Not If You Were the Last Vampire on Earth (20 page)

Chapter 45

Her

We didn’t talk about it in the morning. I ate the bread and jam from my backpack that Miss Molly had given me and Alex downed a vial of juice. He took one look at my face and loaded my pack into the truck before whistling for the dogs. Whatever he saw in my expression had the truck rumbling in winding fashion down the mountain passes and away from the colony.

We drove quietly for a while. The turns evened out as the tires touched flatter ground and the empty shells of houses sat high above the road on their little hills.

“I missed my dogs,” I spoke suddenly.

Alex threw a thoughtful look at me before pulling the car off to the side of the road and putting the gearshift in park. He turned to face me, his face light with amusement.

“Did you now?”

“Yes. Desperately. I love them. More than anything in this world. I can’t live without them. I tried.”

“You tried for a day.”

“Five minutes was enough. It’s useless.”

He glanced out of the back window where the three beasts were rousing, taking our stop as a signal to jump out and explore.

“They missed you, too,” he said, swinging his gaze back to me. “Just as desperately.”

I raised an eyebrow. “For a day?” I parroted.

“They thought you were never coming back. They spent the day drinking rum and crying.”

“Rum?”

Alex smiled sheepishly. “It was what was in the cabin. Shut up, it’s the drink of pirates.”

“Crying?”

The smile dropped and his eyes turned serious. “Yes. The ugly kind. The worst kind. The heartbreaking kind.”

“My dogs do look frightfully ugly when they cry,” I commented, bringing some of the humor back to his expression. “I love everything about them. And I never want to be apart from them again. I want to marry them.”

Alex’s breathing caught. He let it out shakily. “Society does not approve of human-dog matrimonial unions.”

“Society isn’t here,” I said, smirking.

“Society doesn’t approve of human-vamp matrimonial unions, either.”

Now it was my turn for the teasing to leave my voice. “Society isn’t here.”

Alex unbuckled his seatbelt, reached over me to unbuckle mine and pulled me into his lap. His forehead rested on my neck and his arms wrapped around me.

“I was a mess,” he confessed quietly. “Losing you hit me so much harder than I ever thought it could. But I was determined to be strong in front of you. You’ve been without anybody for so long…I wasn’t going to take that away from you.”

“I don’t want it. Not without you. I don’t want anything without you.”

“It won’t be an easy life. We’ll have to lay low. It may mean leaving everything and starting over several times. I’ll need to reconstruct a lab each time.”

“Okay. And my blood will be enough to make your juice?”

His face turned grim. “Yes,” he said reluctantly.

“Uh-uh. None of that. If you were a sick human in need of blood transfusions it would be a noble gesture. Remember that argument?”

Alex rolled his eyes. “Using my own logic against me.”

“It was sound logic.”

“Okay, yes, it would be enough,” he answered again, erasing all traces of reluctance.

“Good.”

Alex took in a deep sigh. “Our dogs jumped ship.”

I smiled at the use of the word “our.” They were ours now. Not mine. I nodded. “They did. Give them a few minutes. They’ll be easier to call back if we let them piss their testosterone around a bit to mark the place.”

“Yeah, we have time. There’s something I want to ask you anyway.”

I didn’t answer, just looked at him questioningly. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a ring. It was a jade green oval that sat on a gold band with small diamonds studding the setting.

“My mother’s,” he said quietly. “My father gave it to her. They never said vows on it. Not in front of witnesses anyway. It was one of the few things I took with me when I collected some mementos from the house. If she were still here, she’d have wanted me to use it one day. But only with someone worthy of what it stands for.”

My muscles were taut with anticipation. I don’t think my heart was working quite right. My eyes were glued to him and for the first time since meeting him, I was speechless.

He laughed lightly at my frozen state before continuing. “I’ve been carrying this around in my pocket for a couple weeks. I was scared of freaking you out. All day in the cabin yesterday, I wore it and drank rum and cried and then
really
cried because I couldn’t get it off my finger and ended up taking some skin when I finally pulled hard enough.” He looked at it thoughtfully, rolling it between his thumb and forefinger. “Green is really your color,” he mused to himself.

“It really fucking is,” I agreed impatiently.

His eyes were lit with amusement at my statement and he smiled as he stroked his thumb across my cheek. As he touched me, he tugged his bottom lip between his teeth and his face grew serious.

“My soul has been a slave to yours since the day you called me,” he said, keeping his eyes on mine. “That first day. I changed everything about me to make room for you. I sat by that stupid phone for months. I tormented myself trying to figure out the best way to break it to you that I was in love with you. Until you beat me to it. I’ve woken up every single day with you on my mind and I know it’s because I’m supposed to do this with you. Whatever this life is. On our own, in a new colony, running from vamps, in The Before or after The Sweep, it doesn’t matter. Whatever life I’ve got, I’m supposed to share it with you. You coming back to me last night proved that once and for all and I’ll be damned if I waste another second trying to pretend otherwise.
Tasha Owens. Will you marry me?”

I had to close my eyes for a moment. I let the happiness rush through me. From my ears where the blissful words entered, through my arms and legs and gut, up to my head where it made me dizzy, and finally settling into my heart. It was a warm, sure feeling that pulsed with a joy so intense it was almost painful.

I opened my eyes and smiled.

“Alexander Walter Kim: not if you were the last vampire on earth.”

He smoothed back my hair. His dark eyes grazed over my face. “Liar,” he said softly.

My voice was quiet in return. “You got me.”

And then my fiancé kissed me.

To the reader. Yes, you. Right now. Don’t look over your shoulder, I can’t see you. But this part is for you. Before you, I was just someone who needed to get her thoughts on “paper” (let’s be real, I’ve never written a word on paper. I just wanted to use the expression.) And then those thoughts became important to me: they became characters. Bossy, insistent things that demanded to have their story told. So I told them. But only I read them. It was just me and them. Until I wondered,
What if someone else wanted to know their stories, too?

I thank you for being here. Whether you loved it, hated it, rewrote it in your head – you somehow got to the Acknowledgements page which
means
you probably read the whole book, which
means
you now know the story I was so desperate to share, which
means
that I am one happy author. Thank you, thank you, thank you. You’re the only reason I publish anything so let’s acknowledge
that
, shall we?

And, as always, to my husband. Your support is endless and so is my gratitude. Thank you.

Other books by Cara Coe

The White Forest

(writing as M.C. Carr)

Birdie

Cara Coe is a Houston, Texan native, a wife, a mother of three, a librarian, a traveler (when she can), a recipe follower, a home provider to an English sheepdog abandoned at her library, a lover of books, an okay driver, and above all- the part of her that permeates everything else in her life- a dreamer.

She grew up in the corners of libraries reading through the books on the shelves. She loves romances, fantasies, realistic fiction, science fiction, historical fiction – or in a nutshell, she loves a good story. What she loves even more are the fictional characters in her head that keep her company. Telling their stories has been a passion of hers for years.