“Yes, wait—no!” he howled. “Why do you always reduce me to a blithering idiot?”

“This is blithering?” I grinned.

“For me,” he admitted.

I had to concede that one.

“You smell him on me?” I asked, sniffing my shirt. “What does he smell like to you? To me, it’s all lust and bergamot.”

“Uselessness,” he grumbled. He tipped his forehead to mine and kissed my temple, my forehead, the bridge of my nose. He buried his face in the crook of my neck, inhaling deeply. “I do enjoy your scent, though, and I like you. Very much. I want to protect you. If anything happened to you, I don’t know what I would do.”

I lifted my head to eye him warily. “You’re not going to do something weird with my dryer lint, are you?”

“I never know what is going to come out of your mouth,” he said, staring at me. “I enjoy that, in a morbid way. I am saying that even before I turned you, your scent was part of what kept me close to you.”

“What did I smell like?”

“Mine,” he said, kissing the hollow of my throat, the tip of my nose, and finally my mouth. “You smelled like you were mine.”

“Can you take me home now?”

“Are you tired?” he asked. “Sophie’s methods can take a lot out of you.”

“No, I don’t want more people to see me making out with some random guy in the Cracker Barrel parking lot.”

“I’m hardly random,” he said, sliding into the driver’s seat. “I’m your sire.”

“Well, people don’t know that, because they don’t know I’m a vampire,” I said, rubbing my wrists. “I’ve already got

‘jobless’ and ‘publicly drunk’ going. I don’t need to add ‘parking-lot ho’ to the list.”

“One day, you will explain to me what that means, and I don’t think it will make me happy,” he muttered, turning the ignition.

Just when I thought our “date” couldn’t possibly get worse, we arrived at my house to find my Daddy waiting on my porch swing with a Meat Lover’s Pizza. I hadn’t had fatherly approval for a “gentleman caller” since I was a senior in college. This was not going to go well.

Gabriel nodded to the porch. “Do you know this man?”

“That’s my dad,” I said. “I still haven’t told him.”

“I know,” he said. “I can leave now.”

“No, the two most influential men in my life are going to have to meet sometime.”

“Hi, baby,” Daddy said, kissing my cheek between bites of pizza. “Your mama had a sales party thing tonight. Makeup or lotion or home decor or some such thing. I never can keep them straight. I don ’t object until they try to talk her into hosting the things herself. I thought I’d surprise you, but it seems you had plans for the evening.”

“That was sweet. Gabriel Nightengale, this is my father, John Jameson,” I said, waving him and Gabriel in through the front door and leading them to the kitchen. “Daddy, Gabriel is my—”

Sire? Interfering pseudo-mentor? Guy most likely to be my first ugly undead breakup? I settled for “Friend.”

“Pizza?” Daddy asked, opening the box to display his cholesterol-laden treat on my counter.

“Oh, no, thanks, I couldn’t,” I said.

Daddy arched a brow as I pulled out a counter-height barstool for him. I never turned down pizza. Ever. “You’re not going on some crazy diet, are you?”

For a brief, wonderful instant, Gabriel looked stricken. I laughed. “No, we already ate, smart alec.”

“If you’ll excuse me for a moment,” Gabriel said, disappearing out the kitchen door.

“Gabriel Nightengale, that name sounds familiar,” Daddy mused, chewing on a pepperoni. I could tell from the look on his face that he was searching his massive but not quite reliable memory banks for information.

“Um, he has a lot of family around here,” I said, not bothering to add that most of them were in the cemetery. “They’ve been in the Hollow a really, really long time.”

Daddy returned to chewing. Leaning against the counter, I asked, “So, what’s new with you?”

“Same old, same old.” He grinned, snagging a second piece. “Summer classes. Started writing another textbook I won’t finish. Your mama’s already getting ready for next year’s historical tour.”

“I’m not putting River Oaks back on the tour,” I said. “Aunt Jettie wouldn’t have wanted that.”

“Mama’s not going to ask,” he said. “To be honest, she wouldn’t know how. Your mother is at a loss for how to handle this job thing, pumpkin. She’s upset and scared for you, but she’s embarrassed, too. She worried about you being single and living on your own, but she’s never had to worry about you on the job front. She never thought you’d be in this…position. She wants to help, but you’re refusing to let her just swoop in and take care of everything. She feels as if she’s lost her…bargaining power with you.”

I snorted. “Subtly put, Daddy. Try using fewer pauses. They imply you’re searching for the word that will hurt me less than the ones she actually used.”

“Your mother is a complicated woman,” he said simply.

“And by ‘complicated,’ do you mean ‘manipulative’ and ‘emotionally crippling’?” I asked.

“Air-quote fingers aren’t attractive on anyone, honey,” he said, using his authoritative teacher voice. “She may be a little high-strung, but she’s still your mama.”

Daddy wrapped his arm around me. My head fell to his shoulder, in that hollow made just for me. “You know she loves you,” he said quietly.

I sighed. “Yes, I feel the crushing weight of her love from here.”

He cleared his throat, which I could tell meant he was trying not to laugh. “She doesn’t know how to handle a situation unless she’s in charge. Just don’t expect me to pick a side between the two of you.”

“Even though you know I’m right?”

“Janie.” There was the authoritative voice again.

I looked up at him, making the doe eyes. “It was worth a shot.”

So, we talked. Eager for normalcy, I savored the mundane details of the life that I’d been missing. None of the freshmen in Daddy’s summer class could write a complete sentence, which was nothing new. My second cousin Teeny ’s face-lift had gone wrong, which just went to prove that plastic surgery is one area where you shouldn ’t bargain-shop. My future grandpa Bob, Grandma Ruthie’s fiancé, was in the hospital having his hip worked on—which meant it was time for his monthly weeklong hospital stay. Why was this sweet man engaged to my grandma? I could only imagine that after surviving gall -bladder removal, knee replacement, dialysis, and chemo, Bob actually wanted to die, and he saw marriage to her as a legal form of assisted suicide.

While Daddy described Grandma Ruthie’s legendary surgical-ward histrionics, Gabriel returned to my kitchen door lugging a ratty cardboard box. I sincerely hoped vampires didn’t substitute pig pieces for flowers and chocolates. But I couldn ’t smell anything bloody, just the musty scent of old cigarettes and B.O. With his amazing vampire speed, Gabriel managed to shove the box into a nearby coat closet without Daddy’s realizing it existed.

Daddy went into suspicious-father mode, managing to question Gabriel without making it look as if he was interrogating him.

And Gabriel, far more accustomed to lying than I, performed beautifully. He deflected all possible vampire giveaways without an iota of irony. He complimented my father on raising such a “fascinating” daughter. He even praised Daddy’s textbook.

“I see now where Jane gets her inquisitive nature,” Gabriel said. I suppose I should have thanked him for saying “inquisitive”

and not “nosy and spastic.”

Stuffed to the gills with imitation Italian-style meat products, Daddy rolled out the door sometime later. I only had to drop seven “Wow, it’s really late” hints. I think the phone call from my mom was the only thing that could have pried him away from cross-examining my new “friend.” Daddy hadn’t had the opportunity in a long, long…long time.

“I think Daddy likes you,” I squealed to Gabriel in mock giddiness. “I only hope you ask for my hand before my skanky younger sister runs off with a scoundrel and ruins my reputation and hopes for happiness.”

Gabriel grimaced. “That’s not funny.”

“Pride and Prejudice references are always hilarious. What’s with the box full of funk? ” I nodded toward the closet.

Gabriel retrieved the box and opened it with a flourish.

A heretofore unknown and disturbing factoid: When you best a vampire in battle (no matter how sad and circumstantial the evidence of that battle may be), you take all of his stuff. No matter how icky that stuff may be. I was the unhappy recipient of the personal effects of Walter the Whitesnake fan: a silver-plate lighter engraved with “Screw Communism,” several concert T-shirts with discolored armpits, forty-two copies of Knight Rider, season two, and the complete works of Def Leppard on cassette tape.

“Walter’s mother was eager to have her basement back,” Gabriel explained. “She was glad to be rid of this. She brought it down to the council office this morning. No one else will want it, so Ophelia wanted you to have it. I believe it’s a reminder to stay on your best behavior.”

I tossed the cassette single of “Pour Some Sugar on Me” back into the box. “If you beat somebody up, you take their stuff?

Wait, what’s to keep someone from challenging another vampire to a duel just because they like their car?”

“Nothing,” he admitted. “As long as the vampire can find some reason for the duel, even if it ’s a contrived reason. Some petty perceived slight. The restrictions loosen a bit as you get older. The goal is to keep newly risen vampires from developing a taste for random killing, which is the only reason the council is taking such an interest in Walter ’s death. They’re trying to make an example of you.”