Meeting Eternity (The Sullivan Vampires, Volume 1

by Bridget Essex

  Meeting Eternity

  The Sullivan Vampires, Volume 1

  Books 1-3

  by Bridget Essex

  "Meeting Eternity"

  The Sullivan Vampires, Volume 1 – Books 1-3

  © Bridget Essex 2014

  Rose and Star Press

  Smashwords Edition

  First Edition

  All rights reserved

  Smashwords License Statement

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Synopsis:

  Would you risk your life for love?

  Rose Clyde lost her girlfriend six months ago in a tragic accident. Since then, she simply goes through the motions, knowing she might be doomed to spend the rest of her life grieving. But when her best friend calls with a strange job offer—working the front desk of an old hotel up the Maine coastline—it’s an offer Rose can’t refuse. And a chance to restart her life.

  But Rose isn’t prepared for Kane Sullivan, her new boss. This enigmatic, captivating woman, from their very first meeting, has Rose spellbound. There’s something about Kane that seems so familiar…why does Rose feel as if she’s seen this lovely, powerful woman before?

  As the strange old Sullivan Hotel begins to reveal its dark secrets, Rose’s life hangs in the balance. But an even greater danger looms:

  She’s falling in love with a vampire.

  “Meeting Eternity” is the first volume in the Sullivan Vampires series. It contains the full first three novellas in the series: Eternal Hotel, Eternal Kiss and Eternal Thief. The Sullivan Vampires is a beautiful, romantic epic that follows the clan of Sullivan vampires and the women who love them. Advance praise has hailed this hallmark series as “Twilight for women who love women” and “a lesbian romance that takes vampires seriously! Two thumbs up!”

  Dedication:

  For the love of my life.

  And for R.M., who knows, loves and appreciates the vampire gene better than anyone else. Thank you for knowing I could do it. This one’s for you.

  Contents:

  Eternal Hotel

  Eternal Kiss

  Eternal Thief

  Also by Bridget Essex

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  -- Eternal Hotel --

  The first time I saw Kane Sullivan, she saved my life.

  The second time I saw her, I died.

  That was the thing about Kane. Every moment around her was life and death, seconds and decisions that could never be predicted. But even after all of that, even after all of this time, I can still say that she was worth it.

  This is the story of why she was worth it all.

  ---

  My life before working at the Sullivan Hotel was a sad blur. My long-term girlfriend, Anna, and I had been together for two years. I loved her. I thought we were going to be together forever. But one night, on the way back from the grocery store, her bicycle was hit by a drunk driver, and in a heartbeat, my life was changed forever. I don’t remember much about the months after Anna died. I suppose that I got up as I always did, got dressed in my green apron and walked the two blocks to the little boutique grocery store, Rosa’s, on the upscale side of town where I worked. I would go through my shift as their produce manager, which involved a lot of ordering different vegetables, arranging them in pretty, enticing rows and disposing of the rotting ones. After my shift, I’d come home, back to my too-empty apartment with a bag of slightly wilted vegetables that were still edible, but now too ugly to sell. I’d go through the motions of making dinner, of forcing myself to eat it. I’d curl up on the bed. Our bed. And I’d cry myself to sleep.

  I did that for six months, but I don’t remember hardly any of it.

  I’d ask myself on really hard nights, nights when I wondered where my life was going, what I was doing with it, how had this all happened, this radical departure from how I’d assumed life was supposed to be. On the darkest, hardest nights, I wondered if I’d really loved Anna. The thing is, I knew I’d loved her. I’d loved her deeply. I’d been hoping to spend the rest of my life with her. But in the really terrible moments of weeping over the spaghetti at the now too-big kitchen table, far too big for only one person, I wondered if—when Anna died—she’d taken the best parts of my life with her.

  That’s the thing. Without Anna, I was just Rose Clyde. Boring Rose Clyde who wore her boring brunette hair in the same ponytail since high school. Who had worked at Rosa’s since I’d graduated from college. I was a produce manager with a useless bachelor’s in art history. I had no dreams, no aspirations. It was pathetic. I was pathetic. Life had come up too fast and too quickly, and it had hit me broadside. Part of me thought that I was still in college, dreaming of the time that I’d graduate, that I’d do something exciting with my degree, perhaps move to New York and work in a museum finding interesting and beautiful new discoveries from famous painters. Change the world, if only a little. But I was never going to change my life that drastically. I was never going to move to New York. Brave people moved to New York.

  And I had never been brave.

  I’d lived in Greensprings all my life. Greensprings is in New Hampshire, close to the border of Massachusetts, and it’s very beautiful here. But it’s a town that people drive through on their way to more beautiful and more interesting locations. No one knows where Greensprings actually is and no one sets out to find it. It’s one of those very quaint towns that on television, people set wacky sitcoms in, and growing up, I’d had more fantasies that I’d get a condo in the upscale part of it, live a bohemian lifestyle that involved a lot of painting and wine and women. But I couldn’t paint. And before Anna, I couldn’t keep a girlfriend to save my life.

  I was pretty good at the wine part.

  Sometimes I hated how boring I was, my safe decisions that meant that I’d lived in Greensprings all my life, that I would continue to live in Greensprings probably until the day I’d die. Anna was going to change that. She’d wanted to move to New York, too, and we’d been saving money together for just that purpose. We were going to move together, rent a probably much-too-small apartment and then…we didn’t know. But we often talked about that dream long into the night. Let’s be honest: it was mostly Anna’s dream. But I was so happy, so glad to go along with it. Anna had that way about her. A big, wide smile and twinkling brown eyes that promised that if you’d trust her, everything was going to be all right.

  But Anna was dead now. And everything was most certainly not all right.

  I knew that I was spiraling into a depression that I might not ever recover from, but I didn’t know how to stop it. I didn’t know if I even wanted to stop it. What was my life without Anna?

  And then, one day, Gwen called.

  I hadn’t seen Gwen since the funeral. My best friend since college, Gwen was always the brave one, the one who took risks, went exotic, daring places. When I saw her name on my cell phone’s caller ID, I wondered, as I pressed the phone to my ear, where she’d be calling me from. With Gwen, you could never be sure if she was down the street, in another country, or even on this planet (she’d reminded me more than once on an all-night cramming session in school that someday they’d probably sell seats on a rocket to the moon: and she’d be first in line to buy a ticket. I didn’t doub
t that for a second).

  “Hi, honey!” Gwen said, the line crackling with all the static of a terrible connection. “Honey, it’s been forever: how are you?”

  Oh, that question. People ask you that question all the time, but they don’t really want to hear the real answer—they’re just doing it because it’s something we’re taught to say. Every day, regulars at the grocery store would brush past me in the aisle to get their stalks of brussels sprouts and their kohlrabi, and they’d ask me that question. And if I broke down, if I told them that I was doing terribly, that my girlfriend had been hit by a drunk driver and died and I was falling to pieces because of it, they’d back away slowly, maybe never come to the grocery store again. So I always lied to them, told them I was “fine.” They didn’t really want to know how I was doing. Few people in the world cared enough for the truth.

  But Gwen did.

  I broke down, trying to keep the majority of my tears in check, but she heard my little hiccup-sob on the other end of the line, even over all of the static, and she made a little gasp of her own.

  “Oh, honey, I’m so sorry,” said Gwen, and I knew that she meant every word of it. “Please don’t cry. I’m so sorry. Is it really bad? You’re not even a little okay?”

  No. I wasn’t. I was falling to pieces. I took a deep breath, the sound of it catching in the back of my throat as I grappled with words, trying to figure out what exactly I could tell Gwen that would convey…everything.

  “Things are pretty bad,” is what I settled on, then. It wasn’t much, but it was all I could say as I wrestled with the tears and the sobs, trying to keep the last bits of myself together. And failing.

  “I wish so much that I could be there right now. You don’t know how much I wish that,” she said softly, her words as soothing as a cool cloth to my forehead. I sighed, holding the cell phone tightly to my ear, like a lifeline thrown to a drowning man at sea. “That’s…actually the reason that I’m calling, honey,” she said then. The words were still sincere, still soft and gentle. But they were beginning to take on a slightly wheedling quality that made me blink. Gwen wanted something.

  “What is it?” I managed, taking another tissue out of one of the ten tissue boxes on the coffee table, wiping my nose, my eyes, my face. I crumpled the tissue in my hand as silence continued on the other end of the line. Until:

  “I want you to come to Maine.”

  They were absolutely crazy words, but she’d said them so sincerely, one might almost have taken her seriously. I snorted into the phone, lying back against our couch. My couch. I tried to swallow the sob that escaped my throat, then, but didn’t quite manage.

  “Look, I know you’re going through a really tough patch right now. But you and I both know that there’s nothing in Greensprings to keep you there, and to be perfectly honest, I think a change in scenery would be really good for you. I read a book about grieving—you know the one I recommended you that you wouldn’t read? It said that getting out of your usual patterns will help you make some sense of the tragedy, might help you get back to living your life—”

  I would never be able to make any sense of the tragedy. And I was honestly uncertain if there was any life to get back to living. I was shaking my head, wanted to change the subject, but she couldn’t hear that on the other end of the line. So I said, clearing my throat: “What are you doing in Maine?”

  Gwen snorted a little. “Haven’t you been reading any of my emails?”

  I stared at the laptop on the kitchen table, untouched for weeks. “No,” I sighed truthfully.

  “I got a new job,” said Gwen then, her voice dropping a little in excitement, as if she was telling me a secret. “Rose, it’s the best job I’ve ever had. It’s unreal. I’m working at this old hotel in a really cute little town—it’s right on the ocean. In Maine! It looks like an old black and white movie should be set here, seriously. The hotel is this gorgeous old building right on a cliff face overlooking the water—it’s just too pretty for words. I keep thinking I’m going to run into Scarlet O’Hara or the Queen of England or something in the hallways, and—”

  “Wait, wait, wait,” I finally managed, holding up my hand that clutched the tissue. “What are you doing working in a hotel?”

  “I work the front desk. It’s the easiest job in the world. The hotel’s kind of in an out-of-the-way town, and—”

  “Where is it?”

  “In Maine, silly! I just said, and—”

  “Where in Maine?” I persisted.

  “It’s kind of a stupid name for a town,” said Gwen with a little laugh. “It sounds like a soap opera should be set here. Or a horror movie. It doesn’t sound real. But the hotel is in Eternal Cove.”

  Eternal Cove. She was right. It didn’t sound real. But when Gwen said those words, a little chill ran through me—the kind that made the hairs on my arms stand up, my shoulders giving a little shake of their own accord. My mother used to say that this was the kind of feeling you got when someone walked over your grave. I never knew exactly what she meant by that. I wasn’t dead yet. I didn’t even have a grave. But there was such an odd chill that moved through me in that moment, it felt as if I did have a grave. And someone had very deliberately waltzed over the top of it.

  “Huh,” was the dubious response I gave into the phone.

  “The thing is, the place is normally completely dead, so not that much help is needed, even though the hotel is huge. Because, really, we maybe get like a guest a week. But there’s some conference or other that’s coming to Eternal Cove this next month….October,” said Gwen. On the other end of the line, I could hear her shuffling through some papers. “And my boss needs to take on a few more staff, she tells me. And she asked me if I could recommend anyone to her, and I…” There was a very long sigh through the phone. “To be honest, I recommended you.”

  “What?” The floor began to reel beneath me. “But I…I already have a job. I work at Rosa’s,” I spluttered. There were so many reasons why this was ludicrous, I almost didn’t even know where to begin. “Gwen, I mean, I’ve worked at Rosa’s for over ten years, and…”

  “And? It’s a grocery store, Rose. You’re not exactly on the fast track to success at a grocery store.” She didn’t mean to sound condescending, but it had come out that way, regardless.

  “That’s rotten. You know that’s rotten,” I told her softly. A snort came from the other end of the phone.

  “Honey, if I don’t tell you this, no one’s going to tell you this. So it’s sort of my duty as your best friend to tell you that if you, Rose Clyde, don’t leave Greensprings now? You’re never going to leave it. You’re going to stay there forever with your grief.” She said these words gently, but there was a hard edge to the last few of them. “I know Anna’s death was very, very hard on you, and I’m so sorry. But it’s been six months. Anna died. You didn’t. You’ve got to keep living, honey. You’ve got to decide that you want to keep living, and you’ve got to make that decision now.” There was a long pause, and then she finally said, simply: “Anna wouldn’t have wanted this for you, honey. All Anna ever wanted was for you to be happy.”

  I didn’t know what to say. So I said nothing. After another long moment of silence, Gwen sighed again. “Look, it’s the easiest job in the world. It’s such a beautiful town. I know your apartment’s lease is on a month-to-month basis, so that would be insanely easy to get out of. I know that if you absolutely hated it here in Eternal Cove, went back to Greensprings, Rosa’s would take you back in a heartbeat, so that’s insanely easy, too. Rose, honey, you have absolutely, positively nothing to lose, and pretty much everything to gain. And I could help you get through the rough spots, get you to start living again. Aaaaand…” She trailed off, her voice dropping to a whisper again. “I wasn’t going to bring it up, but I’m pulling out the big guns of convincing here.” She cleared her throat, and I could hear her smile through the phone. “If you ever are ready again, for…well. I just want you to know that there are some
ridiculously gorgeous ladies here.”

  I couldn’t believe that she’d said that. It had only been six months. And I was fairly certain that I was never going to date anyone else ever again. But as I opened my mouth to tell her “no,” that the whole thing was a terrible, no-good, rotten bad idea, I took a deep breath.

  I looked up.

  I looked up at the apartment. At what had been our apartment. Every last thing here reminded me of Anna. The now-empty peg on the wall by the door where she’d hung her jean jacket. Her set of car keys with the ridiculous Pooh Bear keychain, sitting in the pottery bowl by the door. Her old plaid work shirt that she’d left on the counter the night of the accident that I’d never had the heart to move. I knew what I was doing, had done, to the place where we’d lived: I’d turned it into a shrine to Anna. I was never going to move on with my life while living here.

  I knew that.

  And Gwen knew that, too.

  “Please,” said Gwen, quietly. Softly. “Please, Rose. Give this a chance.”

  I couldn’t believe it when I said it. But I’d said it, and there was no going back now:

  I whispered, simply: “Okay.”

  ---

  Gwen made the drive that weekend to Greensprings. When she arrived in the parking lot, all but beaching her old, beat-up blue van that she’d dubbed Moochie in the edge of the lot by the bushes, I ran out to meet her, and we hugged for about five minutes, both of us crying. Gwen had an equally useless degree in theater, and we’d been through so much together in college and beyond it, had been there for each other through everything. And now, again, our lives were changing. But at least we were changing together.