Мишель Роуэн - Bitten & Smitten

“Un-what?”

“Undead. An animated corpse. A vampire.” I shrugged at him. “Duh.”

He looked exasperated with me. “Are you breathing?”

I frowned and concentrated to make sure I was still inhaling and exhaling. Yup.

“Of course I am.”

“And, is your heart still beating?”

I put a hand over my chest. There it was, the steady thumping of my heart. A little erratic, but still beating. “Yeah.”

“And my heart, does it beat?”

I frowned at him, then raised a hand to press against his very firm, very warm, and very male chest. It took me a moment before I remembered why I was touching him. Oh, yeah, the heart thing.

I nodded. “Yes.”

He took a step back from me and my hand fell to my side. “So what does that tell you?”

“Not undead?”

“Correct.”

I stood up. Considering what I’d endured tonight, I felt okay. “I guess I’ll go. Can you call me a cab, or”— I tried to smile and actually succeeded—“or can I turn into a bat and fly home now?”

He studied me for a moment. “I’ll call you a cab.”

He made the call, and we waited in uncomfortable silence for ten minutes. I was a little disappointed about the bat thing. That would have been cool. Hands down, this was the weirdest dream I’d ever had. Even weirder than the one in which I’d married a hobbit and moved to Mars. Too bad, too, because this Thierry guy was majorly cute in a sullenly suicidal way. Maybe I’d seen him in a magazine at the hair salon the other day and he’d been burned into my subconscious for later use. But it was definitely a dream. I mean, vampires? Hunters? My blind date being shish-kebabbed and then vanishing into a little puddle of goo? Puh-lease. Total “dream city.” I was just surprised it hadn’t occurred to me while all the drama had been in progress. I could have saved myself a lot of unneeded, wrinkle-causing stress.

When the cabdriver finally showed up, I stood up from the sofa on my shoeless feet and realized that my ankle no longer hurt. Guess it wasn’t a sprain, after all. I picked up my purse from the floor and grabbed my coat that Thierry had carefully placed on the back of a chair to dry. He’d taken it off me while I’d been sleeping. Even damp, my silk dress wasn’t see-through, so I had decided not to make a fuss about it. I smiled at Thierry. “Thanks for all your help. Even though I’ll wake up tomorrow and know for sure this has all been just a dream, at least it’s been a very interesting one.” I started to move past him, but he grabbed my arm.

“You’re not dreaming, Sarah. You must take this very seriously. Things are different for you now, whether you like it or not.”

I shrugged. “I don’t feel any different.”

“But you are. With the hunters around, you must take your safety into consideration. You’ve already seen tonight what they consider fun and games.” He felt around in his pockets and produced a business card. “Take this.” He pressed it into my palm. “Go to that address tomorrow evening for help in starting your new life.”

I slid the card into my purse without even looking at it. “Thanks, Thierry, really. Take care of yourself, okay?” I wanted to say: “Don’t go killing yourself,” but figured that might be a tad rude.

His intense silver eyes flashed at me. “You too.”

He held the door open, and I made my way out and into the back of the taxi.

“One-eleven Ashburn Avenue,” I told the driver, and he pulled away from the curb. I turned around in my seat. The door to Thierry’s high-end townhome was already closed, and the lights in the front windows went off. I’d probably never see him again. I pulled the business card out of my soggy purse.

MIDNIGHT ECLIPSE TANNING SALON.

Must be the wrong one , I thought, and shuffled through the contents of my bag. Hairbrush, wallet, lipstick, tampon. But there was only the one business card. Midnight Eclipse Tanning Salon was the place to go to start my new life? I shrugged inwardly. I was going to Mexico next month. Now that I thought about it, it would be nice to get a base tan before I left.

"So, how was your date?”

I raised my head to look at Amy Smith, my best friend of the past four years and personal amateur Cupid, and attempted to lift an eyebrow at her, which, I hoped, said: “Get the hell away from my desk.”

I had a headache that quite possibly would kill me in a matter of minutes. But a little death headache was no reason to use up a precious sick day from my job at Saunders-Matheson,

“Toronto’s foremost marketing and promotions agency”—at least according to our Web site. I usually reserved my sick days for when I felt really good.

I was the executive assistant to the “Saunders” part of the company name. Amy was assistant to “Matheson,” and was the reason I had the job in the first place. She’d put in a good word for me when the previous assistant had a nervous breakdown three years before.

“Wow,” Amy said. “You look like shit.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“I guess it was a good date, then? Not much sleep to be had, you little vixen, you?” She giggled.

If I’d been feeling 100 percent myself, I probably would have stood up, wrapped my hands around Amy’s I creamy white throat, and throttled her within an inch of I her dumb blond life. As it was, I just tried to look like a woman on the edge of sanity. It wasn’t difficult.

“You have to be kidding me. That guy was a total loser.”

“No way.” She shook her head. “He drove a Porsche. A red one.”

“Hate to break it to you, but I think we’ve been wrong all these years about that. Cars do not make the man. He was a loser who got me drunk on double margaritas and then abandoned me in the middle of nowhere.”

Amy frowned, an expression I rarely saw on her hyper-positive face. “He abandoned you? What a jerk. Okay, forget him. I have another guy who’d be perfect for you.”

“Hold on there, matchmaker. Where are you digging these guys up from, anyhow? Besides, you’re single, too. I think it says something that you don’t want to keep any of these catches for yourself.”

Amy gave me a look that could only be summed up as “duh.”

“Because, Sarah, they’re perfect for you. Not for me.”

“Jerks are perfect for me?”

“You know what I mean.”

“No. I really don’t.”

Amy was the most positive-about-true-love girl in all of Toronto, and there was nothing I could say to convince her otherwise. She went out with at least ten different guys a month looking for “the one.” She was certain her perfect soul mate existed out there somewhere, and by God, she was going to find him. Me—I used to be the same way, but now I was a little more realistic about romance. Lately my perfect soul mate was my Visa card. We regularly had lots of fun together at the Eaton Centre—my favorite mall.

I hadn’t had a steady boyfriend since before I started working at Saunders-Matheson, when I’d been dating a cute out-of-work actor. Which worked out perfectly since I was also a cute out-of-work actress. The perfect boyfriend—even though he was a bit of a mooch—until he got a part on a soap opera in Los Angeles. I came home one day to receive a quick dumping via the answering machine. Throwing the answering machine out of my window on the tenth floor did nothing to change the situation.

“So,” Amy continued, holding out her hand to inspect her new set of pink acrylic nails, “if it was such an early night, then why do you look like that?”

Despite the fact that any sleep I did get was filled with this crazy dream where I was a vampire, I didn’t feel like I looked that bad. Come to think of it, I didn’t remember even glancing in a mirror all morning. I’d woken up so late I barely had a chance to get dressed and out the door into the ridiculously bright sunshine. That’s because vampires don’t have reflections. I frowned deeply at the thought. I wasn’t a vampire. It was a dream, dammit!