“This isn’t what I expected when I found out you were sleeping in the house.”

“What did you expect?”

“I expected you’d come over here because you couldn’t wait an extra minute to have fabulous, mind-blowing sex with me.” And to hell with the corpse, for the moment.

“I’ve told you things for your own good,” Eric said soberly. “However, now that that’s done, I am as ready as ever to have sex with you, and I can certainly make it mind-blowing.”

“Then cut to the chase, honey.”

With a movement too fast for me to follow, Eric’s shirt was off, and while I was admiring the view, his other clothes followed.

“Do I actually get to chase you?” he asked, his fangs already out.

I made it halfway to the living room before he caught me. But he carried me back to the bedroom.

It was great. Even though I had a niggling anxiety gnawing at me, that gnawing was successfully stifled for a very satisfying forty-five minutes.

Eric liked to lie propped on his elbow, his other hand stroking my stomach. When I protested that since my stomach wasn’t completely flat, this made me feel fat, he laughed heartily. “Who wants a bag of bones?” he said, with absolute sincerity. “I don’t want to hurt myself on the sharp edges of the woman I’m bedding.”

That made me feel better than anything he’d said to me in a long time. “Did women . . . Were women curvier when you were human?” I asked.

“We didn’t always have choices about how fat we were,” Eric said dryly. “In bad years, we were all skin and bones. In good years, when we could eat, we did.”

I felt abashed. “Oh, sorry.”

“This is a wonderful century to live in,” Eric said. “You can have food anytime you want.”

“If you have the money to pay for it.”

“Oh, you can steal it,” he said. “The point is, the food is here to be had.”

“Not in Africa.”

“I know people still starve in many parts of the world. But sooner or later, this prosperity will extend everywhere. It just got here first.”

I found his optimism amazing. “You really think so?”

“Yes,” he said simply. “Braid my hair for me, would you, Sookie?”