Free Vampire - In the Beginning (Vampire Series Book 1) by Charmain Marie Mitchell

study.
     
    The study was her favourite room in the cottage, it was snug and warm, or would be when the open fire started crackling in the grate.  With this in mind; she took the box of matches from the mantle, struck a match, and carefully placed the small flame into the paper and kindling that she had prepared before her shopping expedition to Petersfield.  She waited until the kindling was roaring and then emptied a small bucket of coal and a couple of dry logs on top of the flames.  She watched for a moment, and after satisfying herself that the coal and logs would take hold, she made her way over to an old leather chair that stood in front of a huge antique walnut desk, and sunk in to its welcoming folds.
     
    She had walked into the study with the intention of continuing where she had left off with her current story.  However, she found that she was unable to open her laptop, not because it wouldn't open, but because she didn't want to.  What's the bloody point, she thought, it’s no better than anything I've written in the past, it'll flop, just like they all flop. 
     
    Laying her head back against the old, tattered, but soft and familiar leather of the chair, Mary tried to figure out where she was going wrong.  She knew that most people would look at her life and think she had it made, and she wasn't so stupid or selfish not to know that they were probably right.
     
    She was twenty-two, owned her cottage outright (even if it was falling down).  She also had more money in the bank then it was likely she would ever, in her lifetime, be able to spend.  However, she had no one to share her wealth with.  Her parents had died in a car crash when she was just two years old, and her grandmother, whom she had lived with ever since her parents died, had died just under a year previously.
     
    It was her grandmother whom she missed the most. She found it difficult to remember her parents, but her grandmother had always been there for her.  She missed her presence, her beauty and kindness, and the way they would discuss their writing; warm by the fire, with her grandmother giving, but also receiving Mary's constructive criticism.  After all her grandmother was one of England's greatest authors.  Victoria Howard was known throughout the world for her horrific and hugely popular, 'Nightfall Mysteries'.  When the great Victoria Howard died, she bequeathed the whole of her vast fortune to her granddaughter, but with Victoria went the extent of her family - Mary was the sole remaining member, she was to all intents and purposes, alone.
     
    Well, apart from one person, her best friend Kate, but Kate lived in London, and she mixed with the famous and wealthy jet-setting types.  It was the type of life that didn't really suit Mary, who was shy and reserved, and a woman who blushed at the mere mention of a dirty joke.
     
    They did, however, spend part of the year together, normally when Kate felt she needed the peace and tranquility that only the leafy country lanes of Hampshire could offer her.  She would arrive like a whirlwind, taking over Mary's life, and just as suddenly vanish back to her world of glitz and glamour.  Thus leaving Mary to feel even lonelier then she had before Kate had arrived.  Mary didn't really mind.  It had been the same when they were children, so why should it be any different now?
     
    Kate was the daughter of the late, but very well remembered, Edward Windell, Victoria Howard's long time agent and lover.  Edwards’s wife had died giving birth to Kate, and so it was that Mary's grandmother eventually become his lover.  It seemed the whole world knew of the affair, but no one talked of it.  Least of all the two children that happily played together in their own little world, whilst their guardians discussed business, and, as both the children later realised, partook of pleasure.
     
    Nowadays Kate would laugh about the relationship, often saying that she wished Victoria and Edward had