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“Yeah,” I say, stunned at the sob trying to creep into my voice. “He’s called Chipper because he was rescued from a wood chipper, you know. That’s what the guy at the rescue place told me. How could somebody be so evil to try and do that to an innocent animal?”
“Live long enough and you realize there’s no limit to evil, Tammy,” he says. “Thank you for telling me more about yourself. It makes me feel closer to you.”
“Wait a second …”
I look up at him, grinning through the budding melancholy.
“Did you just use one of your charm thingies on me? Because one second I was dead-set on asking you about yourself, and now here I am, spilling my ugly guts out.”
His lips go tight at the word ugly, and he shakes his head slowly.
“No part of you is ugly, Tammy.”
“You’re a master at changing the subject.”
He smirks briefly, flashing his human-looking teeth, his fangs retracted. “There was a war about two hundred years ago between humans and vampires. Some radical sorcerer became convinced that a leader of my kind had discovered a way to make more vampires without the need of a sorcerer. I was at the fringe of the war. I had no interest in it. I was older than most of the petty pups squabbling like humans. No offense.”
I laugh, nudging him, my mind swimming as I try to convince myself yet again that this is all true.
Outside, a light wind howls.
The night watches.
Moonlight shines into the bedroom.
“Then what happened?”
“The sorcerers won. They’d devised a spell to track every living vampire. Well, living-ish. They killed them all except for me, and then they came for me. There were four of them, they came for me in Iceland, where I’d made a home away from civilization.”
“They tried to kill you,” I whisper, sensing where this is going.
“Hmm,” he growls, nodding. “I tried to talk them out of it. I’d grown tired of violence a long time ago, perhaps even in my human life. But when you are attacked, you can’t cling to honor or high-flung ideas of being the better man. You have to remember that you’re an animal just like they are. And fight. So that’s what I did. I fought them and I won. And so I became the last magical creature in this world. There will be no more after me because despite what those idiot sorcerers believed, we didn’t find a way to make more vampires.”
“What about more sorcerers?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “Only sorcerers can make sorcerers, too.”
“So they really shot themselves in the foot there,” I murmur.
“Yes,” he says. “They did.”
“And you’ve been on your own for two hundred years,” I say, trying to let the enormity of the time sink into my head.
Trying and failing.
“I was on my own for centuries before that. Because I never had you.”
He leans in closer and brushes his lips against mine, body pumping warmly before he gets himself under control, a constant war of flaming lust.
“Let me move you into an apartment befitting a queen,” he says. “You and Chipper deserve better than this neighborhood. Let me dote on you, Tammy. Because I … I’ve been waiting all my long life for you, and the idea of something happening to you turns me feral.”
“Really?” I say. “You’d do that for me?”
His smirk twitches and he cradles me to his chest. For a brief moment, I think I can feel his heartbeat, pounding, but then I realize it’s my own.
“I would do anything for you, Tammy.”
The apartment is absolutely freaking amazing, the sort of place I never dreamed I’d be able to live in a million years.
Or maybe that’s a lie.
Maybe I did dream about a penthouse with floor to ceiling windows in my sillier fantasies. When I was a successful singer, I’d buy a place that overlooked the city that had once been so cruel to me. But I never actually believed it would happen.
I walk around the open-plan space, after Torsten’s driver drops me off, over the fur rugs, and into the kitchen of sleek marble surfaces. I stroll to the window and look down at the park, gorgeous even if it’s tiny below, and even if the clouds are shielding the sun and casting a gray night-like sheet over everything.
But the best room, the room that makes me jump up and down like a little kid when I discover it – and Chipper to leap up on his little hind legs and dance around with me – is a freaking recording studio located at the rear of the apartment.
I can barely believe that it’s true until I feel the equipment under my fingertips.
“So you like it?” a voice comes from behind me.
I gasp and turn to find Torsten there, leaning casually against the wall, his body covered in a suit the color of Nordic water.
