Mercy's Debt (Montgomery's Vampires Series Book One) Read Online Free PDF Page B

to flash your tits at in this place in order to get a drink? Oh… wait.” I slapped my forehead, pretending to remember the wet t-shirt contest.
    “ Ha-ha,” she said dryly. She gazed at the business card. “Damn, and here I thought you’d met somebody.”
    “ Right!” I snorted. “Not likely in this hellhole.”
    “Not to get all after school special on you or anything, Mercy, but I do worry about you at times,” she said thoughtfully.
    Oh, God. Not this again. A tacky nightclub was no place for us to have a pity party in my honor. Liz was so preoccupied with my love life that she tended to approach finding a mate for me like it was her sole responsibility in life. Honestly, I would have given her a salary if I’d actually had any money to pay her.
    “Y ou shouldn’t. Nobody ever dropped dead of celibacy.” I sniffed.
    “How long has it been?”
    “Oh, I don’t know,” I stalled.
    “How long , Mercy?”
    “Oh, you know… maybe around...mmm-hmm-mmm.” I wouldn’t meet her eyes.
    “ Yah, sorry, I didn’t catch that.” She leaned in close to me. “ How long ?”
    “Okay, okay! It’s been… a little over a year.”
    “ Jesus Christ!” She spat. “YOU HAVEN’T HAD SEX IN A YEAR?”
    A few men standing near us gaped at me disbelievingly. “I can change that,” one of them snickered, eating me alive with his gaze.
    My man had a barbed wire tattoo on his bicep. He was also wearing sunglasses, saggy jeans, and, the pièce de résistance, a shirt with a pot leaf embroidered on the collar. He was also sporting the largest pendant I’d ever seen; the thing had to weigh at least ten pounds. It was rendered all the more ostentatious due to its faux yellow diamond detailing and chunky gunmetal chain from which it dangled.
    I was unexpectedly disconsolate as it occurred to me that my only take-home option for the night was this walking cliché. I’d been cheated; I suffered the same sort of disappointment a serious wine connoisseur would probably feel after spending all evening hunting for a rare vintage chardonnay, yet only managing to net a musty old case of Ripple.
    I shot the group a filthy look before turning my back on them.
    “ God, Liz! Next time, try to say it louder,” I snapped. “I don’t think people east of the freakin’ Golden Gate were able to hear you.”
    “Sorry,” she muttered, lowering her voice “But a year ? I knew it had been a while, but not that long.” She let out a long whistle, shaking her head at me pityingly, as if I’d just informed her that I’d been diagnosed with a terminal illness and only had a week to live.
    “ I’ve been busy,” I said lamely. She shot me a dubious look.
    I pulled Michael’s card from her finger and shoved it in my handbag, desperate to change the subject. I hadn’t had sex in a while, so what? It’s not that I’d become a nun or didn’t feel a desire to have a man around. Of course I did.
    Anyone could have sex, though. Not everyone could have intimacy. What I truly craved was closeness, familiarity. I missed having a man around who knew that I found runny eggs repulsive, and took my coffee with half and half, never milk, and who would embrace me in the early hours of dawn, holding me close until I fell asleep.
    The longing was so constant that it had become a dull aching that I didn’t quite know how to soothe, an itch that I couldn’t scratch, a sharp splinter underneath my skin that I couldn’t dig deep enough to remove. I felt the void so strongly at times, it was nearly intolerable.
    I liv ed in a city of millions, but somehow I was still all alone.
    “You’ve got to start putting yourself out there ag ain,” Liz harangued.
    I’d heard this lecture before. Soon she’d start sounding like a coach giving a hopeless pep talk to the losing team two minutes before the end of the game.
    “I know. You’re right,” I said, reduced to spouting platitudes.
    “Not every man is a cheating bastard like Mathew ...” She drew