by Molly Harper
After spending time with Jamie, I saw the depths hidden by the sunny exterior. He had pain he never spoke to anyone about. At first, I thought he was angry over his life being cut short in its prime, but it was the reaction of his neighbors to his condition and the abandonment of his family that were his greatest hurts.
Being with Jamie helped me make contact with that goodness I thought I’d lost long ago. In some ways (detectable only to Georgie), he made me a better person. Coincidentally, he also made me a desperate person, hence my hiring a witch to put a magical hit on someone I saw as a rival, leading to my dismissal from the Council and exile to postsecondary Siberia. It was all one big circle.
Jamie’s quick reflexes and recognition landed me in the protective cradle of his arms. He peered down at me with his wide, bright smile.
“Hey, babe . . . uh, you’re not wearing clothes,” he said, steadying my shoulders as we untangled limbs and terry cloth.
“I’m aware of that,” I growled, though I could feel my fangs receding just from the comfort of Jamie’s presence. He chuckled and gave me a kiss softer than I deserved in my bloodlust. I lifted a self-conscious hand to my mussed hair, curled slightly by the shower steam.
I supposed I should be grateful that I’d managed to sling on my robe despite my fit of pique. At least I wouldn’t become a dorm oddity like Naked Jason, the sophomore who insisted on walking to his floor’s shower room wearing nothing but a towel slung over his shoulder. And when the dorm staff tried to intervene, he claimed that he was a nudist and that trying to force him to wear clothes in his home environment was a violation of his civil rights. While I did my best to avoid Naked Jason, I had to admire his ability to use the administration’s terror of social injustice against itself.
“You OK?” Jamie asked as another boy I’d barely noticed bent to pick up the shower things I’d dropped.
“No. No, I am not OK,” I told him. “Brianna used my bodywash and added so much water it barely qualifies as soap. So I’m going to get some duct tape, wait for her to fall asleep, and apply it to her eyebrows until she can’t make surprised expressions anymore.”
“You said the same thing when she drank your last Faux Type O.”
“And if you hadn’t kept me from going to the hardware store, I would have pulled it off,” I grumbled. “Literally. I would have pulled off her eyebrows. And kept them as trophies.”
“Yes, and it would have been amazing, but hey, look who I ran into,” he said in that oh-so-subtle manner he had of changing the subject. He slung an arm around the tall human boy with sandy hair and bright green eyes who had picked up my dropped shower things. The young man was smart enough to take a step back when I gave him a halfhearted smile.
I liked him.
I recalled his face from somewhere, but clearly hadn’t cared enough when we met to commit his name to memory. This was a common problem when you lived for a few hundred years. And people got so offended when you didn’t remember meeting them at some lame party two centuries before that I’d perfected the art of pretending to know who that person was, but being too aloof to refer to them by name.
Jamie knew about this trick, though, like he knew about/blithely ignored most of my tricks. So he rolled his eyes a bit and nudged me. “Ben Overby, remember? Gigi’s ex.”
Right, Gigi Scanlon. The reason I was sequestered in this educational hellhole in the first place.
“Oh.” I tried not to make a disdainful face at the cute little human. He couldn’t help it that he had horrible taste in women. “Lovely to see you again, Ben.”
“Nice to see you, too,” he said, with a cautious little smile. What was it about Half-Moon Hollow that fostered such “aw, shucks” harmless charm in their young men? Ben had the same sort of affable sincerity as Jamie, highlighted by a healthy pink flush to his cheeks. Was he so intimidated by me that he was blushing? Or did he not appreciate my adorable-but-oblivious beau’s reference to him as “Gigi’s ex”?
One I could enjoy . . . and the other I could enjoy and use to my advantage. I smiled sweetly and Ben relaxed his shoulders ever so slightly.
“I ran into Ben in the laundry room at my building. Turns out he lives two floors down from me. We thought we’d stop in and see you and give you this book before we head over to the gym.”
As Jamie handed me a textbook from our shared biology class, I tried not to let my irritation show. I didn’t need the reminder that Jamie had been allowed to live in a nice vampire-friendly off-campus apartment building. Yet another step on Jane’s part to keep her childe separated from me.
“Jamie, sweetheart,” I said, “we don’t need to go to the gym. Our bodies never change form and we have superstrength.”
Jamie shrugged. “Yeah, but that doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy a good workout.”
I shook my head. I loved him, but sometimes, I didn’t understand him.
“I am not spotting for you,” Ben said in a tone that implied that he’d made the statement before. “And I came to see my friend Jason, who lives on one of the human floors.”
My eyebrows rose. Was Ben friends with Naked Jason? Somehow, that made Ben slightly more interesting.
“How are you enjoying your semester so far, Ben?” I asked.
“Eh, it’s my senior year. I’m just trying to coast on electives while I search for a good job,” he said, shrugging with that disdainful boredom so common to his generation. He apparently noticed the flicker of annoyance cross my face and straightened his shoulders, formalizing his tone as he added, “Jamie said this is your very first experience with modern education. How are you enjoying it?”
“Classes are . . . not what I remember them to be,” I said, thinking of long-ago childhood mornings spent in a freezing cold schoolroom, memorizing religious texts that would be considered advanced secondary material by today’s standards.
“And have you chosen a major?” Ben asked.
I frowned at him and Jamie winced. Ever since the Council had sentenced me to an undergraduate program, I’d struggled with choosing a degree. I didn’t know what I wanted to study. Frankly, if the vaunted scholars that ran this campus allowed us to count life experience, I could have walked out of this place with a doctorate in about a week.
Science had never appealed to me. I didn’t want to major in something as mundane as accounting, though I’d always excelled at bookkeeping. Well, I excelled at keeping my considerable finances organized, inappropriate expense reports notwithstanding. Art? Sure, I was a decent draftswoman and knew enough about the history to put my human professors to shame—which I had, on multiple occasions since the semester started. But I would never be able to get a job with an art degree, according to the rants I’d read on the Internet, unless it was in “digital media.” But honestly, I didn’t really need a job. For right now, I was undeclared and that was a bit of an embarrassment.
Even Jamie had a major, and he was only nineteen years old. He was already a hit in the sports medicine department and was on track to serve as an assistant trainer for the baseball team in the spring. He was limited to assisting with indoor weight training and night games due to our sunlight aversion, but he still had a job. It was embarrassing, at my age, to be considered directionless. I was lost. And I was never lost. Jamie was so at ease here, surrounded by people close to his own age and making friends left and right. This was the life he should have started just a few years before, but while being able to eat solid foods and go out during the day without self-immolating. Maybe my punishment for contributing to his loss of that life was my own difficulty in settling into a similar contentment.
I supposed the problem was that while he was choosing what he wanted to be when he grew up, I’d already lived several lifetimes. I’d learned so much already, it was difficult to find a new subject that interested me. And Jamie was so young. He’d seen so little of the world. No matter what Jane said, I didn’t wa
nt to keep him from it—quite the opposite. I just wanted to be there with him when he saw it.
“Uh, Ophelia’s undeclared for right now,” Jamie said, squeezing me against his side.
“Well, you’ll figure it out,” Ben assured me.
“And how is . . . Gigi?” I asked, trying to keep the growl from my voice.
The sparkly smile disappeared from his button face. “Oh, uh, we haven’t really talked much since this summer. We broke up, you know, and she’s been real busy adjusting to being a vampire. I mean, we parted as friends and all, but you know how it is when you say you’re going to stay friends—you never really stay friends.”
I had no idea what he was talking about. No paramour I’d parted with had ever asked me to remain friends. Mostly, they asked to remain attached to all of their limbs. But given her tendency to enthrall every man with whom she came into contact, it didn’t surprise me that Gigi had left Ben a morose shell of the man-puppy he used to be.
“Ben was seeing some girl he met interning at Microsoft,” Jamie added in his helpful tone. “But she dropped him like a silver cross when she went back for her senior year. She saw an old boyfriend and they got back together. She says it’s ‘like they’d never split up.’ ”
Ben said dryly, “Thanks for bringing that back up, buddy. It’s not embarrassing at all.”
Jamie grinned. At times like this I had to remind myself that the awkwardness that stemmed from Jamie’s obtuse nature was genuine. Convenient and amusing, but genuine.
I would have to think of some more appropriate woman to distract Ben. It would keep Jamie from being his undead wingman and it would irritate Gigi when she saw her ex wandering around campus with attractive arm candy. Sure, Gigi had moved on with one of my more reliable operatives, Nikolai Dragomirov, but that didn’t mean she would enjoy seeing her ex canoodling with a beautiful vampire.
I added “connect Ben with a trustworthy vampiress” to my mental to-do list. Also “copy Jamie’s schedule from his iPhone to mine” so I could try to find more time with him. He’d been so busy with classes and his friends and a lot of other things, I hadn’t seen him much since the semester started. Fortunately, he was pretty careless with phone security.
But for right now, I had bodywash to avenge.
“Well, it was lovely to see you again, Ben. Please don’t be such a stranger.” I paused and gave Jamie a kiss. “Enjoy your workout. I’m going to go have a conversation with my roommate.”
“Be nice,” Jamie told me.
“I will be the very picture of civility, all smiles and sweetness,” I promised him.
“I’ve seen what you’re capable of while you have a smile on your face,” Jamie noted while Ben blanched. “That does not make me feel any better.”
About the Author
MOLLY HARPER is the author of the acclaimed Nice Girls vampire series as well as several spin-offs set in the supernatural small town of Half-Moon Hollow. She is also the author of a werewolf series set in Alaska and a supernatural novel called Better Homes and Hauntings. Her women’s fiction novel And One Last Thing . . . was nominated for a RITA Award. She also writes the Bluegrass series of contemporary ebook romances, most recently Snow Falling on Bluegrass. A former humor columnist and newspaper reporter, she lives in Kentucky with her husband and children. Visit Molly on the web at MollyHarper.com or at SingleUndeadFemale.blogspot.com.
FOR MORE ON THIS AUTHOR: authors.simonandschuster.com/Molly-Harper
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Books by Molly Harper
In the land of Half-Moon Hollow
Fangs for the Memories
The Single Undead Moms Club
The Dangers of Dating a Rebound Vampire
I’m Dreaming of an Undead Christmas
“Undead Sublet” in The Undead in My Bed
A Witch’s Handbook of Kisses and Curses
The Care and Feeding of Stray Vampires
Driving Mr. Dead
Nice Girls Don’t Bite Their Neighbors
Nice Girls Don’t Live Forever
Nice Girls Don’t Date Dead Men
Nice Girls Don’t Have Fangs
The Naked Werewolf Series
How to Run with a Naked Werewolf
The Art of Seducing a Naked Werewolf
How to Flirt with a Naked Werewolf
Bluegrass Series
Snow Falling on Bluegrass
Rhythm and Bluegrass
My Bluegrass Baby
Also
Better Homes and Hauntings
And One Last Thing . . .
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2015 by Molly Harper White
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First Pocket Star Books ebook edition November 2015
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Cover design by Emma Van Deun
Cover photographs by Andy Roberts/Getty Images (champagne glass with lipstick); Jamen Percy/Shutterstock (blood drips); Jaxja/Shutterstock (city night lights, bokeh background)
ISBN 978-1-4767-9454-9
