Must Love Vampires by Heidi Betts Page A

that where this woman was concerned, it was just one surprise after another.
    “Reporter. For the Sin City Tattler .” Her nose wrinkled at that. “Good at it, but no respect. Tired of making up shit about flying saucers and Bigfoot sightings. Need a good story. One really good, true story.” Her lips tilted upward, flashing her pearly whites.
    That grin—which he’d seen a time or two on cats that had just swallowed beloved goldfish—told him she already had a story in mind. He wasn’t sure he should care or even needed to know, but curiosity won out, and he found himself asking, “What story is that?”
    She was still staring off into space, not really seeing him, and yet she sat up straighter, as though getting ready to impart some grave secret. “Sebastian Raines,” she whispered.
    His eyes rolled back in his head. Christ on a cracker, was there no reprieve from the roller-coaster ride this woman had him on? It was one sharp climb and sudden drop after another.
    Pressing two fingers to the arch of his nose, he tried to push back the headache throbbing there. A bloody headache, when he’d never suffered one before in his life.
    Vampires didn’t get headaches, or if they did, it was tantamount to a gnat buzzing at the hide of a rhino—so insignificant as to go completely unnoticed.
    But here he was with the mother of them all.
    Or maybe it was an aneurism. An aneurism brought on by stress was entirely possible. It would certainly explain the intense pain banging against the inside of his skull like a jai alai ball.
    At this point, he could only hope for death. It wouldn’t last, of course, but it might be a nice reprieve.
    Lowering his hand from his face, taking a deep breath to shore himself up for whatever answer she might give to his next question, he asked, “What about Sebastian Raines? What story are you working on about him?”
    She leaned in even closer, until their noses nearly touched. He smelled that scent again—flowers touched by citrus—as her gaze drilled into his.
    There was something there this time. Not recognition, but an intensity. Feeling behind what she was about to say.
    “He’s a vampire,” she told him in the merest wisp of breath. “And I’m going to prove it.”

Three of a Kind
    Chuck came to herself in a blink. Literally.
    It was the oddest thing. One minute she was asleep—she thought—and the next she was wide awake, sitting straight up in bed.
    Not her bed, though. She glanced around, realizing she was not just in the bedroom of Sebastian Raines’s phenomenal penthouse, but taking up space on his personal mattress.
    She did not remember that. Going through his wine rack and beginning to snoop in his closet, yes. But climbing into his bed . . . Who was she, Goldilocks?
    No, she definitely didn’t remember getting into—or on to, as the case may be—his bed.
    Or his clothes.
    Looking down, she noticed she had somehow gotten out of Chloe’s “Flames of Hell” costume and into . . . Oh, no. They couldn’t be . . . Sebastian Raines’s pajamas? Half of them, anyway—the bottom half—and a plain white undershirt.
    Didn’t a woman usually get undressed, have (hopefully) mind-blowing sex, then jump into a man’s clothes? She had no recollection of any of those things. And if she’d been lucky enough to have mind-blowing, twisty stix pretzel sex, she really wanted to remember it.
    In her peripheral vision, she noticed a form and turned her head to discover that she wasn’t alone in the room. A man— Sebastian Raines himself, she assumed—was standing with his back to her, staring out the window at the bright city lights playing against the still-dark night sky.
    His black hair and the midnight blue of his tailored suit melded with the shadows hanging all around him, making him nearly invisible. It was only the paler hue of his hands clasped behind his back and his face in profile that had caught her attention at all.
    She must have made a noise . . . or perhaps