The Thursday Excerpt - Cooper McKenzie

Love Reincarnate: Vamping with Jayne #1
By Cooper McKenzie

What happens when a 500 year-old Vampire meets the great granddaughter of the woman he loved 80 years ago?


EXCERPT:


“I know you.” His words were not a question, but a statement of fact as his large hand grabbed my left elbow. Thankfully the coffee pot was in my right hand or one of us would have been wearing the hot, dark brew. The coolness of his touch melted through my white imitation silk shirt and awoke my sleeping libido. It also brought forth memories of another time and another place where I had been another woman.

In a heartbeat, my nipples grew hard and wanting of his touch while my cunt grew damp and ready for sex. My instant reaction caught me off guard as I had not felt horny or in need of a man’s touch in, well, I couldn’t remember the last time I had felt horny. But I did now. Itchy and hot and yearning for a man who was a stranger in this lifetime, but one I had been more than intimate with in another life.

“Do you?” I asked as I looked him straight in the eye for the first time. Those blue, blue eyes, bright and electric. Those eyes that had haunted Charlotte for a lifetime. Eyes that stayed with me after nights of dreaming her erotic memories that were hotter than any XXX movie ever made.

I did know him, though not in this lifetime. I knew who he was and what he was though I did not know the name he was going by these days. I could see he was flipping through his memories, trying to place me, though I knew he would have trouble with that. We did have a connection, but I did not want to acknowledge it here. The explanation was not one for public consumption. It was too bizarre. My family had not believed it when, as a teenager, I had begun having the dreams so I doubted strangers would react any better.

Up close he was even more gorgeous than in my dreams, though he was pale in a town where tanned golfers and boaters were the norm. And he still had those blue eyes that had haunted Charlotte’s dreams until her death. After two years of celibacy following a short, passionless marriage I acknowledged I would gladly jump into the nearest bed if only he would say the word.
“Charlotte. Charlotte Bowen. Charlotte Harper. But how?” He eased his grip on my arm, but did not release me.

I knew from a few pictures that I resembled Charlotte in her youth, but this man made me wonder how close that resemblance really was.

I did not fight for my freedom either. This situation was too intriguing. Charlotte Bowen Harper had been my great grandmother and though I had never met the woman, I knew everything about her. Including the fact that this man, known to her as Richard Donovan had, during the 1920s, been the lover she had never gotten over or forgotten though she had married another man. How I knew this was something only I and a small handful of more radical thinking scientists believed. Though there was an age old joke about inbreeding, it had been decided by those experts that I really was my own great grandmother.

“My name is Jayne,” I said, pulling my arm from his now lax grip. He did not try to stop me, though his expression was one of intrigue, attraction and remembrance.

I walked away, fighting an urge to go back and crawl into the man’s clothes while begging him to fuck me as he had Charlotte. I had an unusual, intense need to make him mine right here, right now, in the middle of a dining room and damn the consequences.

“I’m taking a break,” I told Ellie as I set the coffee pot back on the warmer.

“Uh, huh,” she said. She was too busy flirting with the new busboy to argue.

I stepped through the kitchen and out the back door. The night was hot, humid and typical for late fall. As I paced the alley behind the restaurant, I tried not to let memories of Charlotte’s time with Richard Donovan overwhelm me. I was still in my thirty-day probationary period and I needed the money this job paid, though I had come to the conclusion about two days in that I really was not meant to be a waitress. My problem was, that at age twenty-eight and after holding almost a hundred jobs since graduating high school, I still did not know what I wanted to be when I grew up. Finally I settled enough to go back inside and finish the shift.

“Jayne, that gorgeous guy in the corner booth is asking for you,”

BIO:

Cooper McKenzie always thought she had been born a hundred years too late, but has come to appreciate air conditioning, computers and other conveniences of modern day living. She enjoys the slower pace of New Bern, North Carolina as well as the history and small town community found there. In addition to dreaming up her next story, Cooper enjoys reading everything from children’s books to vampire romance, singing in church choir and needle-weaving. She also loves to hear from her readers.

Website: Cooper McKenzie coopermckenzie@ymail.com

E-book available from Red Rose Publishing on 10/8/09 ($1.99)

Buy the book: Love Reincarnate: Vamping with Jayne #1