Must Love Vampires Read Online Free PDF

studied them each for several long seconds. If she were a vampire stocking her kitchen with human food for appearances’ sake, the perfect hiding place for her supply of blood would be in with the wine. The question was: Which bottles were blood and which were actually grape by-products?
    Sebastian would know, of course. He probably had them marked, or had a system for arranging them so he wouldn’t grab the wrong one when humans were around. But she was going to have to find his secret stash by trial and error.
    Picking up a bottle at random, she turned it from side to side, struggling to see through the dark glass to the liquid inside. She was not looking forward to this, but it was the only way to discover Sebastian’s private source of nourishment and get one step closer to proving that he truly was one of the walking dead. Undead. Whatever.
    Retrieving a corkscrew from one of the drawers she’d ransacked earlier, she went to work on the bottle in her hand. No sooner did she get it open with a small pop than the cat—who had been sitting quite peacefully at the end of the counter—jumped up on all fours. He moved so quickly, he actually startled her for a second.
    If that’s how the poor thing reacted to a simple bottle of wine being opened, she wondered how he’d deal with the even louder sound of a champagne cork being popped.
    “It’s all right, kitty. I just need to check some of these to make sure they’re actually wine.”
    She reached for a glass from the rack hanging over her head and poured a small sample from the open bottle. It was red, but only wine red, not human-blood-leeched-from-anunwilling-victim red. And it swished like wine. (Blood, she assumed, would be thicker.) And smelled like wine.
    Her nose crinkled at the thought of what she had to do next. Not only was she taking the chance of ingesting actual, gack -tual blood—yuck!—but even if it wasn’t, she didn’t particularly like wine to begin with.
    Sigh. The things she was willing to do for a story.
    She might be in one of the most luxurious penthouses in all of Las Vegas instead of a dark, dank, drippy cave that smelled like guano, but she still couldn’t say yet that this little research trip was much better than the night she’d spent camped out in hopes of catching a glimpse of Bat Boy.
    Taking a deep breath, she brought the glass to her lips, squeezed her eyes closed, and tossed back the mouthful of liquid.
    Huh. Her chin came down as she swallowed. Wine. It was just wine. Pretty darn good wine, if she did say so herself, but still just smashed and fermented grapes, not strangled and fresh-squeezed vagrant.
    Re-corking the first bottle, she moved to the next. Poured an inch and went through the whole swirl, sniff, swallow thing again.
    More wine.
    Bottle number three. ( Swirl, sniff, swallow. )
    Bottle number four.
    Raines’s cat moved closer, up on all fours now, back arched. Its long, black whiskers twitched as it raised its lips and hissed, baring tiny little white teeth. Well, except for those two long canines at the sides—those looked kind of big. And sharp. As sharp as any vampire’s fangs could be.
    “What’s wrong?” she asked the obviously upset feline. Chuck glanced over her shoulder, checked the suite’s front door and the portion of hallway that she could see from the kitchen. Nothing.
    With a shrug, she went back to her systematic re-corking of bottle number four and testing with bottle number five. ( Swirl, sniff, swallow. )
    Bottle number six. Seven. Eight.
    The cat hissed again, and again, growling low in its throat between bouts of trying to spit her to death. She didn’t know what the heck its problem was; she was the one having to slug down gulp after gulp of stinky alcohol. Although, come to think of it, it wasn’t really that bad. The first few sips had been a little hard to get down, but things were moving much more smoothly now. She was even beginning to enjoy this, though it was disappointing not