Vampire Blood Read Free

stubborn old man, she told herself as they sped towards town for breakfast.
    She knew her father was too old to be fixing and painting other peoples’ houses, climbing ladders and stumbling around on high roofs, but he was too stubborn to admit it, like with a lot of things in his life. Even if he was small, wiry and had never been sick a day in his life, he wasn’t getting any younger.
    Lately he’d started fumbling and dropping things, and he’d forget things like where he’d laid the tape measure or what he was just about to do. Absentminded as all get out. It was beginning to worry her, along with his mysterious exhaustion. A lot.
    He’d give someone the shirt off his back for he was a good, loving man. Her father had always been there for her.
    He should be retired and sipping lemonade on his front porch as other people did at his age. It was the constant lack of money that forced him to keep working.
    Her parents’ little ten-acre farm, where her trailer sat, hadn’t been profitable for years. They’d once had cattle, chickens and horses when she and her two brothers had been children. They’d had crops, wheat and sometimes corn.
    Now all the cattle and chickens were long gone, sold away one by one over the last drought years. As for the horses, well, there were only old Lightning and his mate, Black Beauty, left. Two bags of bones. She couldn’t even run them hard any more.
    Thus, her father had become somewhat of a house handyman around Summer Haven. Which was a joke in itself, seeing as how Jenny could still hear Mom nagging at him because he’d never fixed a thing around their house and still didn’t.
    Jenny tagged along and helped on his painting jobs, not only because she had to keep an eye on him, make sure he didn’t work himself to death and that he got paid, but because since she’d moved back to Summer Haven after her second divorce, she would be flat broke if she didn’t.
    Besides, painting houses and helping her dad with light carpentry at eight dollars an hour was sure a lot better than slinging hash at her brother’s greasy-spoon restaurant. At least she was outside more.
    Jenny pursed her lips in thought, sensitive as always over the whole work thing. Her father, like everyone else, couldn’t understand why she was doing any of it in the first place when ... no, don’t start on it again, she warned herself. Drop it.
    Jenny returned to daydreaming out the window, and, as usual, purposely wiped out all thoughts of her past.
    The heat waves were already shimmering across the asphalt road as it coiled into the horizon before them, like a piece of that black licorice she’d always liked as a child.
    It was going to be a scorcher, all right.
    “I was going to suggest we skip breakfast this morning to get an early start on painting the Albers’ House, as big as it is, but I sure am famished,” her father said. His face was sweaty as he ran his stubby hand over his very short, gray hair. It looked like a bristle brush, he kept it so short. “Joey’s probably expecting us anyway.”
    No doubt. “I don’t think it’s ever a good idea to skip breakfast,” she replied. “Besides, I could use a cup of that stuff he calls coffee. It’ll shock me awake.” She grimaced and yawned.
    “Ah, it’s not that bad. Great biscuits and gravy.” He swerved the car into the shopping center’s entrance and pulled up before the hole-in-the-wall called Joey’s Place.
    Her younger brother, Joey, owned and ran the tiny restaurant beside the old boarded-up Rebel Theater. Joey’s Place, as Joey had dubbed it, was not only the best place to get homemade biscuits and gravy, it was the gossip hub and social spot where everyone hung out in the small town. Joey had put everything he had into it, and though he’d barely broken even over the two years he’d run it, it was the first thing that had truly made him happy.
    He’d tried a lot of other things before he’d stumbled onto the empty restaurant. The