Though he felt as if he were not yet ready to live another day without her by his side, Count August knew that she would have wanted him to continue on with his life, in her honor. And although he would never find another like her for an eternity, he would always look upon her, through the deep blue eyes of their handsome son, Artois.
It was hard for them all, but time progressed onward. The Count grew weaker by the day; and his son grew stronger by the night. Alice and Cored stood by Artois’ side as his siblings, and the three continued to flourish as the ruling class for Dalmar. Alice and Cored would often talk about how their life was before the birth of Artois, and how beautiful and friendly, a woman his biological mother was.
August continued to eat in the dining area every night with his children, only Catherine’s seat was always left vacant, a cup and plate set for her as if she had just stepped outside for a moment of fresh air. He would spend all his nights in their master quarters, though he would never sleep. Through her, he had gotten closer to his people, never to be an outsider again. He still lived in their presence… exactly as Catherine would have wanted.
And in the visits to her every night, while deep inside their master quarters, he would speak to her. He would tell her of all the wonderful things she had done for him and their children. How Artois was a fearless, yet compassionate, leader of tens of thousands of men, all of which had heard the tales of the fair lady, Countess Catherine Cornelius, the fierce eagle of Dalmar.
And he did this each night… for eternity.
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And if you are looking for even more books by me, Susan G. Charles, please feel free to check out some of my other works below:
Adult Books:
Animal Heat: A Paranormal Romance – the first book in The Animal Sagas series. In it little sister, Sonya is kidnapped, and Lynda, the oldest, must do her best to get her back – using any means possible.
Animal Nature: A Paranormal Romance – the second book in The Animal Sagas series. Sonya now lives safely within the Strongheart wolf pack with her sister Lynda. Still, she longed to hunt the mountainous woods of the pack’s territory all by herself.
Animal Secrets: A Paranormal Romance – the third book in The Animal Sagas series. The two sisters have some issues adjusting to pack life. Then another surprise comes the girls way, just as they are starting to accept their new family. Will a terrible secret from their family lines past now end their future?
Animal Desire: A Paranormal Romance – the fourth book in The Animal Sagas series. The pack is growing with the addition of a new set of twins, half wolf-half cougar. Then, one night their entire world is turned upside down once again when the babies are kidnapped by a stranger with a vendetta against the clan. Ben, the Alpha, reignites the clan to once again identify and find the kidnapper before the twins come to serious harm. But will Ben find them in time…
The Animal Sagas: A Shapeshifter Paranormal Romance – the boxed set of all four books in The Animal Sagas series. Read all about the adventures of the Seron sisters, a pair of shapeshifting, were-cougars, and their adopted werewolf family in this 4 part set.
The Master of the Hunt: A Paranormal Romance – Elizabeth Fox, a fine horsewoman, found that her ordinary ride one foggy winter morning had turned into something completely unexpected as she encountered a handsome stranger and his small hunting party while out on the trail. Should she join them or not?
Paranormal Beverages, Potions and Tonics – Who would ever have thought that a simple chain of events could have such an everlasting effect on a persons life? Now imagine if that whole cycle of events were based on a series of mistakes? But just what would be the outcome when an unexpected stranger came to purchase a potion and received the wrong one by mistake?
Vampires, Love Potions and Other Immortals: A Collection of Paranormal Short Stories – This paranormal romance fiction, a 3 book set, is all about the adventures of three completely different supernatural entities – ancient vampires, gifted potion makers and other mysterious immortals. Included are: Tale of the Century Bride (Book 1), Paranormal Beverages, Potions and Tonics (Book 2), and The Master of the Hunt: A Paranormal Romance (Book 3)
Tale of the Century Bride – Many years ago, the tiny village of Dalmar successfully developed a harmonious resolution with the highest ranking and oldest living vampire in the region to protect their lands from all forms of conflict – but were the people of the village ready to pay the price he required?
The Reluctant Wolf: A Paranormal Romance – The Reluctant Wolf: A Paranormal Romance Werewolves, shape shifters, love, hate, action… this book has it all! Bailey Cooper was a woman with a history and possessed an unusual gift that she loved to share, yet needed to keep secret from everyone. Then one day, as fate would have it, she was nearly knocked down by the man of her dreams. And a man with just a few secrets of his own too. Would their secrets tear them apart before they actually got started?
Blood Sucker: A Vampire Paranormal Romance – Vampires, romance and lots of action! Starting over takes a strong heart. Even stronger when it’s no longer beating. Just when you thought your life was over . . . how do you learn to be a vampire when your maker is a jerk?
Defection: A Vampire Paranormal Romance – A paramedic in a small Georgia town successfully leads a double life, protecting her secret from everyone she knows, including her employers. Can you guess what it is? But one night while out on a call she finds a victim of an attack and is drawn into a world where she finds others are living a double life as well. How will this realization affect her life, her current relationship and her job? The stranger she meets will change her life forever but will this act be a good change, or a complete act of total defiance?
For the Little One’s
Toots and Poots in a World Full of Snoots: The Amazing True Story of One Boys Gas-tly Abilities – is the story of a kindergarten aged boy, Timothy Oscar O’Toole, AKA, Toots, with a talent for farting – a skill he obviously loves to share with all his friends. A great story for kids of all ages!
All About Hummingbirds, A Kids Introduction to Hummers – Fun Facts & Pictures About the Worlds Smallest Birds! This interesting, interactive book is filled with beautiful Hummingbird pictures, information about hummingbirds including their favorite foods, unique flying capabilities, babies, migrations, habitats and even a few Hummingbird fun facts too.
Turtles: All About Turtles and Tortoises, A Kids Introduction to Turtles – Fun Facts & Pictures About the Worlds Coolest Reptiles! – This interesting, interactive book is filled with beautiful Turtle pictures, information about tortoises including their favorite foods, unique capabilities, babies, migrations, habitats and even a few turtle fun facts too.
All About Alligators and Crocodiles, A Kids Introduction to Crocs and Gators – Fun Facts & Pictures About the Worlds Largest Reptiles! – Alligators and Crocodiles? Can you tell which is which! All About Alligators and Crocodiles, is filled with information about alligators and crocodiles including their favorite foods, unique hunting capabilities, babies, how they move, habitats and so much more.
The ABC Book of Dogs: A Fun, Rhyming Dog Breed Alphabet Book for Young Children – This is the ultimate animal book to teach your toddler the ABC’s and a few new dog breeds too, using short, sweet little rhymes.
For the most up to date information about the works of Susan G. Charles, please feel free to visit my facebook page, website or my Amazon author profile.
Free Chapter Preview: Defection: A Vampire Paranormal Romance
I hope you enjoy this free Chapter Preview in my other book, Defection: A Vampire Paranormal Romance:
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Grace Wallace was a paramedic who had been working on the job with the local ambulance service in the small city of Lenox, Georgia, population 852, or just over 3 years now. She was well known throughout her company as being hardworking, heroic, an independent thinker and always ready to go the extra mile to save her patients. She always worked the night shifts and the occasional weekends and thrived in this fast paced environment. She was also a vampire – but no one knew her secret.Tonight, turns out, was no different than any other night on the job, except that it had rained earlier and was pretty miserable. As she pulled herself into the well stocked paramedic van, her long, dark hair pulled back into an easy to deal with pony tail, she thought for a moment about how to find the fastest route to her next call. Her GPS was on the fritz so her memory and an older county map book were all she had to rely on at the moment. A call had just come through to her that a man had been attacked by an unknown creature, and he was losing blood fast.
With her adrenaline pumping she followed a routine that she had done so many times in the past that it had become instinctive. These were the nights that Grace lived for. She pulled out of her dark driveway, turned on her lights and siren and was on her way to the patients location. Her partner, Lynn, late as usual, was supposed to meet her at the scene.
She was thankful to be working tonight. Her boyfriend, Jason, ignoring her as usual, wouldn’t even notice that she was gone, having just come in from some bar or another. This was normal for him – he was always out for the first half of the night, and then home watching the sports channels for the rest of it.
She really hated the mundane routine their relationship had fallen into. Once it had been pure passion, all sultry nights, with plenty of lovemaking and talk of plans for the future. Now they barely acknowledged each other.
As she was driving over her stomach began to rumble in protest. Then she realized that she hadn’t had time to hunt tonight. Crap! Usually she would go into the forest behind their house for a quick kill before her shifts, but it just didn’t work out that way for her tonight, no thanks to Jason and his lazy ways.
Unlike most other vampires, she didn’t like to drink human blood – or maybe it was just that she didn’t want to drink human blood. Either way, she preferred taking her meals from wild animals. It just seemed more humane to her that way, if that was a term she was allowed to relate to when thinking of having a meal. Of course, in the minds of humans there was nothing humane about drinking blood, but that was the hand that Grace had been dealt, and she was determined to cause the least harm possible.
Coming out of her reverie, she pulled off the main road and followed a muddy trail through the trees, bumping along these back roads she knew like the palm of her own hand. It helped her immensely to know as many of the shortcuts as possible in her line of work, after all, a few minutes could literally be the difference between life and death. Her mind was racing as she wondered if she would make it to the injured person in time.
She turned left onto the wet main road again and right there, up ahead, she spotted a roadside flare. She pulled the van to the side of the road, turned off the siren and threw off her seat belt. A dark SUV with lights on was parked askew in the middle of the road, flashers on. Two people, a middle-aged man and a woman, were crouching over a third that lay flat on the roadway. She grabbed her kit and jumped out, surveying the scene as she moved swiftly to the injured person.
“I’m a paramedic,” Grace called out, and the two bystanders immediately stepped to the side and out of her way. She knelt down next to the injured man and felt his head for possible head injuries, checked his pulse and surveyed the external damage before she went any further. “Do you know what happened to him?” she asked the other two with urgency in her voice.
“We were driving by and almost ran over him before we spotted him in the middle of the road, just laying there. He was attacked by something, but I don’t know what,” the older man who had called it in, answered, “I stopped when I saw him lying in the middle of the road, but there was no one with him. Someone or something sure did a lot of damage though,” he muttered.
“Will he… will he be alright?” A woman who must have been the man’s wife, asked in a quivering voice. It looked as though she was on the verge of tears.
“He’s lost a lot of blood, but, fingers crossed, I’m sure he’ll be just fine. I’m going to do everything I can in my power to make sure that’s the case. That’s what I’m here for right?! Will you please call the police for me though, while I finish up here?” Grace replied as calmly as she could as she continued taking the injured man’s vitals and also wondering where the heck Lynn was at.
They did as she asked, while she took a closer look at the injured man’s body. Just under the collar of his shirt, in the soft middle section of his neck right behind his ear, she found two round puncture holes, leaking two thin streams of blood. She recognized it immediately – a vampire bite. She frowned at the realization. Crap – who did this to you, mister?
Vampires she knew never hurt humans this much. It was generally accepted as vampire code not to play with your food, or torture it. After all, we weren’t big cats. Sometimes though, humans struggled against the bite, and they had to be glamored or knocked out during the struggle, but it was a standard blow to the back of the head that did nothing more than leave a dull headache for a few days and a short memory lapse. But it was all aimed at protecting the human – and the vampire population too.
Those vampires who strayed from this way of feeding though, they were often punished by their own kind for not following their most basic of rules – to fly under the radar and not be detected. In many cases, most humans that were fed from were rarely even aware of it. And that was exactly the way vampire kind wanted to keep it.
But this wound – it was different. There were big bruises all over the man’s body, a bloody nose, quite possibly broken too, and judging by the redness around his neck and his shallow, strained breathing, it looked like he’d been strangled as well. A long gash down his leg and a swollen eye and busted lip too suggested that this was much more than just a struggle. This man suffered a full on attack. And this vampire meant business.
Grace shivered a little as she thought about the brutality this man had endured, and a new rage crept up through her. This type of attack was exactly what made humans believe that all vampires were monsters, not just the rogue few who decided to ignore the rules. Not all vampires were monsters, but enough were that caused the whole species to be hated.
Carefully, she pressed a folded bandage against the worst of the wounds and taped them into place. She knew that by the time they reached the hospital, the severity of the victim’s wounds would have alerted the attention of the police and other authorities too. It was too bad that she would not be the only witness to the truth of what happened – but she felt secure that, at least as far as the attacker was concerned, only she knew what had really caused these wounds.
With help from the older man at the scene, she heaved the injured man’s wet body onto the stretcher and loaded him into the van to take him to the hospital. By that time the police had arrived at the scene and were questioning the couple. Grace jumped into the van and switched on her emergency siren and took off in a flash. She didn’t know how much blood the victim had left to lose before it would be too late, so she hurried to the hospital even faster than usual.
On her way there she took the time to try and figure out what was going on with her partner Lynn, so she tried calling her. No answer. “Crap, where is she?”
So she called in the stats on what was going on with her patient to her company en route, where she was advised that Lynn had called in sick and would not be working tonight. That’s just perfect! She thought to herself. Just perfect! Now I know exactly what kind of crazy night I am in for!
Once the ambulance arrived at the hospital, the ER staff met her at the emergency room door with a fresh stretcher and all sorts of other medical parapher
nalia in their hands.
“He’s lost a lot of blood,” she informed the head nurse who took over, wheeling the gurney as the other staff helped her assess the man’s situation.
“Any idea what happened to him?” she asked Grace quickly as they continued on in deeper into the ER.
Grace hesitated. She looked down into the face of the man who was still unconscious. She knew exactly what had happened, at least how he lost all of the blood. But of course she couldn’t tell the nurse that.
“No, I really don’t know what happened to him and the witnesses didn’t see anything either,” Grace added. “They just found him like this in the middle of the road – almost ran over him. But I’m sure he needs a transfusion.”
As the gurney was being wheeled away Grace leaned down and whispered beside the man’s ear. “I’m so sorry this happened to you,” she apologized.
It wasn’t so much an apology for herself, but for the way that her kind had treated him. It made her sick to think of what must have unfolded for this man to end up like this. She imagined, immediately, the image of a cat playing with a mouse… before the inevitable. Vampires had inhuman strength and this man never would have stood a chance against one. She could only hope that he wouldn’t die.
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Table of Contents
Preface
Tale of the Century Bride Book One: Chapter 1
Tale of the Century Bride Book One: Chapter 2
Tale of the Century Bride Book One: Chapter 3
Tale of the Century Bride Book One: Chapter 4
Tale of the Century Bride Book One: Chapter 5
Tale of the Century Bride Complete: Historical Vampire Paranormal Romance Box Set Page 9
