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After that, I sometimes went to bars, got drunk and found someone easy on the eyes, good for a few hours.

“I’m not good with what comes after,” I admitted. “Men want to see you again, they want you to answer texts, come out with them to football games, play games with their friends, meet their mothers.”

“I don’t want any of that,” Jack said, his eyes intense.

“What do you want?” I asked him, playfully, to lighten the mood.

“This,” he said, pulling me close. I could feel desire stirring in me again. I wondered how long this would last, this attraction we felt for each other. Surely, it would fade in time?

He kissed me, deeply, tenderly.

“All I want, is this, right now.”

I smiled. “But I’m not always like this either.”

“I will take what I can get,” he said, refusing to make light of the situation.

“I’ve been waiting for you for so long,” he said. “I don’t want to let you go.”

I couldn’t imagine being alive for centuries, having lived through different kinds of wars in a time before electricity and cars, when horses and carts were the only means of transportation. When some people had no rights and were seen as slaves, where life was short and people who came in and out of your life were with you for a short time only.

I could tell Jack didn’t like talking about his mother and sister, who had not changed like him. They had died, as human beings do, after a brief life though it sounded like it had been happy enough.

“Maybe, we just see how it goes,” I said to him. “No expectations, no demands?”

I had a feeling he didn’t quite like that but he nodded and agreed.

It seemed to me that moments like these were perfect. We spoiled them by trying to recreate them, trying to preserve and keep them, trying to pin them down like a dead insect in a glass box.

I may not have lived for centuries but I did know this, happy moments didn’t come around often and you had to appreciate them or you missed out.

I didn’t know what the future held for me and Jack Beaufort but I was willing to see where this would take us.

Whatever this was.

Chapter 14

Jack

I hadn’t told Kaya everything about my family.

Of course not.

I didn’t tell her that Simon had come with my father from Europe and was not my real brother. He was related to my father, a strange relationship that went back many centuries. But Simon looked young and it made sense to call him my brother. He’d come out with my father and they had been slave traders. They made a fortune supplying workers from Africa to the American cotton plantations. During a brief stay in Boston my father met my mother, a society lady and daughter of a prominent local physician. She agreed to marry my father on the condition that he gave up slave trading and drinking human blood. It was not an easy decision but he loved her and agreed to her terms.

He sold his stake in the slave ships, opened a hotel and then another. He built Clover Castle to remember his Irish roots. Simon was meant to help him with the business but secretly continued the slave trade, even keeping blood slaves in a dungeon at the castle. When this came out there was a huge scandal and my mother briefly left my father. Simon was banned to France.

In time he wheedled his way back. During the wars he came to fight alongside my father and after my mother’s death he moved back into the castle. My father reinstated him in the business even though he clearly had no interest in anything but power.

But my father would not turn his back on him. Even when he saw how Simon tried to undermine me as I rose in the company. When my father fell ill after consuming a contaminated blood product, I was convinced Simon had something to do with it but there was no proof.

There had been several attempts on my life and my suspicions had grown over the years. At Simon’s wedding to Ulrika, a member of a wealthy Scandinavian aristocratic family, I was attacked by a vicious monster on my way back to my room. I had been badly injured. It came shortly after I had convinced my father to demote Simon to a less visible role in the business. He was still on the board. But in these modern times it was important that the company had the right look and came across as family friendly, honest and decent.

Simon was everything but.

I knew he was still consuming real blood and combined with his age, it made him a powerful and dangerous enemy. I had always known I would have to get rid of him, sooner or later.

At my father’s funeral, he tried to take over proceedings. He made a speech in which he announced he was taking over the company. I had to mobilize the board to have him removed, pushing him out as much as possible, even though he still had a role in the business.