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powerful there, too.
    When he kissed me good night, his lips brushed my cheek, and I smiled.
    I like a man who knows when to rush things . . . and when not to.

Chapter 3
    I GOT A PHONE CALL THE NEXT NIGHT AT MERLOTTE’S. Of course, it’s not a good thing to get phone calls at work; Sam doesn’t like it, unless there’s some kind of home emergency. Since I get the least of any of the barmaids—in fact, I could count the calls I’d gotten at work on one hand—I tried not to feel guilty when I gestured to Sam that I’d take the call back at the phone on his desk.
    “Hello,” I said cautiously.
    “Sookie,” said a familiar voice.
    “Oh, Pam. Hi.” I was relieved, but only for a second. Pam was Eric’s second in command, and she was his child, in the vampire sense.
    “The boss wants to see you,” she said. “I’m calling from his office.”
    Eric’s office, in the back of his club, Fangtasia, was well soundproofed. I could barely hear KDED, the all-vampire radio station, playing in the background: Clapton’s version of “After Midnight.”
    “Well, lah-de-dah. He’s too lofty to make his own phone calls?”
    “Yes,” Pam said. That Pam— literal-minded was the phrase for her.
    “What’s this about?”
    “I am following his instructions,” she said. “He tells me to call the telepath, I call you. You are summoned.”
    “Pam, I need a little more explanation than that. I don’t especially want to see Eric.”
    “You are being recalcitrant?”
    Uh-oh. I hadn’t had that on my Word of the Day calendar yet. “I’m not sure I understand.” It’s better to just go on and confess ignorance than try to fake my way through.
    Pam sighed, a long-suffering gust of sound. “You’re digging in your heels,” she clarified, her English accent making itself known. “And you shouldn’t be. Eric treats you very well.” She sounded faintly incredulous.
    “I’m not giving up work or free time to drive over to Shreveport because Mr. High and Mighty wants me to jump to do his bidding,” I protested—reasonably, I thought. “He can haul his ass over here if he wants to tell me something. Or he can pick up the telephone his ownself.” So there.
    “If he had wanted to pick up the phone ‘his ownself,’ as you put it, he would have done so. Be here Friday night by eight, he bids me tell you.”
    “Sorry, no can do.”
    A significant silence.
    “You won’t come?”
    “I can’t. I have a date,” I said, trying to keep any trace of smugness out of my voice.
    There was another silence. Then Pam snickered. “Oh, that’s rich,” she said, abruptly switching to American vernacular. “Oh, I’m going to love telling him that.”
    Her reaction made me begin to feel uneasy. “Um, Pam,” I began, wondering if I should backpedal, “listen . . .”
    “Oh, no,” she said, almost laughing out loud, which was very un-Pam-like.
    “You tell him I did say thanks for the calendar proofs,” I said. Eric, always thinking of ways to make Fangtasia more lucrative, had come up with a vampire calendar to sell in the little gift shop. Eric himself was Mr. January. He’d posed with a bed and a long white fur robe. Eric and the bed were set against a pale gray background hung with giant glittering snowflakes. He wasn’t wearing the robe: oh, no. He wasn’t wearing anything. He had one bent knee on the rumpled bed, and the other foot was on the floor, and he was looking directly at the camera, smoldering. (He could have taught Claude a few lessons.) Eric’s blond hair fell in a tousled mane around his shoulders, and his right hand gripped the robe tossed on the bed, so the white fur rose just high enough to cover his kit ’n’ kaboodle. His body was turned just slightly to flaunt the curve of his world-class butt. A light trail of dark blond hair pointed south of his navel. It practically screamed, “Carrying concealed!”
    I happened to know that Eric’s pistol was more of a .357 Magnum than a