Mallory’s liaison with the seductive vampire Jonathan was only supposed to last for one night, but fate—in the form of his slightly more sinister contemporary Cian Ambrose—has other plans.
Seeing dead people is all very well…unless one of them wants to kill you.
To Mallory Sharpe, vampires are a fact of life. They exist, walk the streets and for the most part mind their own business. As a second-year university student, she doesn’t pay the undead much attention until she meets Jonathan Cutler. He has needs, and blood is only one. The other, Mallory is more than willing to help him with. After all, he has but one rule, to never spend more than one night with a woman. He won’t get attached, or consciously put anyone’s life in danger.
Another vampire, Cian Ambrose, isn’t so troubled by conscience. Mallory’s fair game, a weapon to taunt Jonathan with. In fact, it might be fun to make her his grail, or living blood donor, and Cian Ambrose doesn’t take kindly to the word no. He hasn’t heard it often in his one hundred and fifty years and it usually results in the other person ending up dead.
So with Mallory’s tolerance for undead guys running very low, Jonathan has to regain her trust, stop Cian killing her, oh…and for God’s sake, not fall in love.
Reader Advisory: This book contains scenes of violence.
Publisher's Note: This book was previously released by another publisher. It has been revised and re-edited for release with Totally Bound Publishing.
General Release Date: 2nd May 2014
There are three things I learned from fucking a vampire.
They don’t perspire.
They go on for hours.
And it’s the closest thing to death I’ll ever experience.
* * * *
I met him in a bar near St Joseph’s one weekend evening. Not actually on campus, it’s one of those establishments that’s too close to the university to be anything but one of the first places students head to on their way into the city centre on a Saturday night. Some, however, park their butts and never leave until closing time, too weighed down by a cocktail of alcohol, student angst and existential crises to move on anywhere else. The farther the philosophy students with black berets and disdainful attitudes stray from their usual haunts, the less they become known as deep thinkers and the more they’re looked upon by the general public as shallow twats. So they stay, cocooned against the world’s derision in their fog of pretension, badly accented French phrases peppering their speech like the wrong spice in an overcooked meal. According to polite society, students should be drunk in a bar or vomiting into a gutter, not getting into a sneering match over whether or not Descartes could take Derrida in a fight, or wondering if Freud’s attitude came from having a really tiny winky after all.
Me? I’d gone in with two of my housemates, Caroline and Jenny, not with any specific game plan in mind, just with an evening of time to kill, a pocket of money to spend on cheap beer, and an itch in my pants six months without a regular boyfriend was doing nothing to help.
As soon as I saw him, I was a goner.
The thumping bass line of whatever irritating dance track was popular that week assaulted my ears as one of the doormen stood back to let us in—then I realised part of that thud was my own pulse. Already hyped-up on adrenaline, I cast a glance around the place.
And my heart stopped.
Or rather, it nearly did. An ironic effect to have on me, if my initial impression of him was correct.
The bar didn’t have strobe lights or neon signs on the walls—anything to manipulate his skin colour or disguise his pallor. If experience had taught me anything, he was one of those guys who did everything in his power to avoid getting a tan. As Caroline would jokingly call him, a ‘factor-five-hundred case’.
He didn’t look ill. Far from it. He looked… God, it was strange, but he looked healthy. For a dead guy. If my suspicions were correct. And judging from the looks this guy got from other weekend revellers, they were. The way other patrons skirted him, barely breaking stride as they passed by, said it all. A semicircle of nothingness arced around him—an invisible barrier that no one else dared penetrate. If the paleness of his skin didn’t tell people what he was, the aura of nothing confirmed it.
“I know you like taking risks, but that’s going a bit too far, isn’t it?” Jenny asked, but when I turned to her, she smiled, and her smile was a dare.
“I’m only looking.”
“Uh-huh.” She lowered her chin, looked at me through her lashes, gave me a ‘who do you think you’re kidding?’ face and left me to it.
Sure I was out to have some fun, but whether fun could be defined by surrendering my virtue to one of the undead remained to be seen. Some people did it, willingly and regularly. Vampires were a safe bet, if one could ignore the obvious risk of them losing control if thirsty. Then again, it was said males needed to have drunk already to achieve and maintain an erection—something to do with blood flow—so they’d come to you hot, hard and hungry for sex. No risk of pregnancy, no risk of disease. In fact, there were some who were commonly known as ‘bloodsucker fuckers’, the undead being their preferred partners for that very reason.
Sex and death—always linked and, in this modern age, just one more way to combine the two. No risk of disease, but the reaper still hovered in the background, taunting.
My only encounters since breaking up with James in a shower of anger, accusations and insults had been with men who ticked the essential boxes on my ‘qualities I like to see in a member of the opposite sex’ list. Dark hair. Wicked grin. A pulse.
But hell, there was nothing wrong with flirting, right?
“Need to look at the cocktail menu?” the barman asked with a wink. He knew I was as intimately acquainted with it as he was.
“I don’t think so. I’ll have a”—I shot a glance at the mirrors behind the bar. Hmm. He does have a reflection after all—“Melon Headache.” All the cocktails here had inventive names. A Banana Lobotomy was their top seller, I’d heard.
“Coming right up.”
“You don’t have any qualms about standing at a bar next to a vampire?”
For some reason, my lips wanted to curve into a smile of triumph even as I licked them in anticipation. His words came in a cut-glass English accent but with an undercurrent of something else trying to break through. It was as if he spoke his mother tongue in an accent not his own, conscious of his diction, making an effort to enunciate each word far more clearly than a mere student—and a drunken one at that—ever would.
“Are you kidding? No one else wants to come near you. Easiest way to get to the front of the queue. If there were one.”
He leaned an elbow on the bar, ran the tip of his thumb along his bottom lip. A barely there, discreet action that drew my attention to his cupid’s bow, bracketed perfectly by a line of stubble that in a few days would be a thin moustache if he let it grow. “And there I was thinking you were braver than everyone else.”
“I am, am I not? I’m the only one who had the nerve to take advantage of the ten feet exclusion zone around you and ask for my drink.”
He looked around as if the thought had only just occurred to him, a wry twist to his lips that wasn’t quite a smile but still conveyed amusement. “You mean I’m stopping people from coming to the bar?”
“I guess you’re just scary.”
He picked at the label on his half-full beer bottle for a few seconds before meeting my eyes again. “Aren’t you scared of me?”
“No. Should I be?”
Scarlett Parrish was born at a young age on Planet Earth where she still spends most of her time. Possessed of an unholy lust for James Purefoy, she sometimes ventures out to stock up on chocolate, hurrying home again before the sun burns her to a cinder. Once James realises she's the only woman who can make him happy, she plans to rise up, take over the world and have a nice cup of tea.
Clearly, she forgot to take her medication before writing this author bio, but she does have splendid taste in music, the ability to leap tall buildings in a single bound and no idea why she's talking about herself in the third person.
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