Page 24 of Road Trip with a Vampire

Then he jacked up my car and eased off the busted tire like he’d been doing it all his life. A sudden warmth came over me as I watched him work. It had, I realized, been a very long time since I’d been able to rely on somebody else to take care of things like this for me.

When had I last been able to turn to someone else when there was a crisis and have them just… handle it? I couldn’t remember. All I knew was that this, right now, being cared for…

It felt good.

I shoved the feeling down deep. I couldn’t let myself get used to it. Peter was still a stranger. And a vampire. And while we hadn’t talked about what his plans would be after getting to Indiana, I had a feeling I would never see him again after we got there.

“How do you know how to do this?” I asked to distract myself from this swirl of confusing feelings.

He paused in his work, still holding the long metal tool he was using to tighten the new tire in place. Where had that come from?

“I don’t know,” he said, thoughtful. “But this feels intuitive to me.”

“Really?” I couldn’t fathom.

He nodded. “Easy as breathing.”

Once finished, he stood up, wiping his palms off on his jeans. There was a streak of grease across the bridge of his nose. I had to resist the urge to reach out and rub it away with my fingertips.

“Thank you,” I said. “You’re a lifesaver.”

He shrugged, like what he’d just done was no big deal. But he couldn’t quite hide the pride in his voice or the smile that tugged at his lips when he said, “All in a day’s work.”

It was a twenty-minute drive to the nearest auto repair shop. Fortunately, they had a full complement of new tires available and said they’d have my car ready for pickup in an hour.

“Mind if I get something to eat while we wait?” I asked Peter as we watched the mechanics get started. “I’m starving.” There was a truck stop across the street, complete with a convenience store on one end and a diner on the other. I could all but hear my soon-to-be breakfast calling to me.

“Why would I mind?” Peter slid on a pair of sunglasses as we stepped out of the repair shop and into the sunlight. “I plan to do the same.”

I turned to look at the truck stop. The parking lot was full of trucks and their truckers—which meant there were a lot of potential witnesses.

“It’s fine,” Peter said as if reading my thoughts. “I suspect those truckers are half-asleep. If I’m wrong, it’ll take just a small glamour to make sure I’m not spotted.”

My mind snagged uncomfortably on the oblique reference to his powers. “Your glamour abilities are strong.”

He frowned. “Are they?”

I nodded. “All vampires can hide their fangs. I’ve only known a few who could alter people’s perceptions beyond that.”

He considered that. “Do some vampires like a sunny day?”

“Not many,” I said. “But some do, sure.”

“And the sun feels awful to me,” he pointed out. “Being able to alter people’s perceptions beyond hiding my fangs seems a fair trade-off for never being able to enjoy the beach.”

In the wrong hands, a power like Peter’s could be put to terrible use. Dwelling on this while I was traveling with him, though, would lead to nothing good.

There were few cars on the road, and we easily crossed the wide street between the truck stop and the repair shop. To my surprise, Peter followed me towards the convenience store rather than heading directly for one of the sleeping truckers.

“I need a hat,” he explained as he opened the door for me. The bell above the doorframe jangled far too loudly for the early hour. “To keep the sun off my face.”

“But you already have a hat.”

He scoffed. “What? That chicken thing?”

I gave him my shit-eatingest grin. “Yes. That chicken thing.”

“I am never wearing that hat again.”

“But I bought it just for you.”

The place was spacious for a convenience store and had an entire wall of hats, most of them with slogans like Git-R-Done and NASCAR emblazoned on the front.

Peter quickly found the only hat in the store that didn’t have a slogan on it—a little neon-green number that was so bright it probably could have been seen from space—and paid for it at the cash register.

“Lime green?” I asked when he popped it onto his head. “ Really? ”

“It was either a lime green hat or a hat that said something stupid.”

There was something so haughty about the way he said something stupid that made teasing him about his hat selection nearly irresistible. From the twinkle in his eye, I suspected at least part of why he’d chosen it was to goad me into giving him shit.

“What do you think?” he asked, confirming my suspicions. He turned this way and that as he modeled it for me.

I decided to play along and made a show of looking him up and down. “Looks good on you,” I quipped. It wasn’t a lie. The hat was hideous, but the man could wear a garbage bag as a dress and look amazing. Truly unfair. “Green matches your complexion.”

He placed a hand over his heart in mock offense. “My complexion? You wound me,” he said in a theatrical voice I didn’t think he had in him.

I was just about to tell him the chicken hat matched his complexion even better when—

Wait a minute.

Were we…flirting?

Was that what this was?

No.

That was impossible.

Wasn’t it?

Before I could answer my own question, my stomach chose that moment to do a comically loud rumble.

I sighed and looked down at myself. Saved by the appetite.

“Breakfast,” I said.

It seemed to take Peter a moment to adjust to the abrupt change of subject. “Right,” he eventually agreed. “Breakfast.”

“Go on and get yours,” I said. “I’ll meet you back here in an hour.

” Now that I remembered I was ravenous, the twin aromas of pancakes and coffee wafting towards me from the diner were a siren song I could no longer resist. It had been a good twenty years since I’d eaten at a truck stop diner.

Granted, the last time I’d done so I’d been so hungover, none of it had gone down all that smoothly, but my mouth still watered at the thought of all the junk food deliciousness I was about to consume.

I was so preoccupied by these thoughts that when I turned to walk towards the diner, I didn’t see the oversized stack of Coke boxes in my path until I tripped over it.

Ten years of yoga training was apparently no match for a one-on-one fight with gravity. I fell to the ground hard , scraping my knee against the sharp corner of a shelving unit on my way down.

“ Shit! ” My impact with the floor would leave bruises on my ass later, but my knee was a bright burst of pain that took priority over all other discomforts. A glance down showed that the scrape had torn my leggings and was deep enough to draw blood.

I clapped a hand over the bleeding wound reflexively—before remembering that the vampire I’d come here with had been wanting his breakfast, too.

Peter was crouching on the floor beside me inside half a heartbeat, his hands gently touching me everywhere. My face, my shoulders. My injured leg.

His dark brown eyes were round with panic.

“Are you all right?” His voice was low and urgent. His nostrils flared slightly, the only sign that he might be tempted by the drops of blood welling up beneath my palm. “You’re hurt.”

“It’s nothing,” I said honestly. Gods, this was embarrassing.

A lifetime spent causing mayhem throughout the world, followed by the past decade dedicated to perfecting my flexibility and balance, and I had just been felled by a stack of soda boxes?

Peter must have been right, earlier. My natural state was clumsy.

If Lindsay or Becky were here, I’d never hear the end of it.

Peter scowled. “It’s not nothing.”

“It is,” I insisted. “A Band-Aid, a couple of ibuprofen, and I’ll be right as rain.” If I used my daily allotment of magic to heal myself later, I probably wouldn’t even bruise.

Peter wasn’t hearing it. He stood abruptly and accosted the pimply teenage boy sweeping the floor a few feet from where I’d landed.

“Who left those boxes in the middle of the aisle?” he demanded, jabbing an accusatory finger at his chest. Peter didn’t just look angry. He looked murderous .

The kid quailed and stumbled back a step, his eyes saucer-wide. “I don’t know,” he yelped, cringing into himself. “I just got here.”

Peter stepped closer to the kid, getting right up in his face. “If I find out you’re lying to me—”

Whoa. Whoa .

“Peter, stop.” I stood up and grabbed his arm. It was solid steel beneath my grip. “It’s not a big deal. See? I’m fine. I just tripped.”

Peter turned his attention back to me, the venom in his expression slowly fading as his eyes cataloged every inch of me. He swallowed, then shook his head as if coming back to himself. “You’re…really okay?”

I nodded, feeling shaky for reasons that had nothing to do with the tumble I’d just taken.

“Totally okay,” I managed. Physically, anyway, it was the truth.

The kid, seeing his opportunity, fled behind the checkout counter at the other side of the store. I barely noticed. Peter was still staring at me so intensely I could feel it from the tips of my ears all the way down to my toes.

“Are you all right?” I asked him tentatively. My hand was still on his arm. Neither one of us pulled away.

A long pause. “I’m not sure what came over me,” he admitted sheepishly. “I smelled blood. You were hurt.” And then, with a hesitation in his voice I had never heard from him before: “I…don’t like the idea of you being hurt.”

My heart hammered in my rib cage at the reluctant admission. He’d been about to rip that kid’s head off. All because he thought I might have been injured.

How was I supposed to process this?

It had been a wild, indefensible reaction to a negligible injury. So why did I find his going feral like that one of the hottest things I’d ever experienced?

If he’d reacted like this when I’d barely hurt myself, what might he do if I were really threatened?

I was distantly aware that a group of employees had gathered behind the checkout counter. I turned to face them and saw they were openly staring at us, their eyes very wide.

I gave Peter’s arm a gentle tug. “We should go,” I murmured.

Peter followed the direction of my gaze and grimaced. “That’s probably a good call.” He looked back at me and gave me a sheepish smile. “Let’s find breakfast somewhere else.”