Page 11 of My Big Fat Vampire Wedding
She could get Lucy to help set up auditions or something like that. That was the kind of thing that would be right up Lucy’s alley. She would probably spend the whole shift working on the ad to put up online and deciding what questions they would ask Pandora’s future husband.
Husband.
It was going to take some work to wrap her head around that idea. Time she didn’t have. Because, with only a three-month deadline, she needed to meet, “fall in love with” – i.e. learn everything about and become really good at faking chemistry with – someone, and then plan and execute a wedding.
While, hopefully, staying sane.
Which, she thought, was not going to be easy once her family got wind of things.
But that was a bridge she could cross when she got to it.
She could only cross one at a time.
And right now, she needed to find her fiancé.
5
“Ithink we need to ask the hard questions up front,” Lucy said, using the company clipboard to scribble her plans. “Your parents will sniff out a fraud in minutes. So we have to dig deep.”
“Oh, please enlighten me, oh wise one,” Pandora teased her friend as she refilled the tea caddy. “What are these hard questions?”
“Well, first,” Lucy said, holding up a finger. “Can he hold a brooding stare for longer than thirty seconds without looking thick? Or, you know, constipated.” A snort escaped Pandora. “Because you vampire types, you love a good brood.”
Despite herself, Pandora’s mind flashed to Caramel Macchiato Cutie. Who, she’d noticed on many an occasion, had the hot brooding-guy thing down pat.
But he wasn’t in the running. And she needed to stop thinking about him.
“OK. Second question?”
“Can he deliver grand romantic lines and make them believable?”
“Like what?”
“Oh, maybe, ‘My love, you are the moon to my eternal darkness.’ But not be cringy about it. It’s a critical skill.”
“I don’t talk like that,” Pandora said, rolling her eyes at her friend.
Lucy ignored that, tapping her pen against her clipboard. “Third, what are his dance skills? The wedding is going to require dancing. And your parents are old-school. They are going to expect him to be able to do a standard waltz. Maybe a tango. Bonus points if he can do the spinny bit and doesn’t get too green in the face.”
“I concede that he needs to know, or learn, how to waltz,” Pandora said. “But even I don’t know how to tango.”
“You’ve been alive one hundred and twenty-four years, and you haven’t learned to tango?” Lucy asked, shaking her head. “What’s next? You never learned to Cha-Cha Slide or the Macarena?” At Pandora’s guilty look, Lucy sighed. “Well, I guess I know what we are doing on our next girls’ night.”
“I think I’d rather listen to one of my uncles talk about the ‘good old days’,” Pandora said.
“All right. Anyway. Back to our list. We can’t forget possibly the most important skill of all. The smolder. Because all of this will be for nothing if he can’t pull that off. I mean, if he doesn’t look at you like the last drop ofwater in the desert, then what’s the point? Your parents will never buy it.”
That was fair.
Even just a normal vampire would pick up on there being no real chemistry between them. But before Pandora’s mother had fallen in love with her father and agreed to become a vampire for him, she’d been a powerful succubus.
That meant she was not only insanely beautiful and alluring, and capable of using lust and love to entrance her targets, but she was also able to sense things like love and sexual attraction between others.
Sure, when her mother had become a vampire, some of her succubi powers had weakened. But Pandora was reasonably sure Ophelia could still sense attraction.
“Fine, yes, smolder. Anything else?”
“Plenty,” Lucy said, checking her list. Which looked like it was three full pages. Frontandback. “Let’s talk fashion. Can he rock a waistcoat? Pull off a cravat? Gothic-chic is going to be needed at some point. Being able to wear it comfortably, so he doesn’t seem like he’s cosplaying, would be important.”
