The Vampire Who Loved Me

THE VAMPIRE WHO LOVED ME VAMPIRES CRAVE CURVES AIDY AWARD Copyright © 2023 by Aidy Award All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. Cover by: Jacqueline Sweet CONTENTS 1. Silas 2. Daisy 3. Silas 4. Daisy 5. Silas 6. Daisy 7. Silas 8. Daisy 9. Silas 10. Daisy 11. Silas 12. Daisy 13. Silas 14. Daisy 15. Silas 16. Daisy 17. Silas 18. Daisy 19. Silas 20. Daisy Epilogue - Fleming Acknowledgments Also by Aidy Award About the Author Once again, this is for all my curvy, plus-size, chunky, thick girls who wondered if when you were turned into a vampire, if the supernatural beauty you’d develop would make you skinny. It wouldn’t. Because you’re beautiful exactly the way you are. And for Sean and Hopey who found James Bond Vampires just as hilarious as I did. The key to immortality is first living a life worth remembering. BRUCE LEE SILAS I grinned and bared my fangs at the human lackey before me. Inhuman, lethal, cold as death itself. Seeing a vampire about to eat you was enough to scare most men. Not this guy. I’d blame that on the long and storied history of vampires in New Orleans. Not that we frequented the area, but don’t tell all the authors who wanted to interview us. Fine. He might think he wasn’t scared of me. But he would be. One calculated punch to the nose to incapacitate him, but not kill, coming up. I’d drag him into the field office for questioning. Then he’d know real fear. Unless, of course, he didn’t fess up. Then he’d know death on a much more intimate basis. I clenched my hand, prepared to knock him down, but he was ready, and his fist came straight for my face. I had to duck, narrowly avoiding his jab. Okay, not an ordinary human then. That was an interesting clue in the case. The breeze from his punch mussed my hair as I slid beneath the blow. The bastard was fast, but I was faster. It’s bad enough that this traitor was involved in a plot to kill His Majesty the King, but making me look anything less than absolutely fucking dapper was a crime against women I had yet to woo everywhere. It would be so easy to simply tear his throat out, drink from him and know his thoughts, then kill him. But I was not my father. I snarled and swung around in a circle, faster than the human eye should be able to track, and moved to sweep his legs out from underneath him. Bad guy lackey smirked and leapt into the air, clearing my attempt to knock him down by several inches. Bollocks. He was either a supernatural masking his true form or a human somehow altered and trained specifically to engage in combat with monsters like me. Either way, this fight just got much more fun. I gave him the universal come at me hand gesture and then lunged, reaching for his throat. As quick as thought, he was gone, tearing up and out of the dirty, wet alley we fought in and toward the busy Bacchanalia known as Bourbon Street. The door to the underground gambling den behind me still stood ajar. I debated going back to get Gabriel. Just when I’d decided not to, he peered out from the rickety doorframe at me, in his usual mentor knows best way. Gabriel gestured at the empty alley that showed the signs of my struggle with Nameless Lackey. “Are you going to get the goon or what, Silvanus?” He tilted his head at me lazily, like we had all the time in the world for a lesson in spycraft. I flipped him off and muttered, “He’s heading into the public, come on.” Gabriel snorted, and I could practically hear his oncoming eyeroll. Not today, sir. I turned and sped up the alley after my prey. “Try to keep up, old man.” The fact that I was almost a thousand years younger than him was my constant companion on our missions together and gave me all the fodder I needed to poke at his impending retirement. Gabriel called me something very ungentlemanly, and I snorted at his taunt. I harassed him for being as old as the First Vampire himself, and he regularly gave me an earful for being nothing but a playboy. It wasn’t my fault V wouldn’t allow any vampire under the age of a hundred to join Vampire Intelligence. What else was I supposed to do in the last ninety-nine years besides amass my fortune then spend it on all the delicious women I loved to love? I’d become particularly good at both endeavors. I’d be even better at protecting the Crown. Well, maybe not as good as I was at wooing women to my bed and making them come until they didn’t know their names or mine. I wove in and out of the pedestrians weaving about from bar to bar. It was a skill to do in a way that was both quick and yet unnoticeable, but this was what we trained for at the Castle. I slid between and amongst the mortals, catching little snippets of their conversations as I passed. Nameless Lackey raced ahead of me, and the tingle of the frenzy that came only when in pursuit of prey zipped through my arteries and veins. Damn if I didn’t love the chase. My father’s own prey-chasing frenzies led to some of his greatest, most daring feats. Not that it would matter if I, too, leapt from a moving train to the bottom of Reichenbach Falls, covertly assassinated King Alexander of Greece, or famously escaped from the Nazis at Dresden. I would never be him. Never as