The Lady Is a Vamp Read Online Free PDF Page B

of Argeneau Enterprises after his last night of work. He’d been whistling happily at the thought of showing Livy English castles and feeding her French food when his cell phone had rung. Recognizing the doctor’s name on the screen of his Lexus, he’d hit answer as he’d backed out of his parking spot. The doctor had greeted him solemnly and announced she’d got the results back on all the tests and he should come to her office right away.
    Paul had felt the cold clutch of real concern then. It was 7:30 in the morning. He’d hired Mrs. Stuart to watch over Livy while she slept, and had worked the night shift since Jerri’s death so that he would be home to have breakfast with her and be available during the day if she needed him. Usually he slept while she was in school and was up by the time she got home in the early afternoon. But it also meant that if she was sick and had to stay home from school, he was there for her. Tired, but there.
    The doctor knew his shift and had known he’d just be leaving work and could swing by her office on the way home. What had concerned him was that she wanted him to, that early. Ten minutes later he’d sat in her office, completely numb as she told him his daughter had a brain tumor. The position and size of it made removing it a very deadly proposition. She would most likely die in the operation. Chemo might shrink it, but wasn’t likely to. It was one of the more aggressive types and had grown to twice its size between the first round of scans and tests and the second they’d done to verify it a week later.
    Paul had listened to that with a blank mind, his brain unable, or unwilling, to take in the information. No doubt understanding that he was in shock, the doctor had told him to go home and to think about what he felt was best for Livy. If he chose the operation, they would book it at once. If he wanted to try chemo to shrink it first, that too would be booked right away. But she obviously hadn’t held out much hope for either helping the child.
    Paul had driven home, cancelled the flights and reservations for their trips and sat alone in the empty house all day, his brain whirling. Operation. She could die on the table. Chemo. Probably wouldn’t work and would just make the child suffer. The end result either way seemed to be her dying before her sixth birthday. It was just a matter of whether she suffered with painful headaches and no treatment, suffered horribly with headaches and the misery of chemo on top of it, or died abruptly with the operation. None of the above had been palatable to Paul. He’d watched his wife die slowly after the car accident, one organ shutting down after another. He simply couldn’t do it again with Livy. He refused to lose her.
    Paul’s thoughts had run around in panicked circles inside his head all day as he’d waited for Livy to come home from her last day of school. And then the answer had come to him, clear and simple. If Livy were immortal she would never get sick, never die.
    Paul worked in drug development at Argeneau Enterprises. His job was to help come up with stronger and better tranquilizers to help Enforcers capture and bring in rogue immortals. To do his job properly, he’d had to be brought into the circle of those who knew about these incredible creatures—humans made immortal by bio-engineered nanos programmed to keep them at their peak condition. The nanos attacked anything that threatened their host: colds, flus, diseases . . . cancer. They also repaired injury and reversed the damage caused by aging. The nanos used blood to reproduce and propel themselves, as well as to make their repairs, more blood than a human body could produce, which meant the immortal had to take in blood from an outside source, mortals.
    He’d been told that in Atlantis, where these nanos were apparently developed millennia ago, the recipients of the nanos had been given transfusions to meet this need for blood. But when Atlantis fell and