THREE
The insanely hot visitor gave me a little smile while he got out of his car, which was a mint condition blue Mustang that I guessed was from the eighties or nineties. “Is this the MacGregor house?”
I found that I couldn’t speak to answer his question. His attractiveness level seemed to have robbed me of this ability. Now that he had come to a stop mere feet away from me, I could see that my initial assessment had been correct. He was indeed knock-me-over-with-a-feather-level hot. It wasn’t just his face that was incredibly attractive, though; his body, all probably six-foot-two of it from head-to-toe, was a thing of masculine beauty, too, all long, muscular limbs and chiseled contours. I could even see the outline of a six-pack beneath the visitor’s fitted gray t-shirt.
He looked to be in his early twenties, maybe twenty-two if I’d had to guess, although I knew when it came to vampires, looks were no indicator of “real” age. Still, I found myself not even caring about his “real” age. He looked like someone I might really want to spend some time with. If I could manage to speak to him, anyway.
I finally did after a long moment or two, although my voice came out in some sort of a weird squeak.
“Yes.” Deeply embarrassed about my weird squeak, I cleared my throat before trying again. “This is the MacGregor house.”
“The MacGregor house where Hayden MacGregor lives? I know there’s supposed to be quite a few different houses on this property.”
Clearing my throat again, I nodded. “Yes…and yes. Yes, there are quite a few different houses on this property. There’s acres and acres of property…and houses and houses. Many, many houses. Thirty-something, maybe, to the east of the berry patches…or maybe west. I mean...the houses are definitely west. I just couldn’t think straight for a second.”
It seemed that now that I was finally talking, I was unable to shut up.
Realizing that I was babbling and saying stupid things, I made myself pause by doing yet another throat clear, then continued in a way that I hoped was less babbly and more normal. “Anyway, yes. This is the MacGregor house where Hayden MacGregor lives. He’s my dad.”
The thought occurred to me that I was actually talking to a guy I was attracted to for the very first time. Silently, I cursed the homeschooling that had surely helped to make me so socially awkward with guys. Or maybe men was the right word, I mused. The male standing across from me was maybe somewhere between guy and man. At any rate, he was a young man, and a devastatingly attractive one at that.
With his hands in the pockets of his battered jeans, he grinned in response to what I’d said, revealing perfectly straight white teeth. “Great. I’ve come to the right place, then. Your dad is supposed to be my new boss, so to speak. I’m here to train to be a Watcher.”
Willing myself not to grin like an idiot, I gave my visitor a small smile. “Well, good.”
Still grinning, he suddenly took a step closer and extended a hand. “I’m Jake Warren…no relation to the Warrens. Total unfortunate coincidence.”
Smiling a little bigger, I took his hand and shook it, experiencing some sort of internal quake when I felt the firm warmth of his touch. “Oh…well, that is an unfortunate coincidence.”
He stifled a short, sharp laugh. “You’re not kidding. The vetting I had to go through to come here was intense. I had to convince your dad that I’m a Warren from the good-for-nothing-yet-pretty-harmless trailer park Warrens of the outskirts of Indianapolis, Indiana, and not a Warren from the Warrens. In fact, I didn’t even know vampires existed until about a year ago, when I was turned. I think your dad followed my family tree back to the Mayflower anyway.”
I laughed. “Yeah, considering the history we Watchers have had with the Warrens, I bet he did.”
Smiling at each other, we both fell silent, and I thought about the fact that Jake was indeed fairly close to my age, with his “looks” age matching his “real” age. I also thought about the fact that he hadn’t yet released my hand, and was instead still holding it, motionless, between us. With this fact making my face warm for some reason, I nervously cleared my throat for probably about the fiftieth time since we’d met.
A moment or two later, Jake glanced down, seeming to suddenly realize that he was still holding my hand, and he finally let it go. “Sorry. You’ve got me all flustered. It’s not every day that I meet a girl with your looks, and your beautiful smile.”
Now my face went from warm to flamingly hot, with the color probably matching my hair, I guessed, even though that was a bit of a stretch. Nonetheless, whenever I was nervous, flustered, or embarrassed, or a combination of all three like how I was currently, I always imagined that my face probably matched my hair, which was a deep brick red that got a little lighter and brighter on top in the summer. “You’re gettin’ your summer flame streaks,” Jen had said to me a few days earlier while playing with my hair. Her own hair was nothing but “flame streaks,” being subtly different shades of vivid flame red all over. My own hair had been nearly identical to hers when I was born, although it had darkened considerably over the years, to my relief. To me, bright red hair said, “Look at me!” which was a look that Jen seemed to thoroughly enjoy, but I definitely didn’t. In fact, I would have been fine with hair that said, “Please look away.”
Right then, while I stood not a foot away from Jake, not knowing how to respond to his compliments, my hair seemed to pull a “Look at me!” stunt of its own accord, or at least the bobby pin holding it in its messy bun did. Apparently overtaxed by having held my thick hair in place all day, the single pin loosely hanging on at the front of the bun suddenly just simply let go, slowly falling to the side. Maybe I’d jarred the pin loose earlier when I’d nodded, or maybe at that very moment the weight of my hair had just been too much; but at any rate, while the pin fell to the grass, my bun quickly uncoiled, spilling my long hair over my shoulder in a loose twisted rope.
Before I could grab it to push it over my shoulder, Jake’s eyes widened, and he spoke in a lower voice than he had been.
“Wow. You have some beautiful hair. It’s gorgeous, actually.”
At this point, if it were possible for a person’s face to burst into actual flames simply by that person being profoundly embarrassed, mine would have. In fact, my face may as well have been a barbeque grill, ready for steaks and hamburgers.
Somehow, I managed to squeak out a thank you to Jake for his compliment, and he smiled, pulling a pack of cigarettes from his pocket.
“You’re welcome. See, I’m never shy about giving out compliments. When they’re genuine, and when you might make someone’s day by saying one, why not, right? Life’s too short to beat around the bush and not be upfront.”
While I murmured agreement, he pulled a lighter from his jeans pocket and a cigarette from the pack and lit it up, taking a deep drag. So, he’s kind of a “bad boy,” I thought. He smokes cigarettes. I’d never smoked cigarettes myself; I’d never even taken a single puff. I’d witnessed people smoking outside various businesses when I went into Sweetwater to shop, and I witnessed a few vampires on the farm smoking cigarettes sometimes, usually outside whenever we had a community barn party and all the adults were drinking. No one had ever lit up so near to me, though; and, in fact, until Jake just had, I’d probably never even seen a cigarette from any closer than fifteen feet away. I’d lived a pretty sheltered life in a lot of ways, I knew. I’d certainly never been exposed to any guys fairly near my age that had felt free to just light up a cigarette around me. And there was something about the act that just seemed a bit thrillingly “bad boy” about it to me.
Jake is only kind of a “bad boy,” though, I thought while he let the smoke from his deep drag out slowly. No “boy” who smiled as warmly as he did could ever be truly “bad,” I figured. There was nothing in any way “bad” about the way he made me feel when he complimented me, either.
However, upon getting just a bit of his smoke in my lungs, I began coughing pretty bad, covering my mouth with my hand.
After exhaling the rest of the smoke from his second drag in a hasty rush, he then dropped the cigarette and stamped it out, apologizing. “I may have regenerating vampire lungs, but I can tell just by your human scent that you don’t. I should have asked you first if you’re okay with cigarette smoke. I’m really sorry about that.”
Getting a few last coughs out of my system, I glanced up at him and saw that he seemed sincere. In fact, he’d just taken his dark shades off, and his vivid blue eyes, which were absolutely gorgeous, were now practically radiating sincerity.
Once I could breathe normally, I told him not to even worry about the cigarette. “I guess I must just have exceptionally delicate lungs. Not your fault.”
Jake said nonetheless, he wouldn’t smoke around me anymore. “I shouldn’t even do it anyway, regardless, just because it’s a nasty habit that makes my clothes smell…but more importantly, I don’t ever want to make you cough again. I really am sorry…and I wish I could say your name here, just to underscore how sincere I am about being sorry, but…I don’t even know your name.”
Realizing that I hadn’t yet told it to him, I smiled. “I’m Chrissy.”
Making his beautiful blue eyes twinkle in the sun, he smiled in return. “It’s really nice to meet you, Chrissy.”
My face had cooled somewhat, but now it warmed again, as if heated by the very warmth of Jake’s smile. Returning it, I said it was really nice to meet him, too. We then fell silent briefly, just looking into each other’s eyes, until Jake dropped his gaze to my book, which I was clutching along with my phone.
“‘Anne of Green Gables,’ huh?”
Stupidly glancing down at my book, as if I wasn’t quite sure that was the title, I said yes, and then immediately became a little embarrassed that I’d been “caught” reading a book so antiquated and probably lame. “I’m not really that far into it. See, I hadn’t finished it when I got my high school diploma a few months ago, so my mom insisted that I read it over the summer. So…I’m trying, I guess.”
Everything I’d just said had been a lie. I was actually halfway through the book; I was thoroughly loving it; and my mom hadn’t forced me to start reading it. She hadn’t even recommended that I read it. In fact, when I’d earned my diploma, she’d actually encouraged me to “take a break from books,” suggesting that maybe I join some other teens working at a summer camp at one of the lakes in Sweetwater. Needless to say, I hadn’t even applied for a camp counselor job, preferring to work at the creamery and spend my downtime reading, which was a pursuit I truly loved. Which was why I had no idea why I’d just felt the need to spew a string of total fibs at Jake.
I supposed I’d done it just because I didn’t want him to think I was a “nerd.” Truth be told, my love of books had always made me feel a bit self-conscious, on top of how self-conscious I already felt because of my rapid aging and the resulting divide that I’d always felt between me and the other kids on the farm. My love of books made me a “double weirdo,” I’d always figured.
Jake, however, didn’t seem to find it weird at all that I was reading Anne of Green Gables and apparently not hating it, at least. In fact, he said that he’d heard it was a “must-read classic.” Encouraged by this a little, I asked him if he liked to read, and he said yes. I asked him if he had any favorite books in particular, and he again said yes.
“I’ve always really loved Machiavelli’s The Prince. Have you read it?”
I’d heard of this book, maybe having come across it during some homework assignment or something, and I knew it was well-regarded or somehow considered very important in literary circles; however, to my embarrassment, I really knew nothing about it. Feeling sheepish, and embarrassed now that I knew that I hadn’t had to hide my love of books from Jake, I told him that I wasn’t familiar.
He said that was no big deal. “Maybe you’ll get a chance to check it out someday, and we can discuss it then.”
I said that sounded good, and we both fell silent for a moment or two until Jake said that he usually didn’t tell people that he was a “reader.”
“See, where I come from, it’s not really considered to be a good thing. It’s kind of considered weird and weak for a kid to be into books, a boy especially. I never really cared, though. I was always determined to get out of the trailer park, and I learned early on that books were probably the way to do it.”
Admiring Jake’s thinking, I asked him if his parents had encouraged his reading, and he just scoffed.
“My dad took off just before I started kindergarten, but if he’d stayed, I bet he would have just called me a sissy. My mom stuck around to raise me in the trailer, if you could really even call what she did ‘raising.’ She was more concerned with winning the jackpot at the bingo hall, and with all her many boyfriends over the years, than she ever was with me.”
I didn’t exactly know what to say, but a simple I’m sorry seemed to want to come out of my mouth. However, before I could even speak the words, I heard the front door of the house suddenly whoosh open from maybe fifteen feet behind me, followed by Carol’s voice.
“Are you one of the new recruits?”
Looking over my shoulder, Jake nodded. “Yes, ma’am. I am.”
I turned and looked at Carol while she spoke to Jake again.
“All right. Well, welcome to the farm. You’re free to make this your home now, but please don’t smoke cigarettes up here near the main house. Too many kids around, and we don’t want them breathing in smoke. When you get settled into your own house, you may smoke in your own yard, as long as it doesn’t bother any of the neighbors nearby. Okay?”
To my horror, I realized that Carol had to have been watching Jake and me from a kitchen window or something, which somehow felt like she’d been watching me while I experienced a first date or something. Which, honestly, since I’d never even spoken to a guy I liked before, she kind of had been. I wasn’t sure exactly why Carol’s witnessing this should horrify me, but it did nonetheless. Also to my horror, I wondered if she counted me among the “kids” she’d spoken of, the “kids” that she didn’t want breathing in cigarette smoke. I took serious issue with this because I certainly didn’t feel like a “kid.” In fact, I was feeling more like an eighteen-year-old legal adult every single minute that I spent with Jake.
Seeming not to share any of the horror, irritation, and even borderline anger that I was currently feeling, he simply dipped his head in a nod at Carol again. “Yes, ma’am. I won’t smoke up here near the main house anymore. I promise.”
Seemingly satisfied by this, Carol said all right. “Now, why don’t you come up here to the house and come inside. Hayden has asked that all of you newcomers wait for him to host an ‘orientation’-type meeting in our dining room before being assigned to your houses; and you and I can get better acquainted in the meantime.”
Jake said that sounded just fine, then glanced back at his car before looking at Carol again. “Is my Mustang okay to leave here for right now, then? I don’t need to re-park it anywhere?”
I couldn’t be sure, just because I was standing pretty far away from Carol, but before she responded to Jake, I thought I heard her scoff faintly, something I couldn’t ever remember her doing before.
“Your Mustang is just fine right there. I’ll make sure all other newcomers don’t scratch the paint.”
With that, Carol turned and went back inside the house, leaving me to wonder if she had some sort of a problem with Jake, and why.
Jake didn’t seem overly concerned, cracking a half-grin at me the moment the front door was closed. “I guess your mom is probably on guard when it comes to guys talking to you. I bet you probably have a few dozen practically trying to break down your front door every week.”
Smiling, I shook my head. “Not really, and that woman wasn’t my mom, anyway. She’s my Aunt Carol.”
Feeling stunningly immature, I resisted the urge to add, And she’s not the boss of me.
Jake said that Carol seemed like a really good aunt. “Aunts should be a little protective, after all, especially when it comes to newcomers in the community. I mean, your Aunt Carol doesn’t know who I am. I could be one of those Warrens, for all she knows.”
That would explain her scoffing, I thought, if she’d really done so; but still, I couldn’t help but feel like that had been a little unfair to Jake. It seemed obvious to me that he wasn’t one of those Warrens. Didn’t you see him smile, Carol?
In response to what Jake had said, I just gave him what I hoped was a small, polite sort of smile, which he returned before speaking again.
“Well, I guess I’d better head inside. A meet-and-greet with Aunt Carol awaits me.”
Looking at the devilish sort of little glint in Jake’s eyes, I couldn’t help but crack a grin. “Have fun. She’s a novelist, so ask her about her current project. You’ll be fine.”
Grinning, Jake thanked me for the tip, then began heading inside. I watched him go, surveying his broad shoulders and tight rear, wondering if I’d possibly just met my very first ever boyfriend.