Scent of a Vampire – Jude Stephens
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Scent of a Vampire
By Jude Stephens
Chapter 1
I was on the way to have hot monkey sex with a stranger. How did I get myself into a situation like this? Oh yeah ... the girl sitting next to me on the bus, my supposed best friend Janel Atwood. Six months ago on the night my divorce was final Janel had taken me out and got me smashed. Smashed for me meant three glasses of wine. We made a pact. She knew I was shy so she made me pinky swear on my parents lives if I didn't get myself out in to the dating world in six months time, we would travel to Atlantic City from our home in Buffalo and I would let Janel hook me up for a night of hot monkey sex.
I had planned on getting back into the game again. I had such high hopes. I was going to learn to be flirty and fun. I was going to date a lot of different men until I found 'Mister Right.' So much for the best-laid plans and all, as soon as the wine wore off I slipped back into my same Scent of a Vampire – Jude Stephens
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old comfortable routine.
I turned to Janel and gave her an annoyed look, "Why did we come all the way to Atlantic City?
Couldn't you have picked up a man for me in the nearest bar back in Buffalo?" Janel used her look on me ... the one she uses on patients at Saint Vincent Hospital, where we both worked.
She has the face of an angel; she can get any patient to open up and take foul tasting medicine, she can quiet the most upset, disgruntled family member and get me on a crowded bus, headed to the last place on earth I wanted to be.
Janel gave me an impish grin and said, "Now Orenda, I told you before, I don't plan on spending too much time in the casino. The plan is to find some very cute, fun, high rollers and go to dinner and then dancing and some ... well, whatever floats your boat. You know the men back in Buffalo are boring. They're the same old, same old. Besides, you know you need a break from the hospital. You work way too hard. And definitely don't play enough" I knew she was right. I hadn't had a vacation in a while. I hated leaving patients I got to know so well. They often came to feel like my family.
Janel was a nurse and I was a physical therapist. When thinking about a career, I thought this was a great way to make a difference in the world.
Physical therapy allows you to participate in someone getting better and you are there for the end results, which can be very rewarding.
It's a hard job for someone who is a rather sensitive person. You have to push someone to work hard to regain the use of a limb.
You are often looked upon as a sadist, a ball buster and a Nazi all rolled into one. But, I love my job and at the end of the day I am satisfied. I am doing something worthwhile in my own small way.
"I told you not to use that name. I wish I had never told you about my real name!" I lamented. I absolutely hate the name and only told Janel after she swore to never tell anyone, I cringe whenever I hear it.
"Ohhhh, geez, okay. I promise to never use Orenda again, but really, it's so much cooler than your middle name. Olivia is nice, but it's not unique and mysterious like Orenda is." Janel just didn't understand what using that name conjures up for me. My parents are what some would call free spirits and others would simply call hippies.
I remember when I was a teenager in school my parents coming to one of my track meets dressed in their organic clothing and wearing love beads sitting in the bleachers, cuddling and kissing while the other parents stared at them. The taunts of my classmates were even worse.
The guys would ask, "Hey Orenda, do you believe in free love? Cuz if you do I got some for you right here." While the girls would snicker and make up rumors saying I did indeed believe in free love. There's nothing like being a teenage girl with a bad reputation and a freaking virgin all Scent of a Vampire – Jude Stephens
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at the same time. Since the time I turned fifteen, I've made everyone; even my teachers call me Olivia. I let my mind wander through my painful high school days. I had to admit to myself my feeling of being different from everyone else is not just due to my unconventional parents but to something inside me. I've always felt a step out of sync with the rest of the world. I've heard it said you usually rebel against what your parents are. As my parents are on the free spirit side, much to my parent's puzzlement I became the conservative of the family.
I sat back on the hard scratchy seat, let out a long sigh and glanced over at Janel. Compared to Janel, I am generic.
When the two of us are together I've literally been pushed out of the way by men wanting to get closer to her. Where Janel is tall, I am on the short side at five foot five. Janel has a body that could compare to a runway models'. My body is not bad, more like average. No big assets to make a man look twice. Janel has gorgeous blue eyes and straight blond hair, which is the envy of every woman we know. My eyes are hard to describe. Some have described them as silver, but at the DMV they stamped "gray" on my license. My hair is chestnut brown and no matter if I wear it short or long like I did now, I never could get it to behave. It has a mind all of its own and not a great mind either, more what I'd call scatterbrained.
Janel is what people would call vivacious, a gregarious extrovert but not in a pushy way. People love to be around her.
I had never seen her, not once, be in a bad mood. Me, on the other hand, am such a huge introvert I have trouble talking to myself. I am the type of person people forget two minutes after we are introduced. I need to seek therapy the first chance I get; I thought to myself and not for the first time either.
I've known Janel since our college days. That's also where I met my ex-husband Brian. He had been very charming and swept me off my feet. I should have known something when Janel and he didn't hit it off.
The night of the bachelorette party she asked me several times if I was sure I wanted to spend the rest of my life with
Brian. Looking back, there were signs he wasn't the guy for me. He constantly tried to change me.
He would say things like "Olivia you should wear your hair up in a more sophisticated style. You really should have gone for your master's degree, you'd be earning twice what you're making at the hospital."
Too late, I realized I wasn't the woman he needed me to be. It seems a woman who worked at his office turned out to be the woman he needed. I caught them having sex in his office one night when he told me he had to work late and I stopped by to bring him dinner. He didn't apologize. He didn't try to explain. He actually tried to blame me for his cheating.
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"You don't know what I need, you don't try to understand my desires, and you don't know how to let go in bed." Blah, Blah, Blah. A story women must have heard from the beginning of time.
The last one hurt the most because I had always been willing to give him whatever he wanted in the bedroom, even when I never got what I wanted in return. Six months later it was over; I found myself single again but with no longing to date again. I think a part of me was worried Brian had been right. I really don't know what men want!
So, here I am a half hour later, pulling up to a brightly lit hotel named Platza del la Viva. The hotel obviously tried for the Roman flair as the doormen (who were not unattractive) stood all manly like in their white togas guarding the entrance.
Much to my mortification, Janel took one look and marched right over to start talking to the Roman gods. As much as it embarrassed me, I stood there wishing I could be the type of girl who could throw caution to the wind and strike up a conversation with a stranger. I walked over to Janel, ready to drag her away before these guys fed her to the lions, and heard her giving them her cell number and telling the
m to give us a call later.
"What did you do that for?" I asked as soon as we walked away. "Those guys could be ax murders or perverts or sex fiends."
Janel smiled and said, "One can only hope." I loved Janel to death but sometimes I felt like she had no sense whatsoever! If I ended up dead tonight by being bludgeoned to death by two Roman hunks, I am so going to kill her. I opened the heavy glass door to a blast of cold air and the smell of death.
I stopped dead in my tracks as the now sickly sweet familiar scent filled my nose. Janel took one look at my face and said "Oh no, tell me it's not the smell again." With a concerned look, she pulled me to the side of the lobby. "Can you tell where it's coming from?" Janel asked.
"No I can't"
I took a glance around the enormous lobby. A huge fountain stood in the middle and Roman statues lined all the entrances. I let my gaze wander over the people in the lobby. To our right, a group of six people mingled and appeared to be checking out. From their appearance they seemed to be here for business. Most of them wore suits and had laptop bags with them.
Across the lobby stood a couple with two teenage children. Please not them, I thought to myself.
Another younger couple was next to them and to my left I saw two men, one with dark hair wearing what surely was a suit worth more than my entire wardrobe and a blond man who stood in sharp contrast to the other man. The blond man wore faded blue jeans and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled halfway up his muscular arms. I noticed two things about them at almost the same time. First, both men were absolutely gorgeous, what Janel would call eye-candy. And two, they seemed to be arguing. The dark haired man gave the other man a fierce Scent of a Vampire – Jude Stephens
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look. One that would surely make me shiver in my boots. The blond man seemed to be holding his own. While I was staring at them, they stopped talking and glanced our way. I quickly averted my eyes and pretended to admire the scenery. Janel brought me back to the problem at hand by saying
"Olivia, who do you think it is?"
"I don't know." I answered. "I don't think I'm close enough."
That can be a problem with my so-called gift. The first time it happened was about two months ago. I had gone up to the floor where Janel worked to see if she wanted to grab some lunch with me. At the nurses station they told me they believed she was with a patient in room 512, so I went to find her.
When I peeked into the room I didn't see her but there was an elderly man in the bed who saw me and called to me for some water. I ran to get his water and when I started to walk closer to him I smelled something earthy with a touch of musk. I had never smelled anything like it before. At the time I thought maybe it was a cleaning product or sometimes even a new piece of equipment can have a strange newly manufactured smell.
Janel came into the room and said, "I see you met our favorite patient Mr. Saunders."
I smiled at him and he gave a weak smile back. While Janel and I were walking to lunch she told me that that Mr. Saunders was in bad shape and not expected to live too much longer.
I saw the sadness in her eyes as she spoke and thought to myself, as I often did, that she is a good nurse and a good friend. I never gave the scent I smelled that day another thought.
Not until the following week when I was working with a patient who had a stroke and was in physical therapy to get the use of his hands back. While doing some mobility exercises with him, I smelled the musky scent again.
"Do you smell something? A sort of musky scent?" I asked him.
My patient said he didn't smell anything. Again I dismissed the unusual scent as one of those strange things and got back to work.
The next day while waiting for my two o'clock patient to be brought down, I got a page from the unit clerk informing me my patient would not be coming because he expired this morning.
Looking at the daily schedule, I saw it was the same patient from yesterday who I had asked about the strange smell. As soon as the thought crossed my mind, a tingle went all the way from the base of my spine up to my scalp. It unnerved me for some reason.
At first I told no one what happened, not even Janel. Not until it happened again. I went to a neighbor's birthday party and his favorite aunt from Ohio had come for the event. As I stepped Scent of a Vampire – Jude Stephens
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forward to be introduced to the elderly woman, the dreaded musky scent filled my nostrils and I started shaking. I quickly told my neighbor that I wasn't feeling well and left the party as fast as I could. Two days later, coming home from work, I saw my neighbor just entering his house and he waved me over.
He asked me if I would be able to take in his mail for a few days because he had to go to Ohio to attend his aunt's funeral. He said she had passed away suddenly right after returning home the day before. I nodded, mumbled my condolences and knew I had to talk to someone. I decided I had to at least tell Janel about my curse and when I did, I didn't get the skeptical reaction I thought I would.
"Well, that is odd. But you know there are a lot of odder things in the world than this. Yesterday I read a story, while in line at the supermarket, about a never before seen pink lizard being found in the South American jungles. Imagine, a pink lizard! Hmmm, I wonder if there will ever be blue cows?
Imagine the gorgeous leather handbags we could have." She laughed.
As always, Janel made me crack a smile and forget my troubles for a minute.
"Why are you looking at this as a curse? What you need to do is find a way to make this into something positive. Maybe this isn't a bad thing. You have to look at this from another angle.
I'm sure you can find a way to make this into something good and maybe one day we can have blue leather handbags baby!"
I realized she was right. I can take this and figure out a way to do well with it. Damn me if I couldn't!
So, for the last few months, I'd been finding ways to turn a curse into a blessing. Whenever the musky scent assailed my senses, I investigated where it came from. Once I found an elderly woman lying in a bed. I didn't need my gift to see she was dying.
I went over to her and asked her name. She told me her name was Mae. She had no children and her husband had passed away five years ago.
As a girl, she lived by a lake and more than anything she liked to watch the sunset on the lake.
So, when the sky started turning a deep blue, I helped her turn in the bed toward the window so she could see the sunset. As I held her hand, she closed her eyes and died peacefully with a slight smile on her face. That was when I started to embrace what I had been given. I didn't question it anymore. My parents have always told me to every thing there is a reason. Turn.
Turn. Turn. My parents love old songs and I have a tendency to get music stuck in my head. And sometimes without being aware I am doing it, I tend to sing out loud. I hate it when that happens. People tend to look at you a little strange when you burst into song.
But Janel had been right, maybe this is a gift of some kind and I was given it for a purpose that I was unaware of as yet.
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Chapter 2
While Janel and I stood in the ornate lobby of the Platza del la Viva hotel and casino, I was hoping I could pin point where the smell was coming from. I glanced back to the two hot guys who appeared to be arguing again and looking as if they might come to blows, but the gorgeous blond spun on his heel and walked away. Luck was on my side. He was heading our way, though I doubted the scent could be coming from him, he looked so virile and full of life. Janel gave me a little push to put me right in his path and with all the finesse of a two-ton elephant I ended up running right into the man.
He quickly reached out and grabbed my arm to steady me and the musky scent assailed my nose. The look on my face must have been something close to shock because he said,
"Hey, sorry are you okay?"
"Yeah, I'm okay. I'm sorry I'
m such a klutz" I looked over toward Janel and I knew she was aware this was our man.
For the first time, I really got a good look at him and was staggered at how handsome he was.
The only thought going through my head was "You are so beautiful to me." Damn lyrics.
I felt my face flame when I realized I was staring and singing out loud. He smiled at me. A very sexy lopsided grin was more like it.
He was tall, probably six foot or more with short blond hair and green eyes. I realized I was still holding his muscular arm and promptly let go. But he did not. I felt my pulse start to race. His eyes traveled from the top of my head slowly down the length of my body. I swear it felt like his hands instead of his eyes touching me.
"No problem you can bump into me anytime babe," he said with a wink. "I hope you don't think I say this to every woman who runs into me, but you have the most unusual eyes, they are mesmerizing."
"Thank you." I stammered, sure he must have hit his head.
Janel swiftly walked over and extended her hand. "Please excuse my friend; she isn't normally so tongue tied or so clumsy. My name is Janel Atwood and this is my friend Olivia Sherman."
"It's great to meet you, my name is Alexander Sandstrom, but please just call me Alex."
Alex stared at me so intently, I began to feel a blush starting at my toes and work its way up my entire body. I swear I could read some very hot and dirty thoughts in his gorgeous green eyes.
Worse, I could feel my body reacting to his. In all my life I have never gotten sexually excited, just by looking at a man. It was weird, nice but still very weird. I became uncomfortable with his attention. I'm definitely not used to attention from mind-bogglingly handsome men. By the look Scent of a Vampire – Jude Stephens
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on Janel's face she was a bit uncomfortable herself, as she wasn't used to not getting attention from handsome men.
"Are you in town for business or pleasure?" Janel all but purred at him.
Alexander finally looked in Janel's direction and said, "Both actually, it's my pleasure to own a hotel and casino here in town called The Scandinavian. Hey, would you ladies care to join me for a late dinner tonight? The hotel has a great restaurant called The West Harbor. It has a fantastic view of the Ocean, great food, and you'll have a very charming dinner companion." He laughed.
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