Page 26 of Guarding the Rock Star
When Monica came up the next morning she wasn’t alone. Her brother Mark was with her. Mark was part of my regular security team, and he was the one who’d introduced me to Monica when he overheard me talking about needing a personal chef.
I was pretty sure Mark had a crush on me. He was different from the rest of my team. Flirtier. Standing closer to me. Staring at me. Asking personal questions while the others were of the ‘seen and not heard’ variety. A few times Monica had made comments implying that she’d like to fix me up with her brother, but I’d just laughed it off.
It was flattering really, and totally harmless. He’d been with me when I had dates, so I knew that Mark knew that I was a lesbian. Not that anything had happened with anyone I’d gone out with publicly. Before Wanda laid me out on the dining room table, I hadn’t had anything close to sex in several years.
It was one of the things that made me wonder the most if the fated mate thing was true. Normally I just wasn’t very sexual. It took a while for me to warm up to someone, and even longer to have any desire to be intimate with them. But with Wanda, I’d wanted her the second I’d laid eyes on her. I was fantasizing about her like a teenager with a crush. I even found myself making excuses to go down to the dining room to see her when we were both supposed to be working. It was pathetic.
“My God Tasha, this place is fabulous!” Monica gushed as she entered the cabin, her arms laden with bags of food. “I mean, the kitchen is a little basic, but the view is incredible.”
Wanda looked at the large kitchen filled with stainless steel appliances and then back at Monica. “This kitchen is at least twice the size of most people’s. I’ve lived in apartments smaller than this kitchen.”
Monica ignored her. I’d noticed that Monica seemed a little snippy with Wanda and I wasn’t sure why, but I suspected it was the vampire thing.
With Monica spending so much time in the kitchen, we’d had to tell her that my cousin was a vamp. She didn’t ask any questions, but she’d definitely been colder to Wanda since then. And she’d insisted on having Wanda store her blood in a special part of the refrigerator as if it was going to contaminate the rest of the food.
Monica fingered the cross she always wore around her neck, then turned back to me as if Wanda had never spoken. “What would you like to eat first?”
For some reason, my eyes flew right to Wanda.
Our eyes met in another one of those long, heated gazes. When I finally broke eye contact, Monica was looking between us with a sour look on her face that she quickly wiped away when she realized I could see her.
“How about some bean and rice bowls? I brought some fresh cilantro.”
Wanda
The chef was annoying. She was constantly sending me nasty looks when she thought I wasn’t looking, as if I was something she’d found on the bottom of her shoe. If there was one thing I hated it was human snobs. For vamps, taking blood was like a diabetic taking insulin, but there was a lot of anti-vamp prejudice and fear among the humans. At least with those who even acknowledged us.
“I’m going to do some work,” I grumbled, leaving Tasha and Monica to do their meal planning.
I needed to do some hacking, not listen to those two wax poetic over food. I turned on some Mozart and opened my computer.
As a vamp, food was fuel. I enjoyed food as much as the next person, but it didn’t generally have that emotional component to it that a lot of humans had. I could live without food if I had to, I just couldn’t live without blood.
I’d been working for a few minutes when Tasha slid into the chair next to mine. “Hey.”
I looked up from the foreign government database I was attempting to hack into. I loved those kinds of challenges.
“Hey.”
“I’m sorry, I guess I shouldn’t have asked for Monica to come up here, knowing that she’s kind of rude to you.”
I scanned Tasha’s face, seeing only sincerity. I was surprised that she noticed how rude Monica was, but then again, Tasha was smarter than most people gave her credit for.
“It’s fine,” I said quietly. “A lot of humans are freaked out by vamps, probably because we can tear their throats out.”
I allowed myself a quick visual of me tearing Monica’s throat out. I wouldn’t even drink her blood. She was way too mean. I had no doubt her blood would taste sour.
“Is that why you’re always staring at my neck?” Tasha teased, drawing my attention back to her. “Looking for the best spot to bite me?”
She wasn’t actually far from the truth. Occasionally I got lost in thought, imagining where I would mark her as my mate if things worked out between us. Somehow I didn’t think Tasha was ready to hear that though. She’d apologized for being glib about the mate thing, but that didn’t mean she was into it.
Tasha was definitely attracted to me, there was no doubt about that, but that didn’t mean she saw me as someone she wanted to be shackled to forever. I was significantly older than her, and our lives could not be more different. We could work through everything, but only if she wanted to.
I wondered if things had been simpler with Angie and Suzie. The bears would probably know since they were tight with the couple, but I was too embarrassed to ask them.
“I would never hurt you,” I told her honestly.
Tasha reached up and cupped my cheek with her hand, drawing me out of my thoughts. Instinctively, I leaned into her palm, soaking up the warmth she was generating.
