Page 74 of Cooper’s Passion

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The room Vanessa led her to was located a floor below the conference room. It looked like a cross between the prop room of a midsize theater and the dressing room of a transvestite. A young woman with dark hair sat on an armchair in a corner and jumped up when she saw them.

“Scarlet, hey,” Vanessa greeted her, before turning to Anita. “Anita, this is Scarlet, my sister-in-law. She’s blood-bonded to my brother Ryder.”

“Hi, nice to meet you,” Anita said and stretched her hand out.

Scarlet shook it. “Likewise. So you’re with Cooper.”

“Yes, it’s just… you know… we’ve only seen each other for a few days,” she said, feeling a little awkward about Scarlet mentioning her relationship to Cooper.

“Cooper wanted to give you a chance to talk to one of the humans blood-bonded to a vampire hybrid,” Vanessa explained. “And you can’t very well do that while your father is hovering.”

She wasn’t wrong. Her father had eagle eyes, and it would be difficult to keep things from him. “I appreciate it.”

“Scarlet is human, and my brother is a vampire hybrid like myself.”

“And I’m happy to answer all your questions,” Scarlet offered.

“Oh.” Anita ran her eyes over Scarlet, her gaze zeroing in on her flawless neck. There was no sign of bitemarks at all. Hadn’t Cooper said that a vampire bit his lover during sex?

She caught Vanessa and Scarlet exchange a conspiratorial look.

Vanessa chuckled. “I’ll leave you guys to it. Nicholas will stop by shortly to bring you the wire.”

“Bye, Nessie,” Scarlet called after her as Vanessa turned on her heel and left the room.

When the door closed behind her, Anita took a deep breath. “Uhm… so, uh…” Her throat felt like sandpaper. She’d never had a girlfriend with whom she talked about guys and sex, and now she was supposed to ask this stranger about the mating habits and sex practices of vampires?

“I’ve been where you are now.” Scarlet motioned to the two armchairs in the corner. “Let’s sit down. I’m on my feet all day, running after two boys that have more energy than their father and I combined.”

Anita took the proffered seat, and Scarlet sat down too. “You have kids with Ryder?”

Scarlet smiled, and her eyes lit up. “Twins. And they’re already a handful at seventeen months!” Then she leaned forward in her chair. “But you don’t really want to talk about kids, do you? You want to know what it’s like to be bitten.”

Anita gasped. “How did you—”

“Because that was my first question too when I found out what Ryder is.”

“You don’t mind telling me? I mean… Cooper said it’s part of the sex between vampires.”

“It is. And not just because Ryder has to feed from me, otherwise he would starve, but—”

Anita shot forward on her seat. “What?”

“Well, when a vampire blood-bonds with a human, he can only drink that human’s blood. In Ryder’s case, he can only drink mine. If he ever drank from another source, he would get sick.”

“Are you saying, he’s dependent on you? But what if…” There were so many what ifs, so many scenarios where things could go wrong. So many what ifs that contradicted Scarlet’s statement.

“What if his human mate left him?” Scarlet prompted. “He would die. But I haven’t heard of a single case where that’s happened. Vampires mate for life. And they’ll do everything to make the woman they’re blood-bonded to happy.”

“But what if the woman dies? That must happen. Or what if they are mated to a vampire, like Cooper’s parents? You can’t tell me they can only drink from each other. That can’t work. It’s like a closed system… there’s no nutrition coming in… no…”

Scarlet took her hand. “Anita, breathe.”

Anita took a breath.

“Okay,” Scarlet started calmly. “There are a few exceptions to this rule about blood. If the human mate dies, there’s a change going through the vampire, and he will once again be able to drink any human blood. It happened to Luther, Cooper’s uncle. Katie is his second mate. And in the case of Cooper’s parents, vampires mated to each other don’t undergo this change within their bodies that would restrict them to the blood of their mate only. They can drink any human blood.”