Free Must Love Vampires by Heidi Betts Page A

too. She’d already been drooling over him from afar, so putting herself out there like that ( ha —putting out) for the story of a lifetime wouldn’t exactly be a hardship.
    As for the other . . . well, she could scrub a toilet as well as anyone, she supposed.
    “You won’t remember anything once I finish.”
    She blinked, slamming on her brain’s brakes and laying rubber until she could pull a mental U-ie. Wait. What?
    “What?” she repeated aloud, knowing she was blinking like a camel in a sandstorm.
    “That’s the deal, Char—Sorry. Chuck.”
    He said her name as though he didn’t particularly like it, and definitely wasn’t used to calling a woman by a man’s name. She got that a lot.
    “What does that mean?” she asked carefully.
    Was he telling her that he wouldn’t allow her to use anything he told her when they were finished? An off-the-recordtype interview. Or was he telling her she wouldn’t remember the interview when they were done in a Mafia boss, you’llsleep-with-the-fishes sort of way?
    She honestly didn’t know which made her feel more sick to her stomach. Swimming with the fishes would be bad, but not being able to use the most coveted interview on the planet would be devastating. Heartbreaking. Even if he didn’t put her in cement shoes and drop her to the bottom of Lake Tahoe, she would probably take a voluntary dive off the Hoover Dam, anyway.
    “It means that I can answer your questions. I can tell you everything you’ve ever wanted to know. But when we’re done, your memory of this evening will be completely erased and you’ll remember nothing.”
    “How . . .” When her voice squeaked on the word, she paused, collected herself, and tried again. “How exactly will that happen?”
    One corner of his mouth quirked up in a self-deprecating grin. “Come now. Do you think all vampires do is drink blood from unsuspecting victims?”
    Inside her chest, Chuck’s heart was ka-thump-ka-thumpka-thump ing to beat the band. Holy hell on a hamburger bun. That was as good as an admission that he was, indeed, a vampire.
    Granted, he hadn’t come right out and said, “Why, yes, ma’am, I am a bloodsucking fiend of the night. Wanna see my fangs?”
    But she’d seen the fangs, hadn’t she? No full-on, double-fang action, but there for a second, just a minute or two ago, she’d definitely seen . . . more tooth where most people had less tooth.
    And though she hadn’t asked him directly whether or not he was a vampire, she’d certainly made it clear that’s what she was after, and nothing he’d said so far led her to believe his answer would be no.
    The glass in her hand trembled, and her lips started to go numb. Was she having a heart attack? Was this what one felt like? Or maybe she was simply on the verge of a panic attack.
    Either way, this was IT. Big I, big T, nothing was ever going to top this in her entire life. If she one day gave birth to a litter of porcupines and got into the Guinness Book of World Records , she would still look back at the night she’d sat across from an honest-to-goodness vampire and gotten the story from his very own bloodstained mouth, and consider it the most exciting thing that had ever happened to her.
    But could she go through the most exciting event of her life, get all of her nagging questions answered, know she’d finally proven that vampires really did exist . . . and then consent to having it all wiped away as though it never happened?
    She thought about it for all of about a millisecond. The time it took for her fingers to flex more tightly around her wineglass and her gaze to once again zero in on Sebastian’s impressive, almost Romanesque profile as he reached for the bottle to refill his own glass.
    Yes. Yes, she could. She had to know. Wanted it more than her next breath or her daily, top-secret Snickers bar.
    It killed her, absolutely killed her to think that when she woke up the next morning, she might not remember a single thing