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“Did you send all those roses to the house the other day?”

I nodded.

“She didn’t like that,” Princess said.

I was beginning to see that.

“Who’s at the door, honey?” I heard an older woman call out from inside the house. There was the sound of scraping chairs and heavy footfalls and then the door was opened wide. Princess stood aside while a huge woman, stooped over on account of some illness, filled the doorway.

“What do you want?” she glared at me, very hostile. “Kaya isn’t friends with the likes of you! Go away!”

She slammed the door in my face.

I turned around to walk away when I heard Princess calling from behind me.

“Wait!”

She came running towards me. “She went away for a bit but she will be back tonight.”

I thanked her and gave her a bag of candy that I had bought earlier for this purpose.

“Did you know I had these?” I asked with a wink.

She grinned, “Well, a girl can hope, right?”

I decided to wait for Kaya outside her house.

In the early evening, her truck stopped outside her house and I saw her getting out with the little girl. They went into herhouse and I watched them in the kitchen making dinner, then heard as Kaya sent Princess off to have a bath and get ready for bed.

I waited for the house to quiet down and then I went up to the front door and knocked quietly. I had to knock a few times before Kaya would come to the door.

She looked so cute, dressed in cut-offs and a vest, her hair falling over her shoulder.

“What do you want?” she demanded.

“I just want to talk. You’re avoiding me,” I said.

“The other night was a mistake,” she said, looking away, embarrassed. “I would like to pretend it never happened.”

“I can’t do that,” I said quietly. “There is absolutely no way that I can do that.”

The atmosphere between us was charged, conversation was difficult. I wanted to take her into my arms and kiss that luscious mouth of hers but I could see this would not go down well.

“I think you don’t really want that either.”

“How do you know what I want?” she snapped and was about to slam the door shut in my face when I called for her to wait.

“Can we talk, please? Just talk?”

She didn’t want that but, reluctantly, she held the door open.

“You have a problem with our kind, I understand that. But I’m not like them, I have been trying to live with humans, running a legitimate business. I have not tasted human blood in many decades.”

“You’re lying!” she accused me, her eyes burning.

“I swear I’m not!”

She gave a grimace. “I know for a fact that you had Juan Marco Albarellos killed.”