Free His Captive Mortal by Renee Rose Page A

out the steak to marinate. He also grabbed a few potatoes and set them to boil. He had a hankering for twice-baked.
    He hadn’t thought as much about Anka as he had in the last two days for a very long time. The possibility of ridding himself of her curse brought the memories of her to the forefront of his consciousness.
    As he worked on the food preparation, he caught Sasha stealing looks at him from under her lashes. She appeared to have a mystical intelligence, as if she saw beyond his self-centered vampiric existence straight into his heart, where she sifted through his loose morals to determine whether he had anything left to redeem. An old soul, it would seem. Descended from the fae.
    He had to admit parts of him he’d presumed dead had come to life in the past two days. Something about his little fairy soothed his spirit, made him feel human again.
    Her cell phone rang and she picked it up. “Hey, girl, what’s up?” She looked over at him. “Tonight? I can’t…” She twirled a piece of hair between her fingers and looked at him again before walking toward her room. “I met a guy,” she said in an undertone.
    He smiled, glad for his heightened sense of hearing, because this was one conversation he did not want to miss.
    “Yeah, well...I met him at work...sort of. And we’ve just been...hanging out for the past couple days…Charlie. Yeah. I don’t know,” she said with the suggestive lilt to her voice that teenage girls use when telling secrets.
    Something in him turned warm and sugary. He loved hearing her talk about him as if he were a love interest. Her innocence shone through in the conversation and it brought out a protective instinct in him. He’d had no intention of developing a relationship with Sasha, but the idea of her wanting one somehow changed things.
    He doused the steaks with balsamic vinegar and olive oil, onion powder, salt, and pepper. He wrapped strips of bacon around the edges and fixed them in place with toothpicks, then returned them to the refrigerator.
    Sasha emerged from the bedroom.
    “If you work very hard, I might let you go out with your friends.”
    “Shut up, vampire,” she said, but she wore a flirtatious smile.
    “Are you going to introduce me to them?”
    “That depends.”
    “On what?”
    “Why you want to meet them.”
    “I’m going to kidnap them and keep them as blood slaves until you free me of the curse.”
    She snorted, but darted a glance at him, as if checking to make sure he was joking.
    “Nah, that’s only if you haven’t figured it out by Tuesday.”
    “I don’t perform well under pressure.”
    “I don’t believe that.” He scooped out the insides of the cooled potatoes and mixed them with butter, cheese and chives, popping them into the oven, along with the steaks which he planned to top with blue cheese during the last few minutes of baking.
    Sasha walked up behind him and he found himself longing for her to touch him of her own accord. Instead, she said, “What can I help with?”
    “You could work on making a salad.”
    He moved out of her way and she took the salad fixings out of the refrigerator.
    “So how did you become a vampire?” she asked as she began chopping fresh vegetables.
    He folded his arms across his chest, leaning back against the cabinets and watching her work.  “I was the carriage driver and groom for the Duke of Lynton. His wife, the duchess, had a penchant for being bent over the hitching post and taken roughly from behind.”
    Sasha stopped and stared at him, a mixture of fascination and shock on her face. “By you, you mean?”
    “Yes, although I imagine I wasn’t the first groom she’d recruited for her recreation. The night I was turned, I’d just driven her to London and had thrown up her skirts in the stables when the Duke found us and shot me.”
    Her eyes rounded, the knife suspended in mid-air.
    “I managed to stumble out onto the streets of London. He let me go—I imagine he didn’t think