Page 5 of Road Trip with a Vampire

The longer Peter stood there, watching me, the less concerned I was growing that he was about to attack my students.

But I knew the signs of a hungry vampire.

He’d been tempted by me when I’d grabbed him earlier.

He was still tempted. I could see it in the way his eyes kept flitting to the spot where my neck met my shoulder, and I could sense it in his nearly irresistible smell.

He was fighting the siren call of my blood, but it was using up a lot of his self-control.

I was tempted to kick him out, but that would only unleash a thirsty vampire on a sleepy, unsuspecting community.

“Come up to my apartment with me.” I folded Reggie’s letter and thrust it back at Peter. “We need to talk.”

Peter’s eyes went as wide as saucers as he took the letter from me and tucked it back into his bag. “You want me to go with you to your apartment?”

My stomach did a stupid little flip, hearing him say that out loud. I tamped it down.

“I’d take you somewhere else, but nothing’s open after eight,” I explained. “I need to get your whole story before I send you on your way.”

Peter’s footsteps were eerily silent on the stairs behind me as we made our way up to my place.

In contrast, my heart was pounding so hard he could probably hear the rapid pumping of blood through my veins. At least he kept his fangs to himself.

“I should have mentioned I don’t have air-conditioning,” I said, just for something to say. “Most places here don’t. It doesn’t normally get hot enough to need it.”

“It’s fine,” Peter said. “Sleeping in a hot apartment is better than sleeping at the bus terminal in the coffin Reginald shipped me in.”

I stopped climbing so abruptly Peter crashed into my back. When I whirled to face him, he was rubbing the tip of his nose.

“First of all,” I said, “you’re not sleeping in my apartment. Second of all, Reginald shipped you here in a coffin ?”

“He said it’d be faster than a bus.”

“So’s flying on an airplane like a normal person.” Flying would also have been a hell of a lot cheaper than shipping an entire coffin filled with two hundred pounds of vampire across the country. This had to have been Reggie’s idea of a practical joke. “What a dick.”

“They weren’t ideal travel conditions,” Peter admitted. “Not ideal for sleeping, either.”

Despite everything, I felt a twinge of sympathy. “You’ve really been sleeping in a coffin since getting here?”

He nodded. “I arrived a few days ago. Didn’t know where to find accommodations. My coffin’s stashed behind some abandoned lockers where no one will stumble across it.”

He’s a vampire and not my problem , I reminded myself as I opened the door to my apartment. Peter stayed outside as I walked in, eyes on his shoes again. Like he was waiting for something but was too embarrassed to ask for it.

Oh. Right.

“You can come in,” I said, feeling foolish for forgetting that vampires needed express permission before entering someone’s home.

“Thanks.” Peter stepped across the threshold into my living room. And then it was just the two of us—a witch trying to remake herself and hide her identity from the rest of the world and one of the sexiest vampires she’d ever seen.

His mere presence here could ruin everything I’d built for myself.

Peter looked like he felt as awkward about the situation as I did, his eyes darting around the room as though looking for hidden dangers. He clasped his hands in front of him, then let them fall back by his sides, like he didn’t know what to do with his arms.

“This isn’t what I expected,” Peter said, taking in my consignment store furniture and eclectic decor. His tone was neutral, not judging. His comment rankled all the same.

“What were you expecting?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Reginald said you’re a witch. I suppose I assumed you’d have…I don’t know.” He trailed off, gesturing vaguely with his hands. “Cauldrons and broomsticks, maybe. A talking black cat.”

I snorted. “Haven’t you known any real witches? Those are just stereotypes.”

“I don’t know if I’ve ever known any real witches.” There was real pain in his voice.

I winced. “Sorry. Um…so you really have amnesia, then?” I asked as gently as I could.

A curt nod. “So it would seem.”

“I didn’t think that was a real thing,” I admitted.

“Apparently it is.”

“I’m sorry,” I said on instinct.

“It’s fine.” He didn’t look fine, though. His brows were furrowed, the corners of his lips turned down into the beginnings of a frown.

I softened my tone before continuing. “Reg was right. I am a witch. Or I was. I’m not anymore.” I gestured expansively to my living room. “I keep my few souvenirs from my old life out of this room so no one finds out.”

He looked at me. “Why hide that part of yourself?”

“It’s…complicated.” I didn’t owe him an explanation.

He opened his mouth to ask more questions, then closed it again, seeming to think better of it. He gestured to my sofa. “May I?”

I shrugged. “Suit yourself.”

He crossed the room with the same effortless grace he’d shown the night before when he’d helped with the trash.

It wasn’t the first time I’d seen a vampire move with this kind of confident supernatural fluidity, like gravity didn’t affect them the way it did everyone else.

But watching the ease with which Peter moved, those confident strides…

Well.

It may not have been the first time I’d seen this sort of thing, but it was still hot.

“So,” Peter said. “If I’m not sleeping in your apartment—”

“You’re not,” I confirmed.

“Fair enough,” he said. “But if not, why couldn’t we have had this conversation downstairs?”

“You’re hungry,” I said.

He peered at me. “How do you know?”

“I know a hungry vampire when I see one,” I said.

“When I smell one, too. You smell like you haven’t eaten in a week.

” I moved closer and made a show of sniffing him.

The joke was on me, though. This close, his scent was potent, enticing—and it was pouring off him in waves.

He smelled like sex and the promise of almost unbearable pleasure.

I could all but feel it reaching inside me, tugging me towards him.

Despite myself, I squeezed my thighs together, doing my best not to imagine the ecstasy that would come if I just gave in and let him drink from me.

Vampire venom worked like an aphrodisiac, making victims experience a kind of pleasure unlike anything else in the world.

Thank gods Lindsay hadn’t gotten any closer to him than she had. Who knew what might have happened.

Most humans didn’t recognize a hungry vampire’s pheromones for what they were until it was too late, but I wasn’t most humans. And I was smart enough—and experienced enough—to know that the worst possible thing I could do would be to succumb to this nonsense.

Gods, vampires were such fuckers.

If Peter recognized the effect he was having on me, to his credit he seemed uninterested in acting on it. “You needn’t have worried downstairs,” he muttered. “I can control myself.”

I snorted. “Sounds like something a vampire who struggles to control himself would say.”

“I haven’t attacked you , have I?” He spread his arms wide. “Here we are, all alone. No witnesses. And yet I am calmly sitting on your sofa and engaging in entirely rational conversation, rather than…”

He trailed off, eyes tracing along the slope of my neck with naked hunger.

Aha. “Rather than what?” I smirked.

He shifted in his seat. “I wouldn’t have bitten those people downstairs,” he mumbled instead of answering.

“Whatever,” I said, not certain I believed him. “Anyway, listen. It doesn’t matter now. It’s over. And I have questions.”

Peter swallowed, then squared his shoulders as if preparing himself for an unpleasant task. “Go on.”

“How do you know Reginald?” The last time I’d seen him was at a party we both should have been smarter than to attend.

I had vague memories of Reggie ending the night with a lampshade on his head and his teeth deep in the neck of one of the human groupies who, for inexplicable reasons, had hung around us back then.

I couldn’t reconcile the memories I had of my wild, reckless friend with the person who apparently took on charity cases like this guy.

“I wouldn’t say I know him,” Peter said. “It’s more like…” He trailed off, trying to find the right words. “Reginald and his human girlfriend found me at a scrapbooking convention in Chicago.”

My eyebrows shot up my forehead. At no point in that sentence could I have possibly predicted the next word.

“A scrapbooking convention?” How on earth was Reggie now attending scrapbooking conventions—with or without a human girlfriend? Then again, one of the things I’d always liked about him was how just when you thought you had him all figured out, he went and did something unexpected.

“A scrapbooking convention,” Peter confirmed.

Huh. Well, people changed. Maybe domesticity and crafts made Reggie happy these days. Just like pretending to be mortal and running a yoga studio made me happy.

“Are you, like…into scrapbooking or something?” I couldn’t help but ask.

He considered that. “I don’t think I have any specific feelings about scrapbooking. I ended up there because I got lost. Because of my…” He trailed off, then tapped a finger to his temple.

Right. That.

“What exactly do you remember?” I asked as gently as I could. “Sorry if that’s too personal. I’ve never met an actual amnesiac before.”

“Almost nothing,” he said. The frustration in his voice was impossible to miss. “I only know my name because it was on the ID I found in my wallet.” He paused. “I did remember my, uh… unusual diet right away, but that was more a biological urge than a memory.”

Of course. “Right.”

“Reginald told me you would know what unusual diet meant.”

“I do.” And then, because I was curious: “What did he tell you about me, besides my being a witch?”

“That you’re immortal,” he said. “Like me.”