Free Castaway Cove by Joann Ross Page A

the bloodlust.’”
    Annie paused in lifting her wineglass to her lips, held it out, and studied the straw gold Chardonnay. “It does?”
    “Of course not. Because vampires, excuse me, don’t exist. He also told me that he only ate red meat.”
    “Which makes the Sea Mist an odd choice.”
    “Not if you order the burger off the children’s menu . . . So, while we were waiting for his rare hamburger and my seafood salad, he decided he could trust me with his secret.”
    “I’m afraid to ask.”
    “Wise. Because it just so happens that he’s a direct descendant of old Vlad the Impaler. And it gets better. He’s the first person in his American family to make the pilgrimage back to their homeland.”
    Annie nearly choked on her wine. “He comes from an entire family of vampires? Who live here in Shelter Bay?”
    “No. We can rest easy. Apparently he’s the only one for generations who inherited the count’s powers. In fact, despite his showing supposedly irrefutable evidence from three different genealogists to his relatives, they all deny their heritage.”
    “Whew! I feel much relieved.” Annie waved her hand. “So, continue on.”
    “Well, as I said, he seemed normal enough whenever he came into the shop, so for a few minutes I thought I might be getting punked. I couldn’t imagine who’d go to the trouble to set up such a practical joke, but I decided to play along and see how far he’d go with the story. So I asked him if he had super vampire powers.”
    “And?”
    “Supposedly he does, but he only uses them in times of great need. He can hover.”
    “Cool.”
    “And allegedly slow time down.”
    “Okay, that one might be worth having lunch with a vampire if he could pull it off for me for even a day,” Annie decided.
    What with her business, and her volunteering at Still Waters, the evening classes she taught at Memories on Main, the card group she led, which made blank-inside greeting cards for troops to send back home to friends and loved ones through Operation Write Home, as well as for the Cards for Hospitalized Kids charity, she could definitely use at least another two hours in her day.
    “Unfortunately the blood power’s been diluted through the centuries. Which is why he’s going back to his so-called homeland. Because once he’s in his ancestor’s castle, he’ll have Vlad’s strength.”
    “Gotta love his optimism. Even if it might involve him looking forward to impaling tens of thousands of innocent people. So, is this where you got up and left the restaurant?”
    “I hadn’t had my salad yet. Which I’d been looking forward to all morning. As I said, he wasn’t outwardly creepy. And, in a way, in the beginning, he was entertaining.”
    “But that changed?”
    “Absolutely.”
    “If he’d leaped over the table and sunk retractable fangs into your neck, I would’ve heard about it,” Annie decided. “Because someone would’ve called the sheriff, and Kara would’ve arrested him.”
    “No, it was just that being a vampire was all he wanted to talk about. I asked him what sports he liked, and he said that he couldn’t do sports because even though his strength might not be up to his ancestor’s, it was more powerful than humans’, so it wouldn’t be fair to compete. He is actually pretty buff.”
    “Probably from sweating blood in the gym.”
    Sedona laughed at that. “Trying to change the subject, I mentioned being homeschooled in the commune, which usually sparks some conversation, but it was as if he didn’t have any real interest in me, because his response was that he’d always been smarter than anyone else in school due to his hyper-speed brain power, which had made him an outcast growing up.”
    “Not that telling everyone he was a vampire would’ve had anything to do with that. Especially once his classmates all started wearing garlic necklaces,” Annie said dryly.
    They laughed, then changed topics to the residents of Still Waters, and the