First Love: A Superbundle Boxed Set of Seven New Adult Romances (52 page)

The penthouse he lived in was located in midtown London, not too far from the university. He arrived in front of the library in less than five minutes. There was nowhere to park on the street, so Robb eased the Porsche up onto the sidewalk and pulled under the awning of the student coffeeshop. Two undergraduates having coffee outside stared at the Porsche as Robb parked it next to their table and got out. He pulled his tie around his neck and knotted it as best as he could, leaning down to see his reflection in the window. Stupid dedication. Stupid speech.

"I don't think you're supposed to park your car here," one of the students said to Robb.

"It's not a car," Rob said, straightening his tie. "It's an art installation."

"A what?"

"It's a—uh—a commentary on the modern lifestyle of conspicuous consumption," Robb said. There. The tie was as good as it was going to be.

"Huh," the student said, peering at the black sportscar. "Why park it here?"

"Obviously he wanted to tie together the concept of consumption of food and transportation with the idea of knowledge as a consumable good," the other student said, pressing his glasses back on his nose and nodding fiercely in understanding. "It's about how our universities spoon-feed knowledge to us in exchange for currency. It's about capitalism's excesses."

"Exactly
," Robb said. Before the students could ask any more questions, he turned on his heel and walked across the lawn toward the university library.

"We're running late." The library director ran a hand through her frizzy red hair, pausing for a second to yell at the people setting up the small stage just inside the library doors.

"Don't tell me that," Robb said. "My speech was supposed to be at nine o'clock."

"Fifteen minutes," the director said, her eyes trained on the two students heaving the podium up onto the stage. "Maybe twenty. Depends on the sound people."

"Then you'll have to get someone else to speak," Robb said, turning away. That was easy enough. What was the next thing he had on his schedule? He pulled out his phone to check. A visit to the university chemistry lab in the afternoon. He could take a nap before then...

"Wait! No, wait! Mr. Chatham," the library director said, stepping in his path. Robb looked up from his phone in irritation.

"Please, Mr. Chatham, I understand your time is valuable and I promise it won't take long. Ten minutes, tops." The director grasped his hand in both of hers, obscuring his phone's screen, and looked up at him, her eyes beseeching. "We have the university president attending.
Please
."

"Fine, fine," Robb said, shaking her hands off of him. "I'll be back in ten minutes."

Robb wandered upstairs to the private rooms of the library. There was one room in particular where he knew he would not be disturbed: the poetry collection room he'd founded years ago. Nobody ever had time to read poetry anymore.

At the back of the upstairs hall, he unlocked the room and stepped inside. The air was stale, dusty, and the shelves were piled high with antique books that looked as though they'd fall apart if you looked at them too hard.

Robb walked down the last row, letting his finger slide over the spines of the books of poetry. At the end of the row he found the book he was looking for. Pulling it out, he lay down on the small couch in the corner and swung his legs over the couch arm. He flipped through the book, reading snippets of poetry at random until he found the one he was looking for.

Summer Dawn
, it was called. That poem had always reminded him of Eliza. He began to read, and the first line took him back to the time when he was ten and he'd read to her. She'd thought it was wondrous that he could take the letters on the page and translate them into songs, and he thought it was wondrous that she could not. He'd read them with exaggerated lyricism, and she'd read along, her finger moving with his across the page that he'd copied laboriously from his tutor's worn books.

Now, sitting back on the couch arm, he read the poem the same way, his finger moving from line to line. His lips moved only slightly as he read the words.

Pray but one prayer for me 'twixt thy closed lips,

Think but one thought of me up in the stars.

His eyes filled with tears at the thought of Eliza reading the poem to him in her stumbling, half-certain syllables, looking up at him with pride when she managed a section by herself. He'd thought himself so far above her that even in his love he'd let his arrogance taint him. That was his sin, and he would never forgive himself for letting pride supersede his love for her.

It did not matter now that his vision was watered and blurred. He knew the poem by heart and continued to read, though the words now were fuzzed. Eliza loved the next part, she did...

The uneasy wind rises; the roses are dun;

Through the long twilight they pray for the dawn

He blinked, and a tear escaped the corner of his eye, running down his cheek. He continued to recite the poem, his eyes closed. He kept them closed.

There would be no dawn for him. He would always have this seething darkness inside of him, and he would never again be able to love. There would only be the next girl that he used for his purposes for a brief moment, and then she would go and the next girl would come along. And the next. And the next. Could he do this forever?

A book dropped, and he wiped his hand quickly across his cheek as he sat up to see who had made the noise. It was a girl with dark hair, and for a moment he thought it was Eliza. But no, no of course it wasn't her, it was a young woman, a student. She looked up, and—

Her eyes. Robb found his skin hot, and he swallowed the lump that must have risen in his throat when he had been thinking about Eliza. Instantly he shamed himself for being so put out by a clumsy girl. He drew his face into a practiced expression of aloof disdain and looked down at the girl, trying not to let her eyes distract him into falling in love.

Falling in love.
He'd tried before, whenever he found the flickering of desire inside himself, and been rewarded with abject failure every time. Inevitably women hated him for something: an intuition, maybe, that the charm he'd worked on them had already worked on hundreds of women. He could never let them know the black secret he carried into every human relationship—that their desire for him was largely due to the chemical reaction that occurred when he bit them lightly. They fought with him, they insulted him, they left him or cheated on him and he left them. After living four hundred years, he could not work up the energy to care about the trifling disagreements that tore his relationships apart.
 
Eventually he'd stopped trying, and he'd accepted his fate. He was a monster, after all.

There was no room in his world for love.

Chapter Two

"Ninety-nine empty test tubes on the wall, ninety-nine empty test tubes. Take one down, pass it around—"

"Very funny."

A strand of Liz's dark hair fell into her eyes. Again. She contorted her shoulder upward, trying to nudge the disobedient strand of hair back behind her ear.

"When you're done figuring out what pubs to visit, maybe you could help me wash some of these." Liz took the wire cleaning brush and snapped it in Jenny's direction, sending a light spray of water over her. There were test tubes piled in the sink, on the counter, everywhere, and Jenny had had her nose in her phone for ten minutes, looking up pub specials.

"Eek! I'm coming, I'm coming." Jenny wiped the drips of water off of her phone and stuffed it into her pocket, tossing back her blond ponytail as she rolled up her sleeves and came to help Liz wash the glassware. "You know, that used to be a British song. It was
ten green bottles
when I was a kid."

"I suppose Americans like their beer more than you Brits."

"That is
not
true!" Jenny brandished a test tube at Liz. "You take that back, you dirty Yank."

Liz grabbed the test tube away from Jenny and began to wash it.
Ninety-eight empty test tubes on the wall...

"Come on," Jenny said. "We can do this tomorrow."

"Or," Liz said, "we can do it tonight. And then we won't have to do it tomorrow."

"Lizzzzzz..."

"Jennnnny..." Liz said, raising the wire brush in a threatening pose.

"Have some fun! Come on, it's the beginning of the semester. There's a happy hour at Rossi's across the street. We can do this tomorrow."

"The lab program director will be here tomorrow." Liz hadn't met anyone in the chem lab except Jenny, but she wanted to make a good impression on the program director. And Jenny, god bless her, was not the labmate she had imagined working next to during her graduate study. She was friendly, sure, but she seemed more interested in what was on tap at the brew pub than getting the lab ready for the beginning of the year. They'd been working a week and, while they'd started a few lab culture tests, the remaining clutter from the year before had yet to be cleared out.

"He won't show till afternoon,” Jenny whined. “Come on, my mates have been killing me to meet you."

Liz sighed and lay the wire brush down in the sink.

"The last few cases of glassware haven't been put away, and I wanted to pick up those books from the library for reference for the director—"

"He probably won't even care about the lab!" Jenny said, her impatience bubbling out of her. "He just writes the checks, anyway."

"Still..." Liz looked at the dozens of test tubes strewn across the counter.

"Please
. I promise we can come in early tomorrow to clean up." Jenny's face shone up at Liz, like a puppy begging her to take it for a walk to the nearest pub. "
Pleassssse?
"

"Okay," Liz said. "But —"

"You are amazing! Yes!" Jenny grabbed Liz's hand. "Let's go!"

"Whoa, hey, careful, I have substrate all over my hands right now," Liz said. "You wash your hands right now along with me."

Jenny rolled her eyes and, with an exaggerated sigh and a beaming grin to belie it, she squirted soap onto her hands and washed them under the running water.

Ahh, hot water. Liz loved the feeling of soapiness, of letting her fingers glide across each other and untangle in sensuous knots. The feeling of being clean was nice, yes, but the real reason Liz didn't mind all of the safety precautions of the lab was because she loved the hot water. She'd always enjoyed the sensation of getting into the hottest shower she could possibly stand, letting the water run through her hair...

"Hello? Earth to Liz?" Jenny bumped her with her hip and Liz refocused her attention. Right. Washing hands. The pub.

"Sorry, woolgathering," she said, wiping her hands on her jeans. "Ready to go?"

"Did you want to change before we go out?" Jenny asked. Liz looked down at her clothes. An old hoodie with a stylized chemical molecule of caffeine on the front, fraying at the sleeves, and jeans with more chemical splatters on them than her lab coat.

"Is this not okay?" she asked.

Jenny burst out into peals of laughter.

"Liz, you are the silliest. Don't you want to pick up any guys?"

"Not particularly, no." Liz shrugged. "And definitely not if they don't like my hoodie."

"You're a strange one, Ms. Elizabeth," Jenny said. "Now let's go get laggered."

"Laggered?"

"You know, pissed," Jenny said.

"Pissed
?" Liz was so confused.

"Silly American girl," Jenny said brightly, grabbing her by the hand and tugging her out the lab door. "We're gonna get
drunk
!"

At the pub, Liz tried her best to get
laggered
. The first ale she ordered turned out to be darker and more bitter than anything she'd ever drunk, though. And the fish and chips she ordered must come with an extra side of grease...she could see oil
dripping
off of her fries when she picked them up.

She had her lab notebook tucked under her arm to protect it from the grease. All of the initial lab culture results were in there and she definitely didn't want to have to rework all of the runs she'd already done in preparation for the beginning of the year.

Jenny was having a blast, dancing in the middle of the pub to the overloud music. She'd managed to reapply her makeup on the way to the pub and Liz watched her in envy. She had on a cute skirt and top with heels that she definitely had not been wearing in the lab—did she keep her shoes in her purse? Multiple guys hovered near her, hoping to get to talk to the beautiful blond girl. Liz sighed and took another sip of beer, wincing at the taste.

Everything on the radio seemed to be American, Liz noticed, or maybe that was just the rock station. She made the mistake of nodding along to a few beats, and then Jenny had tossed her notebook onto the bar, taken her by both hands, and was hauling her out onto the floor to dance.

"See any cute guys?"

"Uh, I don't know." Liz cast a glance back to make sure her lab notebook was okay.
Come on, Liz,
she told herself.
Nobody at a bar is going to steal your precious lab notebook.
"How about you? Any...um...cute guys?"

"I like... that one!" Jenny pointed, randomly it seemed, to an athletic blond guy standing at the end of the bar. "You like?"

"Um..."

"You haven't flirted with a single guy," Jenny said. "Go hit on him."

"No!"

Jenny scrunched up her face at Liz in confusion. "Are you queer? Not that that’s bad or anything. Actually, I know another pub—"

"No!" Liz laughed nervously. "I don't really like bars, though."

"Not a pub kind of girl? Okay, that's fine."

Liz relaxed, thanking heaven that her labmate would leave her alone. But Jenny had a twinkle in her eye, and she continued on.

"We'll have to get you flirting somewhere else, then! Maybe I can bring a few of these boys back to the lab with us. Then you can talk to them about hematological malignancies."

"I'm sure that would charm their pants off."

"Ooh! You should flirt with the director tomorrow!" Jenny's eyes sparked with excitement.