Read Zombies! A Love Story Online
Authors: Maggie Shayne
Zombies! A Love Story
Praise for the novels of
Maggie Shayne
“Maggie Shayne delivers romance with sweeping intensity and bewitching passion. Readers will lose themselves in her dark, enthralling brew of love, danger, and perilous fate.”
—Jayne Ann Krentz
“Maggie Shayne is a reader’s joy. Fast-paced, witty, delightful, and shamelessly romantic, her stories will be treasured long after the book is done. A remarkable talent.”
—Teresa Medeiros
"Shayne crafts a convincing world, tweaking vampire legends just enough to draw fresh blood."
—Publishers Weekly on Demon's Kiss
"Maggie Shayne is better than chocolate. She satisfies every wicked craving."
—New York Times bestselling author Suzanne Forster
"Tense . . . frightening . . . a page-turner in the best sense"
—Romantic Times Magazine on Colder than Ice
"A tasty, tension-packed read."
—Publishers Weekly on Thicker Than Water
Zombies!
A Love Story
By
MAGGIE SHAYNE
Copyright 2013 by Margaret Benson
E-book and Cover Formatted by Jessica Lewis
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Table of Contents
Chapter One
“CONGRATULATIONS,” I SAID,
and offered the obligatory hug.
Chuck hugged me back, pulling me so close that my head was pressed to his chest and I could feel his heart beating softly against my face. When he let me go, I couldn’t quite look him in the eye. Not yet. So I looked around instead. Midnight in the desert, encircled by red rocks.
It wasn’t the typical way a newly minted biotech engineer would celebrate his degree. But Chuck was one of us, and we weren’t typical people. We were desert dwellers, southwest and sunshine to the roots of our hair. So we threw his welcome home-slash-congrats party the same way we’d celebrated everything from prom to graduation to summer vacation. In our hometown among the sandstone pillars, with a campfire, a tapped keg, twenty or so classmates, and an endless stack of red Solo cups.
It was weird, to think of Chuck as a full blown scientist. Weird and sad for me. We’d been high school sweethearts, even though he was the biggest nerd in class. I liked that about him. The way he didn’t just run off at the mouth, but stopped and thought before speaking. The way I could almost see the wheels turning in that mega-brain of his during those drawn out silences, and how when he finally did answer, it was always with something brilliant.
But I knew there was no future for us.
I was home to stay, too. Fresh out of a series of non-accredited courses in holistic healing, organic horticulture, aroma therapy. I’d just finished an apprenticeship at a medical marijuana farm in Colorado, and I planned to open a health food and medicinal tea shop right here in Bloody Gulch, Arizona, with a loan from my mother.
Chuck had a far different future. He was being courted by some very big corporations who were offering him huge salaries. His future was far from here, and way out of my league. He was going to end up being the Bill Gates of Biotech, while I would forever be the barefoot girl next door who doesn’t eat meat and probably leads protests outside his fancy office. I’d hold him back. And he’d drive me crazy. It would never work for us.
And tonight was the night I was planning to tell him that.
The fire crackled. I watched my BFF Sally munching on cheddar chips and wished I’d remembered my organic vegan ones at home. There wasn’t a snack-food here that didn’t contain dairy or GMOs. I sipped iced tea from my re-usable water bottle (made with recycled, toxin free plastic) and sat there in the dark staring at the flames between my two best friends, Sally Brown and her brother, Matthew, though I’d always called him Chuck. (Don’t worry if you don’t get the joke. Few people do, and even fewer find it funny.)
I looked from one of them to the other, knowing the night would get more awkward. If that hug was anything to go by, Chuck seemed to be assuming we could pick up where we’d left off now that we were both home. We’d taken a break for the past year. My idea. My way of letting him down easy. But he wasn’t taking the hint. I was going to have to tell him.
But not yet.
“So, Chuck,” I asked across the fire, “Do you feel any different now that you’re all bonafide and whatnot?”
Sally elbowed him. “She means now that you’re an official nerd, instead of an aspiring one.” She winked at me. “Hand me those chips, Suz.”
I held out the nearest bag. “I can’t believe you’re eating those things. Did you even read the label?”
“Here we go.” She rolled her eyes.
“They’re made by Sonatta for crying out loud.” As far as I was concerned, the food industry giant was the devil. They had built a processing plant at the edge of town while I’d been away, and had leased local land for their franken-farming experiments.
Sally looked at her brother. “So? Do you feel different?”
Chuck shrugged, keeping his eyes lowered.
Hell, he probably didn’t feel different at all. He was a genius. Had always been a genius. Sally was three years older, but he’d skipped two grades in elementary and one in high school, so he’d caught up to her. And me.
“You’re awfully quiet, even for you, Chuck,” I said. “What’s going on?”
He looked at me, then at his sister. I thought again that he’d grown better looking in the year since I’d seen him, and way better since high school. He had a decent haircut now, really short and sticking up a little. Enough to walk that line between carelessly tousled and deliberately spiky. It fit him, flattered him too. His style used to be a too long, too frizzy dirty blond school joke. He’d ditched his glasses for contacts, and from what I could tell, he’d been working out. He was wearing a jacket over his T-shirt, but his shoulders seemed wider, his waist, narrower, his butt in those jeans was not the butt I remembered. It was hardly fair for a guy as intelligent as him to have turned out to be so good looking too. I mean, come on Mother Nature. Cut someone else a break, why don’t you? “I think I’m very different,” he said at length. “But it’s happened gradually, so it doesn’t feel like a sudden change to me.” He looked me right in the eye. “Must seem that way to you, though.”
I shrugged and looked away from the intensity in his brown eyes. That was new as well. “I’ve changed too,” I said, and it sounded a little defensive because I didn’t think I’d really changed at all. Was I supposed to? I guess I missed the memo. “I cut my hair.” I touched my short, sassy cut when I said it.
“I like it,” Chuck said softly. “Brings out your eyes.”
We stared at each other in the flickering orange campfire glow, and the silence stretched out until Sally cleared her throat. I yanked my head around to look at her instead of him. I liked looking at him better. “They’re making s’mores over there,” she said. “I’m going to get some before the chocolate’s all gone.”
She didn’t care about the s’mores. She was just giving us privacy.
It occurred to me that it might be time for that conversation I’d been dreading, and my stomach burned. I turned my head to look back at him again. He leaned in, slid a hand around my nape and threaded his fingers into my hair.
“Aren’t you...going to tell me what’s wrong?” I asked. The words came out in a breathy whisper worthy of a big screen love scene. “I know something is.”
“In a minute.” He moved closer. I gave in, let my eyes fall closed, and felt his mouth cover mine. Oh, it was good. It was sweet and long and slow and deep, and he tasted good, so good. When he lifted his head away, he said, “I’ve been waiting a long time to be with you, Suz.”
“I know.” I was working up my nerve, reminding myself it was the right thing to do. It was never going to work with us anyway. I had to let him go. “But...we have to talk.”
He smiled his most charming smile. Damn, he’d become good looking. He’d gone away a nerd and returned a bonafide hunk. He looked at the nearby tent, then back at me again. “Can’t we talk...after?”
I frowned and sat back a little. “Right, you wait all this time, and then you think I’m just going to jump your bones after one kiss? What are you, sixteen?”