Page 65 of My Big Fat Vampire Wedding

“How do you know?”

“Well, first, because Elias is always at the house,” she said, immediately regretting it when Victor’s green eyes went dark. “But also because Lucy never keeps anything from me. I know about every bad date she’s ever had.”

Even the one time that Lucy had woken up after a particularly strong full moon to find herself naked in the woods with a man she’d never seen before.

She’d been reasonably sure they had just encountered each other while on a hunt and that nothing had happened between them.

Apparently, it was a turning point for her as a shifter, wanting to make sure she never went through a full moon alone again, despite not having lived near her own familial pack in many years.

“Do you want me to walk you to the Tube?” Victor asked.

“Do you maybe just want to … walk for a bit?” she asked.

“Sure,” he said, tucking his hands into his front pockets and making his shoulders curl forward – something that Pandora found almost intolerably adorable.

If this was a real relationship, not a business arrangement, she was pretty sure she would have moved into his path, grabbed the front of his jumper and pulled him down for a long, deep kiss.

But it wasn’t.

So she needed to keep her hands to herself.

No matter how much harder that seemed to get each time she was around him.

“How have things been at home? Is your family driving you crazy?”

“Pretty much every moment,” Pandora said, but she was smiling. “For the most part, it is good crazy. Three more relatives have shown up since the engagement party.”

“Who?” Victor asked, lightly touching her hip to guide her away from a man stumbling out of a pub.

“My uncle Leopold and his partner, Cody.”

“Leopold and Cody,” Victor said, looking amused by the mix of new and old-fashioned names.

Pandora couldn’t exactly tell Victor that Leopold, a man who had been single and lonely for the better part of five hundred years, had happened across a newly made, twenty-something vampire named Cody at a trendy new underground vampire club. Sparks had flown. They’d been inseparable ever since.

“There’s a bit of an age gap there,” Pandora said. “Then there is Aunt Henrietta,” she went on. “If you think Aunt Ravenna is a bit … eccentric, Henrietta puts her to shame. She showed up just before dawn in a cloud of musky perfume and sixteen small dogs.”

“Sixteen?” Victor asked, aghast. “I like dogs as much as the next Brit, but … sixteen.”

Henrietta had long been a fervent dog-lover. And she was often despondent over the fact that there were no immortal dogs the way there were immortal ravens like Vlad.

“They’re all spoiled horribly rotten, too,” Pandora said fondly, thinking of the way Henrietta went to everyone’s bedroom to hand them a bag of dog treats, instructing them to give any dog who came to their door a little snack before sending them on their way.

“What kind of dogs are they?”

“She likes them small and fluffy,” Pandora said. “She has several different-coloured Pomeranians, Pekinese, papillons, and chihuahuas. And, yes, she will introduce you to each of them. As well as tell you several facts about them.”

How Henrietta kept track, with thousands of dogs through the years, of their favorite toys, treats, foods, weather, music, and beds was completely beyond Pandora. But she always found it endearing.

“I will look forward to that,” Victor said.

“You don’t have pets, right? I don’t think I ever asked that.”

“No. I had a childhood dog. But once he passed, my parents opted against getting another. And I didn’t feel it was right to get one when I’m so busy with uni.”

“We’ve only ever had Vlad.”

“How long do ravens live?”