Accidental Sire (Half-Moon Hollow #6)

“You’re working three weeks ahead, and you’ve read everything on the assigned reading list for the semester,” Ben said, wincing when I kicked him in the shin. “Ouch!”

“I’m very proud of your dedication to your studies,” Jane told me. “But I think we’ve let you get a little too isolated during your probation period. You need to get used to being out in the world again. Working in the office is a good start. But you have to get used to less rigid social situations, too. Jolene is coming. And Nola, Dick’s granddaughter, so it’s good aversion-therapy training. And I want you to meet Libby, our most recently turned vampire adoptee. I really think you two will get along.”

“Fine.” I sighed as Jane handed me several bottles of dessert blood and nodded toward the living room.

“And what will I be doing while you girls are ogling men named Tom?” Ben asked. “Because I do not think that’s the sort of training I need.”

“We are going to Dick’s to play cards,” Gabriel said. “Nik and Jed want to play poker. We need a fifth.”

Ben nodded while doing this weird lip-pursing thing. “Oh, good . . . Nik’s going to be there. Wait, I thought you and Dick stopped talking for almost a hundred years because of a bad hand of cards,” he said.

“We play for bottle caps now,” Gabriel said. “It makes things less hostile.”

Jane grimaced. “Does it?”



When we had girls’ nights back at the dorm, it involved a bag of Skinny Pop and Netflix. Jane and Company made more of an effort. Jane provided fancy bloods for the vampires and serious carbs from Southern Comforts for Jolene and Nola. (Seeing ooey-gooey bacon mac and cheese only to smell rancid cabbage when I opened the container was a form of emotional torture, I swear.) Jane put out special little napkins and sprayed Febreze around. She risked exposure to disgusting human food smells to arrange the snacks on pretty trays. This wasn’t an impromptu dorm-room hangout. This was Jane putting herself out to make sure her friends felt comfortable and welcome in her home. This was a grown-up gathering.

Speaking of grown-ups . . .

“Where’s Georgie?” I asked. “I thought she’d be here for the fancy blood alone.”

“She likes going to watch the card games. Especially when Dick loses. She learns new curse words.”

I busied myself with little straightening-up tasks as the guests filtered in. The prospect of seeing Gigi in a space where I couldn’t politely avoid her was intimidating. Not because she was mean or snotty. Heck, she’d been downright sweet every single time I’d talked to her. But being reminded that she was the one who got away from the boy with whom I shared an incredibly confusing emotional connection was just demoralizing.

But if anyone asked, it was because I was trying to avoid Dick’s pretty (human!) granddaughter with the weird Boston-Irish hybrid accent. Nola seemed like a nice girl. It was believable that I would want to avoid eating her.

Libby was a sweet-faced little blonde wearing a “Half-Moon Hollow Elementary Room Mom” shirt—which I did not expect. Nor did I expect Jane to introduce me to Libby as “the one I’ve been telling you about.” Which made the hiding-in-the-kitchen plan seem that much more reasonable.

I managed to skulk around the pantry, shuffling bottles and plates, until they started the movie, something involving a lot of piano on the sound track. Jane walked into the kitchen, saw me dawdling over fetching Jolene some wet wipes for her face—stored in a drawer marked “In case Jolene eats ribs”—and wordlessly shamed me into walking into the living room. I dropped onto the corner of the couch, far from Gigi and Nola, and watched that chick from the Pirates movies deliver classic English literature while doing duck face.

It seemed that costume dramas were the theme this evening, if the huge stack of DVDs on the coffee table meant anything. Jane Eyre. Wuthering Heights. Sense and Sensibility. And Pride and Prejudice. There were a lot of versions of Pride and Prejudice. We seemed to be watching Pride and Prejudice right now, given how hard the male lead was glaring at the duck-faced Pirates lady.

I frowned. “You know, I’ve never really understood the Mr. Darcy thing.”

The entire room froze, which was odd.

Jane’s face was tense as she turned toward me on the couch. “Why’s that?”

“I don’t know.” I shrugged, taking a drink of my blood. “Darcy insults Lizzie and blames it on being socially awkward. Assumes that she knows how he feels. And then he spews his feelings all over her and gets all butt-hurt when she not only has no clue how he feels but also doesn’t feel the same way. Oh, and he pours his heart out in a ‘Here’s why you’re wrong not to return my precious pants feelings’ letter.”

Jane sputtered, “But—he—what?”

“There’s even a meme about it,” I said. “Firthing: when you stand around staring intensely at someone you like but never man up and say something about it.”

Jane clenched her entire face. She went temporarily Muppet on me. I pressed my lips together and wondered what the hell I’d said.

Aw, hell. The Persuasion quote in Jane’s office. The stack of DVDs. Those weren’t the group’s DVDs, they were hers. Jane was a Jane-ite, a fanatical Jane Austen fan who bared her fangs at the merest criticism of Austen’s works.

“She insulted Colin Firth,” Iris whispered. She leaned toward Gigi, who had gone quiet and still, like a gazelle on the savannah.

Gigi whispered, “You cause a distraction. I’ll get Meagan out.”

Jane cleared her throat. “That is one way of looking at it. But if you read the books a little more closely, you will see that Mr. Darcy understands the errors of his ways very soon after the disastrous proposal and spends the rest of the book trying to make up for it. He’s a flawed character who becomes aware of his flaws and improves himself. It’s why he is Austen’s best hero.”

“I always liked Henry Tilney,” I said. Because I never knew when to stop talking.

Jane made the Muppet face again.

“How about we watch something nonhistorical?” Gigi suggested quickly. “How about Mad Max: Fury Road? You get Tom Hardy in leather, plus unexpected messages of badass feminism.”

“Oh, I do love Tom Hardy.” Nola sighed. “If more men in Great Britain looked like that, I never would have left Ireland.”

“Which would have made Jed very sad,” Libby noted. “Imagine the smoldering. No, seriously, just let me imagine it for a second, because I’m a single mom dating a single dad on an entirely different work and sleep schedule, and the last time we managed to have sex involved the back seat of my minivan while the kids were at a Little League practice.”

Suddenly, my inability to have kids didn’t seem all that b—wait, the last time I had sex was in a tiny single dorm-room bed, and my partner said we had to hurry because his roommate would be back from unloading his clothes from the laundry room any minute. And that was months ago. I had a single mom’s sex life without ever having a kid. That might actually be more tragic than the whole orphan thing.

I shuddered.