A Bite to Remember Page 0,16
silently counting rooms, the master bedroom, her room, Marguerite's room, Tiny's room, and two more guest rooms presently unused. With her and Tiny up, she supposed that would give the men four rooms to work on until Marguerite and Vincent got up. She'd have to warn them to work quietly so they didn't wake up Vincent and his aunt.
It was the professional thing to do, but part of her resented the need for it. Jackie was never quite comfortable working with vampires. Bastien teased her that she had a bad attitude when it came to his kind, and he wasn't wrong. Fortunately, Bastien Argeneau knew the source of her attitude and was understanding enough to overlook it. Jackie wondered now if Vincent would be as understanding. She suspected he would. He seemed intelligent, nice, good-humored... he also seem to get along great with Tiny, whose judgment she'd always trusted. He was also drop-dead gorgeous with a nice smile and sexy silver-blue eyes.
He's a vampire, Jackie reminded herself. It was something she couldn't forget... mustn't forget. She feared the moment that happened, she might be foolish enough to start to like the guy in more than a professional manner, and she so wasn't going there again. Jackie had learned her lesson young and learned it well with Cassius.
Her teeth set at the very thought of the vampire she'd been involved with at nineteen. An image of him rose in her mind: six feet, four inches tall, with shoulder-length gold hair. The man had been as beautiful as a Greek god.
Jackie instinctively started to push him from her mind, then stopped herself and let the memories play. Not so much as a punishment, but in the hopes reliving the memory would save her from doing something foolish now, eleven years later. Jackie suspected it would be a good thing to reflect on the lesson she'd learned, especially in lieu of the fact that she was living in the home of a vampire that she found very attractive.
"There! You've admitted it," Jackie said on a small sigh as she entered her room and closed the door. "You find Vincent Argeneau attractive."
It was a scary admission for Jackie and immediately made her feel vulnerable. She hadn't felt anything but mild disdain and anger toward a vampire since Cassius.
Jackie had been a good student and a dutiful daughter until the summer she met Cassius. She'd been a naive and foolish child... but had thought herself a woman. She'd met the vampire when he came to her home to see her father about a case he was working for him. He'd been a pale, blond god in her eyes, Adonis as he'd surely been meant to look.
Awestruck by his beauty when he'd come calling, Jackie had worshipped him with her eyes as she'd stammered out that her father wasn't yet home. She could still recall the amused smile that had curved his lips at the time. Jackie hadn't understood it then, but did now. The man had been silently laughing at her shy adoration.
Jackie had hardly been able to believe her luck when he'd asked if he might wait for her father. Blushing and smiling and chattering away, she'd seated him in the living room, then excused herself to make tea, too nervous and overset to recall that vampires didn't drink tea. Something she'd known since she was eighteen and had started to work in her father's company.
Ted Morrissey had been excited and eager when he'd got the first call from Bastien Argeneau with a job he wanted looked after. His company had been small then and the referral from another client to the head of such a large multinational company had been like winning the lottery. However, it was soon after that her father had stopped talking about his cases, at least ones involving the Argeneaus or anyone connected to them. Jackie hadn't understood why until her first day of work for her father when he'd taken her into his office, sat her down, and said what he was about to tell her could never be revealed to anyone... Vampires did exist.
Young and eager to believe in the unbelievable, she'd gotten over the shock quickly, and then had spent the first couple weeks of her apprenticeship going through every file her father had on each of the immortals. By the time she was nineteen and faced with the handsome Cassius, she'd considered herself something of an expert on the immortals.
Oh, the arrogance of youth, Jackie