Free Must Love Vampires by Heidi Betts Page B

about tonight, but it was a risk she was willing to take. Who knew, maybe his vampire mojo or whatever it was wouldn’t work. Maybe she would wake up not only remembering the events of this evening, but as far back as having her ass slapped by the doctor when she’d been born.
    A frown crossed her face as one last thought occurred to her. “This whole . . . erasing my memory thing,” she murmured, nibbling at one side of her bottom lip. “It doesn’t involve any sort of electro-shock or frontal lobotomy-type stuff, does it?”
    He chuckled. “No, I assure you it’s entirely noninvasive. Except for the loss of recent memories, of course.”
    Of course.
    Taking a deep breath, she nodded, and forced the words past a throat closed tight with anxiety. “All right. As long as you promise not to leave me a drooling vegetable staring at Phineas and Ferb all day, I’m in.”
    “Who?”
    She waved off his question with a flip of her wrist. “It’s a cartoon. For kids.” Something she knew only because she spent way too many hours awake when she should be asleep, with only the Disney Channel for company.
    “No, I will not leave you drooling over this Phillius on Verb , or anything else. You’ll be perfectly fine, except for a few missing hours of your life you’ll probably wonder about. After a while, you’ll even forget that they ever went missing.”
    “Then I want to know,” she told him, making her voice strong and sure in hopes of convincing herself, as well.
    He inclined his head. “Where would you like to start?”
    Well, shoot, she wasn’t expecting that. Her brows crossed. Where did she want to start?
    She already knew he was a vampire. At this point, that was a given. He’d never come right out and admitted as much, but . . . yeah, it was a given.
    And she assumed he drank blood, couldn’t go out in sunlight, and had been around since the invention of the wheel or soon thereafter. The whole nine undead yards.
    She wanted to know more than just the everyday minutia of an immortal’s existence. Although, yes, she was sure that was all fascinating. She’d come back to it later. But for now, she wanted to dig deeper, learn something a little more substantial than whether or not he slept in a coffin or had to carry dirt from his native land in his pants pocket twenty-four seven.span>
    When she thought about it, what she wanted to know most was really pretty simple. And probably what had driven her to go after Sebastian like a pitbull with this “there’s a vampire living in Las Vegas” theory in the first place.
    Licking her lips and meeting his steel-gray gaze, she asked, “How does it feel to know you’re going to live forever?”
    It wasn’t the first question Sebastian had expected from her. Frankly, it wasn’t even in the top ten.
    What does blood taste like? Do you sleep in a coffin? (And can I see it?) How many people have you killed in order to feed? (And how do you hide the bodies?) Those were the kinds of questions he’d thought someone enamored of vampire legends would be most eager to ask once they found out the legends were true. Well, parts of them.
    But he watched Chuck’s eyes, intensity written across her heart-shaped face, and he knew it wasn’t just idle curiosity that had her asking that question first. There was something else, something deeper. Something personal, maybe?
    “I don’t know that,” he responded truthfully.
    She cocked her head, clearly not understanding. “Vampire immortality is a fallacy. We can die, just not easily.”
    “But you don’t age, do you? You don’t get sick and die like we mere mortals.”
    “No, but mortals also don’t burst into flame when direct sunlight hits them. You can move about the world completely undeterred. Get on a plane in L.A. at noon one day and step off in Australia at noon the next. Visit Disney World every year and take a spin in the teacups with the two-pointthree tots in tow.”
    “But you’re never going to die. At