Kapitel 8: Breakfast of Vampires

Celeste

I awoke to a heavenly smell. Bacon! Wait. Who was making me bacon? I lived alone. My eyes popped open and flew around the room. Slowly, events from the night before came back to me. Hot vampire, running from hunters, that kiss. Goddess save me! I was in the vampire's apartment!

Jumping out of the strangely comfortable bed (Why did a vampire need a bed anyway? Didn't they have coffins and crypts and shit?) I listened at the door. The pop of grease and rattling pans. And was that humming? By the moon, the crazy vampire was humming? Chicken Fried by Zac Brown? What kind of crazy, fucked up vampire was this?

Carefully, quietly I cracked open the door. My mouth watered as the smell of delicious, salty pork assaulted my nostrils at full force. I crept along the wall toward the kitchen. The sight that met my eyes made me stifling a groan. The vampire was standing in front of a large, eight-burner stove, his naked back looking like sculpted marble. Lean muscle flexed under his perfect, pale skin as he forked bacon onto a plate.

"Hungry?" a deep voice asked without looking around.

Damn overachieving vampire hearing!

"Uh, yeah, smells good."

He turned around, spatula in hand, and flashed me a huge, white smile. My face refused to return it, and I frowned at him. His head tilted to the side, and his smile faltered. "What? You don't like bacon? I thought everyone liked bacon."

My eyes narrowed as I studied him. "I love bacon, but why are you making me breakfast? In fact, why do you even have food? I've never seen you bloodsuckers ingesting anything but the red stuff."

I tried to keep the image of a glass of wine in my head rather than one full of thick blood. My stomach squirmed at the thought of it anyway.

"I have friends who like breakfast." He shrugged.

Why was that so freaking adorable? I shook the thought out of my head. "So, you're a vampire that cooks." The idea was so incongruous to my experience with vampires that I had trouble accepting what was right in front of me.

His shoulders raised again, and his lips quirked up on one side. "Yeah," he said simply before returning to the pans on the stove.

A moment later, there was a plate sitting in front of me at the granite bar top loaded with fluffy scrambled eggs, perfectly buttered toast, and crispy bacon. I picked up my jaw from where it dropped when I saw the spread that looked better than my last breakfast at iHop to find the annoyingly handsome vampire holding a pitcher.

"Juice?" he asked like we weren't caught in some Twilight Zone episode.

I held up my glass in invitation. My eyes roamed appreciatively over his naked torso as he poured the sunshine orange liquid into my glass. I'd seen plenty of exceptionally good-looking vampires in my time in Oriana's court but none of them had ever caused my insides to tremble with want like this one did. What was going on? And how did I make it stop?

He jerked a chin toward my plate. "Go ahead. I've already, uh, eaten, this morning."

I forked up a bite of eggs as he pulled out a stool across from me and sat. I tried to stifle a groan when the cheesy, buttery eggs practically melted on my tongue.

"I'm glad you like them. Leo taught me to make them." His smile was back in full force, and my heart did a little flip in my chest. Dammit!

Finishing the bite without making any more embarrassing noises, I swallowed and studied him. "Look," I started. "Thanks for giving me a place to hide and breakfast and all, but you have to realize—we are not friends."

His face hardened at my pronouncement and his jaw ticked. "Fine," he said after a long moment of staring each other down passed. "We need to figure out how we're going to stay off of Draven and company's radar with our heads on our shoulders."

"Look, first of all, there's no 'we' here," I said, pointing back and forth between the two of us. "I figure as long as I stay far away from you, they won't be able to find me. I've been doing just fine on my own so far. It wasn't until I stumbled upon your bar that they started chasing me."

Nick's arms folded across his wide chest. The move made his biceps bulge. I licked my lips and tried not to let the drool run down my chin. Fuck! This really had to stop!

"And how exactly do you know they didn't follow you to my bar where they just happened to find me as well?" He raised one dark eyebrow in question.

Shit! He had a point. I didn't know. Draven and his buddies could have just as easily followed me. But I'd been so careful over the last months since I'd been in Austin. I hadn't picked up any signs of being tailed. No scent of ash that was the telltale odor of the court guards around my place.

But how careful had I been the last few days since I'd met Nick? Thoughts of my seduction and destruction of him had consumed me. Was this my fault after all?

"Cat got your tongue, little Fae?" Nick snarked at me.

I glared at his smirking face. "I guess it doesn't matter which one of us caught their attention," I admitted grudgingly, the eggs congealing into a lump in my gut with the admission. "How do we get rid of them before they report to Oriana?"

The vampire's arms dropped from his chest, and his elbows came to rest on the countertop. He picked up a fork and twirled it around his long fingers like some kind of undead majorette. His blue eyes grew thoughtful as he stared over my shoulder, obviously thinking over the question of the moment.

Finally, he returned his gaze to me. His eyes had gone from stormy blue to red, and I flinched at the sight. "I'm not sure yet, but I will not allow any harm to come to you, Celeste."

The vehemence of his statement rattled me, but, somehow, I completely believed him.