing.

“Do you understand now?”

“Yep. But that wasn’t the part I was having trouble with.” Adrian stared at me blankly. “Thanks, though; I liked the three-D demonstration.” I smiled and did another somersault in midair, managing to get upright again without Adrian’s help. I grinned at him and pressed the release button on the harness, plummeting toward the ground at a frightening speed. Luckily, I landed on an overstuffed couch, let go of the button, and bounced, doing another somersault on the way up with a lighthearted “whoo-hoo!”

Adrian crossed his arms, a smile clinging to the corner of his mouth. “So you think sledding down a hill is a near-death experience, but you don’t mind doing gymnastics twenty feet in the air?”

“If I fall here, I’ll land on a sofa,” I said in a reasonable tone. “If we crash on a hill, I’ll hit a tree. Sofa. Tree.” I looked at him, holding out my hands and pretending to weigh the options.

He grinned and propelled himself toward me until he could grab hold of my cables again. “Is there anything else you don’t understand?”

Oh, the things I didn’t understand. But I shook my head, because I was having way too much fun with the harness thing to do homework.

“Good,” he said with a slight smile. “Now—we’re going to do something I’ve never done before that I’ve always wanted to try.” For about two-and-a-half heartbeats, I thought he meant kissing me. But he followed his previous statement with “Lucian’s not coordinated enough, Julian’s got a stick up his ass, and Mariana and Dominic would rather die than do anything fun. So—you ready?”

I frowned at him, intrigued. “You haven’t told me what we’re doing yet.”

He looked around the library and held out his arms, smiling the biggest smile I’d ever seen him smile. “We’re going to play tag.”

And he dropped straight down like a rock, hit a sofa, and bounced back up, landing on a bookshelf and using it as a springboard to leap a quarter of the way across the library. I laughed, heading toward the same bookshelf. I was about to push off when I paused.

“Are these steady?” I called to him halfway across the room.

“They’re bolted to the floor, each other, and the ceiling. Just try not to knock any books off.”

I grinned. “Okay!”

Carefully planting my bare feet on the ledge, I grabbed on to a cast-iron light fixture affixed to the edge, bent my knees, and jumped. I probably weighed half as much as Adrian, so I didn’t get very far, but enough to reach another bookshelf and leapfrog myself off that one as well.

Waiting for me to get the hang of it, Adrian clung to the side of a shelf until I was only one spiral-formation away. Grinning, he jumped to one of the sliding ladders on the edge of the room. I followed on a ladder fifteen feet to his right. We both ran along the bookshelves, holding on to the ladders as they slid. Once they picked up momentum, we hopped on and rode them around the room. Luckily the tracks curved at the corners of the library, so we didn’t crash into the walls.

Right when he reached the gigantic fireplace at the far end of the library—where the curved tracks abruptly stopped—he sprang off the ladder and flipped through the air to land, spiderlike, on a bookshelf twenty feet away. I jumped, too, landing ten feet lower, intending to climb up and tag him, since it seemed like I was “it.”