The Vampire's Doll (The Heiress and the Vampire Book 1) by Jaclyn Dolamore

Author:Jaclyn Dolamore [Dolamore, Jaclyn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Catlord Press
Published: 2017-04-12T05:00:00+00:00

“You don’t look like you enjoy eating,” Dennis remarked, as she picked at her fruit one morning several days later.

“I’ve gotten more used to it over the years.” She glanced at the clock. The courier with the blood was late, and Papa wasn’t home either—he’d gone to the workshops early. “Did you want anything?” she asked.

He looked at the tray of fruit and the neglected tureen of seaweed soup and shook his head. “This is no breakfast, if you ask me. I’d eat if I could have my mother’s cooking.”

“What would she make?”

“Truthfully, my mother isn’t a very good cook at all.”

She half-smiled. “Then why do you want it?”

“Because it’s how home tastes. What I’d give to have my morning coffee with some eggs and bacon.”

“What is bacon? I’ve seen it in pictures.”

“Cured pork. Strips of it, all crispy fried up in a skillet. Did your mother ever cook?” He slid into a chair and slung an arm over the back. Such a simple motion but sometimes the grace of his simplest movements enraptured her.

And no one ever asked her questions like that about her mother. “No…she worked all the time. Our cook always did the cooking. I don’t think Mama ever set foot in the kitchen.”

“She did the same thing as your father?”

“Almost. She worked more with large steam-powered engines. Trains, especially. That was how she died. A steam boiler exploded.”

“What was she like?”

No one asked that either. Maybe because everyone knew what she was like. Or maybe—well, it wasn’t the way of things here to speak about what the dead had been like. It was a short jump from reminiscing about the dead to ancestor worship, and Lord Jherin discouraged that. “She was—I don’t know. It’s hard to explain. She was wonderful but I don’t know how to explain.” She was distressed, realizing that she didn’t have words to explain her mother to someone who had never known her.

“You don’t have to.”

“But I wish I could. I—I’m afraid maybe I don’t remember her very well. People say she was wonderful. She was the opposite of my father. He was always quiet, except with her. They both came alive together, working on things.”

“Where were you?”

“Underfoot. I wasn’t shoved off on my nurse all the time if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“I was,” he said. “You seem awfully lonely.”

“I’m not, I have Els.” But of course she was lonely.

I have you, Dennis…oh wishes to the fates, let me have you. She was starting to rely on his presence, in some way, and that scared her, because Calban could snatch him away at any moment. Their conversation seemed to come easier after he told her what Calban had done to him, like it was a weight lifted from his shoulders, even though they had not spoken of it again.

“I don’t even know for sure if my mother is alive anymore,” he said. “Ten years have passed. She would have turned sixty this year.”

“She can’t cook? I thought that was all women do, in Earth.

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