A Taste Of A Vampire

Claire shook her head. “I can’t go back. It’s complicated, but the sad truth is that this is the right place for me to be. I can’t go anywhere else. I have to be here. I have my life here. I have my job, my career, my apartment on 5^th Avenue, my friends are here…my whole life is here. It’s just complicated there. It’s not possible. As much as I wish it was, it isn’t. I have to embrace what I have here. I hope I’ll feel like everything is back together again sometime soon. Maybe it’s just because I was gone for so long to such a different place, and the adjustment of coming back to Manhattan is taking some time. I was fine here before. I’m sure I’ll be fine again. It’s just probably going to take some time. It’s just an adjustment period.”

Jill looked as if she wasn’t entirely convinced that Claire was going to become acclimated to returning to her old life. “I don’t know why you’re having such a hard time, and I can see that you’re not going to tell me, but I am glad to see you back, and I hope that you’re right and that in some short time you’re back to yourself again.”

She rose from her chair then and left, giving Claire a smile over her shoulder before she closed the door. Claire sat back in her seat and picked up the paperwork again, gazing at the image of the manor and sighing heavily as so many memories played through her mind. She didn’t know how she was going to let it go, but she had to try.

Jill had said she didn’t know why Claire was having a hard time. Claire scoffed at the thought that it was just a hard time. She had left her heart behind in England, and she didn’t know if she would ever recover from it. She had left a home where she had found family connections and bonds, even though the bonds were with a long deceased great grandmother. She hadn’t felt connection to family in a long time because she had been alone for so long. She had no family left, at least until she got to Grayson Manor, and then it felt like she did have family again.

The other side of it was that she had fallen in love. She had fallen completely for a man who she could never have because he was a vampire. She was a human. There was no way that they could ever be together. There was no way that she would ever feel the love and the passion that she had felt with him. It just wasn’t possible. No other man would ever make her body or her heart feel what Nicholas had made her feel.

That part was just as hard as letting go of a home where her family had been. She knew that that was the reason why she had felt so out of place in Manhattan. It was a great city, and it was where she was from, but it wasn’t her home, and it wasn’t where she belonged. She couldn’t go back to England though, because she would not be able to be with Nicholas, and the only place she would want to live there would be at Grayson Manor, and that was much too close to him to live without him. Her great-great-great-grandmother might have made herself do it, but she knew that she couldn’t. She would want him too much, and the fact that he was a vampire was just something that they couldn’t change or get around.

She was going to have to make herself learn to live happily in Manhattan again. She was going to have to find a way to get Nicholas out of her mind and out of her heart, as well as Grayson Manor and every one of the staff members that lived and worked there. She had a life in New York, and she was going to have to embrace it and move forward with her life. There was no going back. Not ever.