Between a Vamp and a Hard Place by Jessica Sims Read Free Book Online Page A

surprise, he did just that, and I watched him carefully mop the marble flooring with the towel as I sipped my orange juice. There were cookies in the cabinet behind my head, so I pulled them out and began to munch on them between sips, feeling a little better as I did. When Rand straightened, I offered him a cookie.
    He shook his head and held up a hand. “I suspect it would taste as foul as the juice.”
    I considered my glass. Sure, it was from concentrate, but I thought it was pretty tasty. “You think it tastes foul?”
    â€œEverything does,” he said, a wistful note in his voice that surprised me. He leaned back against the counter and watched me scarf another cookie. “All normal food and drink is like ashes in the mouth of a vampire. I have not tasted pleasant food in the two hundred years since I was turned.”
    â€œOh,” I said around a mouthful of cookie. “That has to suck. No pun intended.”
    Rand gazed at me blankly, then shrugged. “It was not as if I was turned of my own volition. And I suppose it has been more than two hundred years now, has it not?”
    â€œSix hundred,” I agreed.
    Rand looked around the room, then back at me. “It truly is the year of our Lord two thousand and fifteen?”
    â€œIt is,” I agreed. The cookies tasted dry in my mouth, and I again felt a stab of unwanted sympathy for the vampire. He looked rather lost despite his big form and easy smiles. “This must be a big change for you.”
    His look was rueful. “It is not one change. It is everything that has changed,” he admitted. “Naught I remember is familiar, and all is strange.”
    I tried to picture myself waking up six hundred years in the future, and how much things would have changed at that point. Okay, yeah, that would not be fun. “You’ll be all right.”
    â€œI am utterly adrift,” he admitted. “Friendless and alone in a strange place and time. Though one would argue if the men I called my friends from long ago were truly that.”
    â€œYou think one of them staked you?”
    At that, he gave me another rueful, sexy smile. “I know exactly who staked me. It was a blond whore with large tits and bountiful thighs. My last memory is of her riding my cock.”
    I gave him a look of horror and choked on my cookie. “We need to have a talk about oversharing,” I wheezed when I could breathe again.
    â€œDid you not ask?” Rand quirked an eyebrow at me.
    For a moment, I wanted to cuss at him like Gemma and her sailor-mouth. “I didn’t ask for that level of detail,” I told him. “So, a whore staked you? Not a friend? I suppose that’s good, right?”
    â€œNay. Or rather, no.” Rand gave a small shake of his head and crossed his arms, leaning back against the counter. His pose was one of such casual sexiness that I wondered if the utter sensuality of every movement he made was part of the vampire package, or if Rand had just been sex on a stick before becoming a vampire. I couldn’t ask without embarrassing myself, though. The last thing I wanted was the man to find out that I thought he was attractive. I’d never get away from him, then.
    â€œSo you were bouncing around with hookers and you got staked? Did you tick someone off?”
    He contemplated this for a moment, and I suspected he was deciphering my words, filtering them through whatever mental ability let him speak the same language as me. “That is the question that repeats in my mind, over and over again. Who have I embraced that was an enemy to me?”
    â€œMaybe start with all the hookers you’re so fond of embracing?” I said sweetly. “Maybe you called them ‘wench’ too often?”
    â€œThey were wenches,” he said with a roguish smile. “And they served many a man in bed. I do not see what was so different about me that they would lure me to my death. They