As Shadows Fade (The Gardella Vampire Chronicles 5)

Verbena, who’d always been a lusciously stout woman, had become a bit more stout in the last few months herself. Since she and Oliver, the groom-cum-footman, had gone to Vauxhall Gardens on the evening Victoria had come to think of as the Night of the Frothy Pink Night Rail, they had been inseparable. By the time Victoria and Max had returned from Romania, Verbena and Oliver had needed a wedding themselves.

Speaking of Max… Victoria turned to the twittering ladies and excused herself under the pretense of not wanting to ruin the bride’s entrance by slogging awkwardly down the stairs in front of her.

Nilly and Winnie patted her stomach several more times, and allowed Victoria to escape as they fussed and pecked and picked at their friend’s hair and skirts and jewels.

“I hate weddings,” Max murmured when Victoria found him skulking at the back of the chapel at St. Heath’s Row, the Rockley estate. A garden wedding had been out of the question in January, and despite the fact that it was out of Season, Melly and her fianc? had been so besotted, they didn’t care about the timing of the nuptials. “They could simply have eloped and put an end to this.”

“My mother was traumatized enough by our elopement,” Victoria reminded him. “It was only the fact that she had her own wedding to plan, and the promise of two more in her new stepdaughters’, that we remained unscathed.”

“I would have remained unscathed regardless,” Max reminded her. “I do believe your mother is still a bit intimidated by me.”

Victoria smiled. “A bit? The way you looked at her when she suggested naming the baby Ermintrude? I was surprised she didn’t faint dead away right then.”

“A ridiculous name. And I’m-we’re-perfectly capable of naming our own child.” He shifted, leaning back against the stone wall of the chapel and eased her so that she rested her weight against his hip. “When is this bloody thing going to start?”

“Soon, I expect.”

“Not soon enough,” he grumbled. “The last time I was at a wedding was yours, and it started late as well, as I recall.”

She looked up at him. “I’d forgotten about that. You were just as annoyed as you are now.”

“You’d invited me to stand guard for vampires,” he reminded her. “I didn’t want to be there in the first place, and then you had the effrontery to ask me to watch for undead while you married yourself off to-someone else.”

Her eyes narrowed in delight. “So you were jealous.”

“No. Of course not.” He looked at her as if she’d grown two heads. Perhaps three.

“Of course. Just as you didn’t peek while I was changing in the carriage. Come now, Max, admit it. You watched me change. You couldn’t resist.”

“Absolutely not,” he said, but he was smiling now, little crinkles showing at the corners of his eyes. “I would never have done something so crude.”

The music began, wheezing from a small organ at the front of the chapel, and Victoria saw that the groom had taken his place at the altar. “I do believe I shall find a seat. It wouldn’t do for the daughter of the bride to be hovering in the back. Are you coming with me?”

“Anywhere, and everywhere,” he said, holding her gaze. And then he ruined it by adding, “Someone has to keep a bloody eye on you.”