A Taste Of A Vampire

“It was an injury sustained when I was hunting once, a very long time ago,” he answered her solemnly.

She frowned and looked at him sorrowfully. “I’m glad you’re all right, but I wish that it hadn’t happened.”

Another thought crossed her mind as he lay there with her in his arms.

“Nicholas, did we make love in your bedroom? I know it sounds a little crazy for me to ask, but… I honestly don’t know if I dreamed it or if it really happened.”

She searched his eyes, hoping that he wouldn’t think she had lost her mind. He only smiled a little and the corner of his mouth turned up. He leaned forward and kissed her softly and said in a low voice, “What do you think?”

He kissed her long and slow then, and she closed her eyes and kissed him in return, losing herself once more in the head spinning bliss of it.

When she opened her eyes, the sun was shining through all of the windows in her room, and she turned over in her bed and saw that she was alone. There was a single red rose on the pillow beside her, and it was the only thing that let her know that she hadn’t been dreaming.

Claire pushed herself up and picked up the rose, tenderly running her fingers over the petals. She couldn’t remember anything after the last kiss they had shared. There was nothing. It was just the same sort of sensation she had felt when she’d woken up in her bed after they had made love in his bedroom. There was no memory. There was no connection between the last thing she remembered and where she was when she woke up.

She had asked him about it, and he had only answered, “What do you think?” Claire frowned and furrowed her brow. That was no answer, she told herself, wondering why she hadn’t pressed him for more. She hadn’t had a chance. He had silenced her with a passionate kiss, and that had stopped the question, stopped the answer, stopped the whole night.

With a sigh of frustration, she rose from her bed and went to the bathroom. She brushed her teeth and washed her face, and as she was combing her hair, she saw something that made her stop. Leaning closer to the mirror, she saw that the two puncture wounds on her neck were red again, looking fresh as if they had just been made.

She peered at them and ran her fingers over each one. They were slightly sore and tender, but they didn’t hurt too badly, and there was no bruising. They were clean holes. Stumped as to how they could have gotten there or what they could possibly be from, she dressed them with antibacterial ointment and put a bandage over them, and readied herself for the day.

When she’d had breakfast, she took Elizabeth’s diary and walked out to the garden. She wanted to know more about her great-great-great-grandmother, and she was curious to see if there was anything else about Nathaniel in the book. The similarities between him and Nicholas were incredible to her.

She hadn’t been able to keep Nicholas off her mind. Her thoughts were clouded with confusion and unanswered questions, but her heart and her body were on fire for him, and she ached almost viscerally for him.

Claire wished that he hadn’t had such a strong effect on her. She wished that she could just put him from her mind and not think about him at all. She knew that when she went back to Manhattan, it was going to be difficult for her if she was thinking about someone so incredible who lived much too far away from her for her to ever see again. She had no desire to make her life more difficult than it was.

She sat down on a cushioned bench in the garden and gently opened the diary to the last entry she had read.

“Something strange happened yesterday, and it’s left me relegated to my bed or at best a lounge in the library. I was out riding one of the stallions through the grounds and when I was jumping a creek at the edge of the property near the trees, he saw something that spooked him. He threw me from his back and ran, and when I landed, I hurt my ankle. Nathaniel was there suddenly, almost out of nowhere. I never even heard him coming, and I know I was riding at the edge between the Grayson property and his, but it was uncanny that he happened to be so near that he was at my side almost the moment that I hit the ground. He picked me up and carried me all the way back to Grayson Manor in his arms. If I hadn’t already swooned for him, I would certainly have done it then.

As he held me in his arms I happened to get a close look at his neck and saw the most terrible scar there, just near the back of his neck where his hair had been covering it every time I’ve ever seen him. It was a horrific scar that looked as if it was a claw mark of some kind. Something big, like a bear or a lion, could only have made a mark like that. Not that I’ve ever seen either, but it’s obvious that it was no small thing that left it. I asked him about it and he was vague. He told me that he had sustained it during a hunting trip a long time ago. It is healed, and it does look like an old scar, but it is hideous nonetheless.”

Claire couldn’t believe the words she had read. She went back to the beginning of the entry, her eyes wide and her fingers trembling as she followed along every single word carefully. She read it over and over again until she could have recited it from memory. It was impossible. It was totally impossible, but the words were right there, staring her in the eye.

It couldn’t be possible that the man her great-great-great-grandmother had written about could have the exact same scar in the exact same place as the man that Claire knew. It just wasn’t possible.

She swallowed hard and read the rest of the entry.