Single White Vampire (Argeneau #3)(15)
"This is a good mood?" Kate asked with disbelief. Thomas just laughed again.
"Here you are," Lucern called. He jogged down the steps and handed his cousin's cooler back to him. "Give Bastien my thanks."
"Will do." Then Thomas nodded, gave Kate another wink, and turned to walk off the porch.
Kate glanced at the driveway and the truck parked in it. "A.B.B. Deliveries" was stamped on the side, the same as the cooler, she noted. Lucern maneuvered her out of the way and closed the door.
"What… ?" she began curiously, but Lucern saved her from proving just how rude and nosy she could be. He turned away and started back up the hall before she could ask the questions trembling on her lips.
"I thought that, as there are so many letters—too many to answer individually, really—we could divide them into categories and come up with a sort of form letter for each. Then you could just add a line to each response to make it more personal."
Lucern grunted and took another sip of the coffee Kate had made while making lunch. Well, it had been her lunch, his breakfast. Although, if he counted the bag of blood he'd sucked down while stacking the rest Thomas had delivered in the small refrigerator in his office, he supposed the meal could count as his lunch, too. They had since moved to the living room, and he was seated on the couch while she explained her plans for his letters.
"I'll take that to mean you think my plan is brilliant and agree to cooperate," Kate said in response to his grunt. Because it seemed to annoy her, and because he liked the way she flushed when she was annoyed, Lucern grunted again.
As he expected, her cheeks pinkened with blood and her eyes sparked with anger, and Lucern decided that Kate C. Leever was a pretty little thing when angry. He enjoyed looking at her.
And despite her unhappiness with him, the irritation on her face suddenly eased and she commented, "You have more color today. I guess there was no lasting damage from that head wound after all."
"I told you I was fine," Luc said.
"Yes, you did," she agreed. Then she looked uncomfortable and said, "I'm sorry I didn't check on you after that first time. I intended to, but I didn't hear the alarm go off again. I must have turned it off in my sleep or something."
Lucern waved the apology away. He had turned the alarm off himself, so she had nothing to apologize for. And he didn't think she'd appreciate knowing that he'd crept into her room while she was sleeping. She most definitely wouldn't want to know that after finishing the task, he'd found himself standing at the side of the bed just watching her sleep for a while, staring with fascination at her innocent expression in sleep, watching the rise and fall of the bunnies on her flannel nightgown as she breathed. How he'd wanted to pull the top of that oh-so-proper nightgown away from her throat to see the pulse beating there. No, she definitely wouldn't want to know all that, so he kept it to himself and sipped his coffee again.
The drink was bitter, but an oddly tasty brew. Lucern couldn't think why he'd avoided it all these years. True, he'd been warned that the stimulant in coffee would hit his body twice as hard as a human's, but he really hadn't noticed any effects yet. Of course, he'd only had a couple sips so far. Perhaps he shouldn't risk any more. He set the cup down.
"So, what are we doing?" he asked abruptly, to get Kate off the topic of not waking up to check on him last night.
"Well, I've been dividing the letters into categories. A lot of them have similar themes or questions, such as requests as to whether you'll write Lucern's or Bastien's story next," she explained. "So I've been putting all those asking that question in one pile. That way, you can write a form letter for each pile, reducing the letters you write to twenty or so rather than hundreds and hundreds."
"Of course, it would be nice if you read each letter and wrote a line or two to personalize your response," she added, sounding tentative.
Lucern supposed she thought that the idea of all that work would annoy him. Which it did. He couldn't help but grumble, "I did not suffer these difficulties with my other books."
"Other books?" She blinked in confusion, then said, "Oh. You mean your historical texts. Well, that was different. Those were nonfiction. Most of them are used in universities and such. Students rarely write fan letters."
Lucern grimaced and gulped down another mouthful of coffee. It helped stop him from telling her that his novels were nonfiction as well, and that they were just peddled as vampire romance.
"Anyway, I think we have enough categories to make a start. I can tell you what each category is, and you can compose a sort of general response to each while I continue to sort the rest of the letters," she suggested.
Nodding his acquiescence, Lucern crossed his arms and waited.
"Wouldn't you like to get a pen and paper or something?" she asked after a moment. "So you don't forget any of them? There are at least twenty categories and—"
"I have an excellent memory," Lucern announced. "Proceed."
Kate turned in a slow circle, apparently trying to decide where to start. "Dear God, he sounds like that bald guy in The King and I," he heard her mutter.
Lucern knew he wasn't supposed to hear that, but he had spectacular hearing. He quite enjoyed her exasperation, so he added to it by commenting, "You mean Yul Brynner."