Page 23

With Wine Pairings

“I … sorry,” she said, trying to remove her fingers and sure enough, there was a small kissing smack as she pulled t hem away.

He didn’t seem to mind. Instead, he closed his eyes as he chewed, but then his eyebrows started to furrow. Blindly, he recaptured her fingers. Only then did his face smooth out and a warm hum leave hi s throat.

Helena mentally kicked herself for letting go before he had finished chewing, robbing him of his taste. She also realized he wasn’t trying to seduce her and probably didn’t have those kinds of feelings at all. Without realizing it, at some point, she had stopped thinking of him as a demon. He was just a person to her, but in truth, he wasn’t. He was an alien creature that was pretending to be human, whatever he might have b een once.

But she was the one who was human. She was the one gett ing ideas.

“Okay, what’s next?” she asked, refocusing on t he plate.

“Take a sip of your wine first,” he insisted, gesturi ng to it.

“Oh!” Helena followed the instructions. “Hmm, tha t’s nice.”

“Riesling with the R oquefort.”

“Oh so there is a wine pairing with eac h cheese?”

“Of course,” he said as if it was obvious. He dug in his pockets and pulled out four little bottles like one would see during a plane flight. “Champagne with the camembert. Pinot Noir with the comte. Riesling with the Roquefort.” He gestured toward her mouth where she had already con sumed it.

“And the … Picodon?” she asked, referencing the card just to be sure.

“They sent a Meursault,” he said, reading the label of one of the tin y bottle.

“Not what you’d choose?” she asked, reading his tone.

“No, no, it’s fine. I’ve just never tasted it before,” he said and twisted the cap off the neck like he was wringing out a chicken. He took a long sniff from the bottle, then gave a non-committ al grunt.

“Take a sip,” she offered, setting her hand t o his arm.

Instead, he extended the bottle to her. “You gotta taste it first, or there is no memory to pull.” A brief flash went through her mind of telling him to drink some first, then kissing him, sharing the wine betw een them.

She cleared her throat abruptly, then took the wine and sipped it from the bottle. He quickly sliced some of the right cheese off for her. “That’s got a—” and then he popped the cheese into her mouth before she could finish speaking.

“Oh, oh that’s nice,” she said as soon as she swallowed after a lingering chew. Then he brushed his thumb over the corner of her lips, wiping away som e crumbs.

“You should have a pickle or a pear to cleanse your palette,” he suggested as if nothing had happened, lifting up both dishes from the tray for her to cho ose from.

“Uh, I guess pear,” she said, selecting one of the slices to suck on. “My gosh, this is fun. It’s like a game.”

“That is why the cheese is a whole course all on its own,” her demon explained. “French dining i s an art.”

“Just ask a French man,” s he teased.

“I told you, I’m not French anymore. I’m not anything.”

“You’re my guide through this world, so it’s not nothing,” she reminded him. “Next cheese, please!” She thrust a finger into the air.

While he prepared the next cracker, Helena watched him. “Would you ever want to go back to France?” she asked.

“I have. Many times,” he answered n eutrally.

“Really?”

“It used to be the only place I would be summoned,” he said. “Then as the world expanded and people traveled beyond their borders and intermixed, the places I would be called to did as well.”

“Until you landed here. In the back of my grandma’s cookbook,” she said. “How … did you end up in the back of my grandmother’s cookbook?”

Rafferty looked up through his eyelashe s at her.

“Oh you’re not going to tell me?” she accused, recognizing his stoic bloc k tactic.

“I don’t exactly know how she got the summoning spell for me. But the fact that I now know she was your grandma makes a lot mo re sense.”

“Wait, wait…” Helena said, some things finally occurred to her that she hadn’t realized at first. “My grandma only passed a month ago… Did you…” She swallowed, fortifying herself. “Did you have anything to do w ith that?”

Rafferty straightened, his face a mask again, his eyes distant.

“Rafferty, answer me,” she ordered.

“It doesn’t matter what I say. If you think that, then you aren’t going to believe me no matter what I say,” he sai d simply.

“Why would you say that?”

“Because I’m a demon.”

Helena huffed a breath. “You know that is getting to be your go-to excuse for ev erything.”

She waited, pressuring him with her eyes to answer her question, and he resisted for quite a while. To dodge her, he kept preparing the cheese morsels, adding different flavors to the different cheeses, but eventually he ran out of bits to put together.

“I didn’t know she was dead until you just told me,” he said softly. “If she did make a deal that failed and was taken, it wasn’t by me. But I don’t actually know and, considering who we’re talking about, I doubt it.”

“So you did know her?”

“We had made a deal once or twice, yes,” he said, but he sounded like he wa s dodging.

Helena wrinkled her nose at that. “Then it is possible to make a deal and not get dragged i nto hell?”

“Yes, it is,” he said, “Otherwise nobody would take the risk.”

She thought about that. “I suppose it’s like how casinos let a person win big money occasionally to let the others think it’s possible.”

Rafferty neither confirmed nor denied it, but Helena was pretty confident she was right. “So what did she want f rom you?”

More of the silent treatment as he picked up one of his prepared tastes and held it ou t to her.

She regarded it, then raised an eyebr ow at him.

“I can’t tell you,” he said.

“Why?”

“Because that answer would cost you something if I got it for you,” he said.

“But—” And again, when her mouth was open, he pushed one of the prepared cheeses into it, stopping her words. He did the same. The taste was mild and slightly sweet. He tapped the Gruyere de Comte part of the card since both their mouths were full. It was nice, but Helena indicated the pinot noir bottle lying on her bedspread. He cracked it and passed it to her while she made sure to touch his knee. Yet he grunted and shook his head, then replaced her hand on a bare section of h is chest.

She went still as she touched his skin, feeling his ribs expand with his breath underneath. He breathed? It wasn’t until he started snapping beside her face that she realized he had been motioning for her to hurry up and take a drink from the win e bottle.

Skin, she thought. I must need to be in contact with his skin for the trick to work. The Pinot and Gruyere together seemed to sweeten both, and finally she had to swallow no matter how much she wanted the taste to last.

“That one was nice,” she said aloud, her hand still on his chest, which was much warmer than his hands tended to be. “Why…” then sh e stopped.

He opened his eyes to look at her. “You ask a lot of q uestions.”

“Well, you’re very interesting, and you don’t volunteer too much about yourself. So I have no choice but to ask.”

“Hmmm,” he grunted and plucked a pickle from the dish to hold out to her lips. She wrapped those lips around the small tube, sucking the briny juices into h er mouth.

Again she caught herself. What am I doing? Cut that out, she chided herself before she bit into the little pickle. She winced at the sha rp taste.

“Hmm, does not mix well with the pinot,” she commented as she lea ned back.

He laughed. “Take a sip of your Riesling. It is light enough that it shou ld help.”

She leaned back to grab up the wineglass, and the stretch naturally pulled her hand off of h is chest.

There. Safe, she thought. Sleeping with him would be a bad idea. She was already sharing the memory of food with him, but to share anything else… well she wasn’t about to make a blood sacrifice and the idea of exchanging her body in any way seemed repugnant. Except, aren’t I doing that anyway, by letting him use my tastebuds? That was an interesting question.

“Okay, then here’s a question for you,” she said, leaning back in her bed against the headboard with her wine wavering in one hand. “Have you taken other ‘payment’ than memories? Or do demons only have their specialized ‘foods’?”

“That’s two questions,” he pointed out, catching her wine to take his own sip to clear his mouth, his hand cupping over her fingers so she didn’t completely l et it go.

“And you can’t answer them because it might cost you?” she needled.

He studied her face a moment, then stood up.

“If we’re going to get into this, then I’m going to get the desser t course.”

She laugh ed. “Why?”

“Because what I’m going to tell you is going to leave a bad taste in yo ur mouth.”