Dead Perfect by Amanda Ashley

thing was, he liked having Shannah around. She had bloomed in the last few weeks. Where she had once been frail and sickly looking, she was now the picture of vibrant good health. Her skin glowed, her hair was thick and lustrous, her eyes bright and clear. She was a beautiful young woman in the prime of her life.
    And he wanted her.
     
    Shannah stood at the stove, stirring a pan of chicken noodle soup, her mind filled with questions, all of them about her mysterious host. She wondered where he slept, since she slept in the only bed in the house, and where he kept his clothes. She never saw him during the day. He didn’t eat. She had noticed there were no mirrors in any of the rooms.
    The word vampire whispered, unbidden, through the back corridors of her mind.
    She dismissed it with a shake of her head. He had answered the door when the sun was still up. He couldn’t be a vampire if he was active during the day, even though he looked like one.
    She laughed out loud. Who knew what a vampire looked like? In books, they were often described as skeletal figures with hairy hands, long bony fingers, and glowing red eyes. In movies, they were often portrayed as funny and sexy, like George Hamilton, or handsome and sexy, like Frank Langella.
    Ronan was definitely handsome and sexy. Maybe he was a vampire.
    A vampire who wrote best-selling romance novels. Right.
    She poured the soup into a bowl, pulled a box of saltines out of the cupboard, and sat down at the table. For weeks now, she had been able to eat anything she wanted without getting sick to her stomach. She felt wonderful. The small mirror she carried in her purse told her she looked better than she ever had in her whole life. Her skin practically glowed. Her hair was thicker than before. Was this a sign that death was imminent? Her doctor had said she might enjoy a burst of good health before the end.
    Her doctor. She had an appointment with him tomorrow. She had been feeling so good the last few weeks, she had forgotten all about it until now; now she was tempted to skip it. If she was better, why bother going? And if she wasn’t? Why bother going when they couldn’t do anything to help her?
    She finished her soup, washed the dishes and put them away, then went into the living room. Ronan hadn’t returned, so she picked up the book she had been reading. He really was a terrific writer. She had read three of his books so far and every one of them had been a keeper, a real page turner. She wondered where he got all his information about vampires, then shrugged. He had a computer. You could find anything you wanted to know on the Net. Plus he had hundreds of books. Some of them could be research books, she supposed, though she had never heard of vampire research books. But then, there were a lot of things she had never heard of.
    Settling back on the sofa, she opened the book and lost herself in another world.
     
    Ronan stood in the doorway, his gaze on the woman who was so engrossed in one of his books that she didn’t even realize he was in the room. It pleased him to think she was so caught up in a world that he had created that she wasn’t aware of her own surroundings. The thought made him smile. There was something deeply satisfying about knowing that others enjoyed his work. He had a dozen boxes filled with fan letters, as well as a number of files on his computer where he stored his email according to the year it had been received. But the fact that Shannah enjoyed his stories pleased him more than anything else.
    She really was lovely, he mused, and then frowned. It occurred to him that she was quite young, probably too young to have written as many Eva Black books as he had. If asked, she would have to lie about her age. These days, with collagen injections, Botox, skin peels and plastic surgery, it was hard to judge a woman’s true age. Of course, it wasn’t unheard of for an author to turn out more than one book a year. He wrote two books a year,