by Dani April
She just had to wipe the devilishly handsome vampire out of her mind and concentrate on what was really important in her life, and that was her career. Anyway, she didn’t really think she would have to worry about Peter. She would probably never see him again even if he was sleeping in her basement. Vampires had a way of only being seen when they wanted to be. Last night she hoped she had made it clear to him that she did not want to see him.
Inside the high-rise office building her network was headquartered in, she took the elevator up to the floor where the studio was located. She felt some butterflies in her stomach as the elevator doors opened. This was such an unbelievable break for her career, and she had accomplished it all through hard work and perseverance.
She checked the TV monitor as she headed toward her desk. The monitor showed the current live programming that was airing on their network. Immediately she knew something was not right.
One of the morning anchors was running a piece on Black Creek Oil. How could that be? This story was not on the radar yet, and Black Creek Oil was not exactly a household name.
She set her laptop down on her desk and moved over to the front of the monitor to watch the morning news show with some of her peers who had also gathered in front of it to watch. The other reporters were enjoying their morning coffee and peering up at the screen with her. The on-screen banner beneath the anchor read “Breaking News.” How could this be? Rebecca had all of the news on Black Creek Oil inside her laptop, and she had not broken it yet.
“Black Creek Oil has just been acquired in a surprise bid by Desert Castle Investments for a reported one hundred million dollars. This is far less than what Black Creek Oil was thought to be worth.” The reporter on the screen was talking about Rebecca’s story, but there was now a twist to it. An outside company had made a takeover bid. Rebecca watched her rival read the news and was in shock. “Furthermore, Desert Castle has announced it found irregularities in the Black Creek books. Desert Castle announced plans to take the company private once again and pay back investors the IPO stock price plus twenty percent. They have also announced plans to repay federal grant money to the US Energy Department. Also, the former board members of Black Creek are receiving sizable packages in the buyout. It seems like there had been a major scandal brewing under the surface here for some time, and no one, including the investing public, apparently knew anything about it. The move by Desert Castle averts what would have more than likely been a lengthy investigation that may have even led to criminal charges. It means that both investors and taxpayers will receive their money back from this company. The only thing that is still not clear is why Desert Castle would acquire a company like Black Creek that it says was worthless to begin with. While everyone else may win in this deal, Desert Castle, who brokered the deal, stands to lose almost its entire investment. What we do know is that this move by Desert Castle makes the Black Creek Oil scandal the story that never was…”
“Weird story, huh?” one of the dialog editors standing next to Rebecca commented.
Rebecca was still speechless. She found herself almost running down the hall toward the executive wing of the floor where the producers had their offices. The secretary siting out front gave her a good morning greeting, but she ignored it and stormed past the front desk.
“What the hell just happened, Bruce?” she asked storming into her boss’s office.
“Now calm down, Rebecca.” Bruce knew immediately what she had barged in about. He set aside the story he had been reading and motioned for her to take a seat in front of his desk. She ignored his request and remained standing over his desk fuming.
“Black Creek was my story, Bruce!”
“It broke today,” he told her, removing his glasses and setting them on top of the story he had been reading. “All of the other networks were getting out in front with it. We had to go with it.”
“I’ve been busting my behind on this for the last three months!”
“Don’t worry. We can still use some of the information you got from the accountant as a background piece. I would think we could squeeze it in during a segment later next week perhaps…”
“Bruce, I staked my career on this story. Now you’re telling me it’s going to be a background piece that you can perhaps squeeze between segments in a few weeks?” The devastating disappointment made her feel like she was about to fall to the floor.
“You still have a career, Rebecca.” He again motioned for her to sit down and again she refused. “You still have a job. Don’t be so hard on yourself and everyone else. I think what you need more than anything now is to take a vacation. Get out of this place for a couple of weeks. You’ll burn yourself out at a young age if you keep working this hard on every story.”
“But I still don’t understand. How could this have happened?” She was almost pleading with him.
“We don’t know. Things move fast in this business sometimes.” He pointed his finger at her. “Don’t blame me. If you want to blame anyone, blame this little known company…What are they called…Desert Castle? They are the ones who pulled the rug out from under this story by making that bid on Black Creek.”
“Desert Castle?” She found herself knowing the answer to her question before it was even asked. Who owned a castle in the desert? Now she had one more reason to hate her vampire lover.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Rebecca started shouting down into the basement. “All right, Peter, come up out of there! Where are you hiding? I want to see you up here now! What are you afraid of?”
The sun had just set. She had come home from work just before sundown making an excuse why she couldn’t stay for the mid-evening broadcast. Rather than go upstairs to her apartment she had tramped down the stairs and thrown open the door to the murky darkness of the apartment building’s basement. Her anger was driving her each step of the way.
“There’s no one down there, dear,” the elderly lady who acted as the part-time building super informed Rebecca as she passed her in the hall. “We don’t even use the basement anymore. Maintenance closed it up about a year ago. There are no windows down there and no light. I think they have mice down there, too. Maybe your boyfriend stepped out for a breath of fresh air.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Crawley.” Rebecca smiled at the elderly lady. “I don’t have a boyfriend,” she corrected her.
Rebecca walked up the single flight of stairs to her apartment. She was so angry, so upset she thought perhaps her eyes were glowing red like a vampire. As she walked down the hall toward her door, she found she was talking to herself again.
Peter stepped from out of the shadow at the end of the hall. He was standing just outside her apartment door. Rebecca halted in her tracks before him staring up.
“You needed to see me?” he asked her.
“Why did you interfere in my news story?”
“I was trying to shelter you from harm.”
“Shelter me from harm?” She repeated his words incredulously. “You haven’t sheltered me from anything, you big thick-headed lummox! Last year when I interviewed you at your castle that was a black mark on my career because I came back with nothing. No story, no video or audio. I had to make up an excuse about being sick with the flu so they wouldn’t fire me.”
“Yes, I know. Your producer sent an apology letter to me. He was very polite.”
She lashed out at him, pummeling his chest with her fists. “Oh, I am so glad Bruce apologized to you for wrecking my career!”
Rebecca had allowed her voice to get loud, and it carried in the narrow confines of the second-floor hallway. The divorced tax attorney in the apartment next to hers opened his door and stuck his head out in the hall to see what the commotion was all about. He cast a frown at Rebecca when he saw her.
“Do you mind?” he asked. “I’m trying to listen to the news in here. Why don’t you and your boyfriend take it inside?”
“He isn’t my boyfriend!” Rebecca found herself screaming at the tax attorney as
well. “Sorry, Larry. We’ll get out of the hall.”
She shoved past Peter and fumbled the key out of her shoulder bag. She got the key in the lock and opened the door. Turning on the light to brighten the dark living room of her apartment, she stormed inside. Peter was still standing out in the hallway staring inside at her.
“What are you doing?” she asked him.
He only cocked a brow at her.
“How stupid of me to forget you’re a vampire.” Rebecca tapped herself on the forehead. “Won’t you please come inside?”
Peter stepped across the threshold, and she closed the door behind him. Then she turned on him, her anger still not in check. Rodney had run out of the bedroom to greet her, but when he heard her raise her voice, he turned around and ran back under the bed.
“This time you have gone too far, Peter.”
“You can’t ask me not to try and protect you and keep you safe.”
“You’re not doing any of those things! You’re ruining my career, is what you’re doing. Why would you do a thing like this to me, Peter?”
“I thought I was doing what you would have wanted.”
“Why would I want to be embarrassed in front of all my coworkers in the newsroom?”
“I thought it was a satisfactory ending to the story you had been working on.” He truly seemed confused by her anger. Apparently this vampire, other than being painfully polite all the time, lacked quite a few social skills. “I saw to it that both the investors and the taxpayers didn’t lose any of their money. I also made sure the executives were paid off in the deal so they wouldn’t hold anymore grudges against you. I can’t see what’s wrong with my solution. Everybody wins.”
“Everybody wins but me,” she reminded him. “I had worked damn hard to break that story for months. Now I’ve got no story thanks to you.”
“Rebecca, if I hadn’t acted, people would have gotten hurt.” Now he sounded like he was the one being patient with her. Maybe he was even lecturing her. “I don’t think you would have really wanted to advance your career at the expense of others. I don’t believe you are that kind of journalist. This way no one will lose their life long savings, no one will go to prison, and you will not be in anymore danger. It was the right thing to do.”
His words had suddenly taken all the wind out from behind her anger. Of course everything he said was true. Why did he have that talent for making everything right, smoothing things over, and making it seem like the easiest thing in the world to accomplish? Did all vampires have that, or was it only Peter?
She put her hands over her eyes. Even when he wasn’t using those hypnotic eyes of his on her, she couldn’t win with him. “No, you’re right of course,” she said. “I am glad no one actually got hurt on this deal. Of course it is better this way. I am just being selfish about my career.”
“You have a whole lifetime left ahead of you, Rebecca. You will have many more opportunities to prove yourself to the world.” His voice was kind, and what he said made perfect sense.
“But what about you, Peter?” she asked him, a thought occurring to her. “You own Desert Castle Investments, right?”
“I do.”
“You’re going to lose millions of dollars on this deal. No one else would have done this. Why would you?”
He didn’t even have to think about his response. “For you of course.”
His words left a silence in her small living room that she did not have the strength to fill up with words. Did he really love her? She walked up to him and appraised his figure. He was so big and strong, his strong jaw and full hair making him the most attractive man in the world. He was sure of himself in all things.
“I guess I have to say thank you to you yet again,” she told him at length.
“You don’t have to thank me for anything,” he told her in a quiet voice.
“I’m sorry about what I said. I was wrong to say those things to you.” She was just in range where she could have reached out and touched him, but she restrained herself. She could now see how when she had been drugged on his vampire blood she could not resist him and how easy it had been to make love to him. She could barely resist the physical attraction now, and she had no vampire blood in her.
“You don’t have anything to be sorry for,” he told her. “I am the one who is sorry for the way I behaved in the desert.”
“Let’s forget it.” She allowed herself to reach out to him and place her hands on his shoulders. “Let’s forget about everything that happened when we first met.”
“I would like that very much.”
She had to resist getting any closer to him. She had to hold herself back from any further touching. This was as far as she could take things.
“You know, Peter, if you weren’t a vampire—” she began.
“But I am a vampire, Rebecca,” he interrupted her.
She took a deep swallow, but wasn’t going to let the sad pang in her stomach stop her from her momentary feeling of satisfaction in him. Though it was a good thing he stopped her from continuing. She had been about to tell him that if he weren’t a vampire she would have stripped him naked and jumped on that huge cock of his right in the middle of her living room. That was something better left unsaid.
“We can still be friends,” she told him with a smile.
“I would like that.”
She smoothed down the shirt on his chest. “Sorry I hit you earlier. That was childish.”
He gave a painful grimace when she ran her hand over his chest and couldn’t restrain a small grunt of pain from escaping his lips.
“Hey, what’s the matter?” she asked him. “Vampires don’t really feel pain or get hurt like people, do they?”
He didn’t answer her. Instead, he let out another sob of pain. She ran her hands back up his chest. His shirt was wet where she felt the fabric. Something didn’t feel right under there.
“What’s this?” she asked him. She opened the top two buttons of his shirt and peeled it back across his chest. “Oh my God, Peter!” she exclaimed as she saw his chest.
Two big wounds marked the right side of his chest. They were open, and they were bleeding. She worked quickly to take down more buttons of his shirt and then threw back the material from the left side of his chest. A large ugly wound seeped blood on that side as well, rivulets of blood trickling down to his stomach.
“You’re bleeding,” she gasped. “This looks really bad. What happened to you?”
“Last night in the alley…” He didn’t even bother to finish. His voice was still quiet and low, almost a whisper.
“You were shot last night?”
“Apparently.”
“I didn’t think vampires could get shot.” She helped him to remove his arms from out of the sleeves, removing the shirt from his body.
“We can get shot. I’ve been shot many times in the past. But we heal quickly, so there isn’t any permanent damage done.”
“Well, you’re not healing too quickly this time.” She helped him to take a seat on her sofa. Then she ran out to her kitchen to rip up some tea towels and pour some hot water.
“It isn’t important,” he told her. “Vampires are immune to infections.”
“Yeah, but vampires aren’t supposed to be hurt by bullets either.” She went running back to him and crawled over on the couch next to his large body. She began dipping at the wounds with a towel soaked in hot water, cleaning dried blood away and hoping the free flow of blood down his chest would stop. “I’m taking you to the hospital if this doesn’t stop.”
“No. I won’t go there,” he told her through gritted teeth.
“Do you want to die then?”
“I don’t think this is going to kill me.”
The wounds seemed to have stopped bleeding, at least temporarily. Rebecca was scared to think that when she hit him earlier that might have been what opened them up. He was going to have to be careful how he moved until they healed sufficiently or they would reopen.
“Why is this happening, Peter?” she asked him, resting her head next to his on the pillows of the sofa.
“I don’t know.” His voice was so low and worn out sounding. “It could be a sudden loss of blood. That can be fatal for a vampire. But my wounds should have healed themselves within a few minutes. They always have in the past. I don’t know why they opened up again this time.”
“Do you need blood, Peter?” Rebecca looked down at him and when he did not answer her right away she turned his face toward her.
“Yes, I need blood,” he admitted. “But it is all right. I can go out and get some later. Right now I am too tired to go anywhere. All I want to do is rest.”
She took a deep breath and made a decision. “I want you to drink my blood, Peter.” He started to protest that he did not want to, but she silenced him with a finger across his lips. “Don’t say anything,” she told him. “I am voluntarily offering it to you. You saved my life last night. At least give me the chance to return the favor tonight.”
“But…” He was still going to protest her offer.
She put more pressure over his lips with her finger to keep him quiet. “I know you’re not going to hurt me. You’ve done it before when I wasn’t so willing. This time I’m offering it to you, and from the looks of things, you could really use some.”
