Page 2 of Road Trip with a Vampire
He had to be new here. Maybe a tourist. This town wasn’t big. I’d have remembered seeing a guy likethisbefore if he’d been around awhile.
“I don’t need help,” I lied. He was a stranger. An incredibly sexy stranger, yes—but I didn’t want to give him the idea that I needed his help with anything.
He frowned, looking unconvinced. “It would be no trouble.”
It was the telltale tingling in my fingertips that made my mind up for me. I had to get home, sooner rather than later.
“Fine,” I relented. I pointed at the box and at everything that had fallen out of it. “Can you pick up this stuff and throw it away for me?”
He was at my side half a heartbeat later, moving with an effortless kind of speed I hadn’t seen from anyone in a very long time. As I watched, the man scooped up the junk on the ground in one fluid movement. Then he hefted the box into his arms like it weighed nothing at all and chucked everything into the dumpster. I had to force myself not to gape at the flex of corded muscle in his forearms while he moved.
Maybe this guy was a runway model, I thought dazedly, watching him brush his hands off on the front of his jeans. He certainly looked like one. Or maybe he was some other kind of celebrity, someone who’d fled to the Northern California coast to escape the nonsense that the beautiful and famous often faced in LA. This area was full of people like that, folks who’d wanted to relocate somewhere coastal and remote to get away from unpleasantness in their old lives.
Like me, I supposed.
“Is there anything else I can help you with?” The man stepped close enough that I could smell his cologne, a hint of something dark and spicy. His dark brown eyes caught the reflection of themoon, and he smiled a little, tentatively, not showing his teeth. Despite his apparent keen interest in helping strangers like me, I got the impression he was shy.
“I’m all set,” I said. There were more boxes of ruined things in the studio, but those could wait until Lindsay and Becky, my friends and Yoga Magic co-owners, showed up in the morning. “Thanks, Mr.…”
“Peter.”
“Mr.Peter?”
“Just Peter.” A corner of his mouth quirked up into a half smile, throwing a small scar above his upper lip into sharp relief. I wondered if he’d just given me a fake name. Not that I’d blame him if he had; we were strangers, after all. Gods, his mouth was gorgeous. It took all my restraint not to stare at it as his smile grew into something warm and genuine. “And you are?”
I gave him the name I gave everyone. “Zelda,” I said. Not my real name, either. But close enough.
“Zelda,” he repeated. In his deep, seductive voice, my new nickname sounded like music. “It’s nice to meet you.”
He made to turn and head back in the direction he’d come from. But some long-dormant flirtatious instinct recoiled at the idea of letting this beautiful man walk away so soon after meeting him.
“Are you new here?” I blurted before I could talk myself out of saying something stupid like…that. My flirtatious instincts should havestayeddormant. I was terrible at this. “Sorry if that’s a weird thing to ask. It’s just this town is microscopic. If I’ve never seen someone before, they’re either a tourist or new to town.”
“I’m not a tourist,” he said. “I’m new here. At least, I think I am.”
Huh. That was a weird answer. I decided to breeze past it. “And how are you finding it here?”
“Hot.”
I laughed. “It’s not usually quite this hot.” Which was true. We were in the middle of a rare October heat wave. California’s famously temperate climate had been one of the main reasons I’d relocated here, but we hadn’t seen her in weeks.
“No?”
I shook my head. “This string of ninety-plus-degree days is unusual.”
He considered that. “Is it normally quite this sunny?”
“It rained the other day.” I pointed at the dumpster. “That box is full of stuff that got ruined when our roof leaked. But yes, most of the time it’s very sunny. It’s wonderful, isn’t it?”
“No,” he said emphatically.
My eyebrows rose. “No?”
“I can understand whyothersmight enjoy a nice sunny day. It’s just that I get…” He trailed off, frowning. “Overheated.”
I took in his fair complexion. Considered the Midwest accent. Most of my visits to the Midwest had been in deep winter, under thick and low-hanging cloud cover. He likely just wasn’t used to hot weather. “Is that why you’re out for a walk late at night? To avoid the sun?”
The corner of his mouth ticked upward again. “Something like that.”
