House of Cards (Chapter 4)

House of Cards

Disclaimer: I don’t own anything that you recognize. They belong to Charlaine Harris and Alan Ball, as I have used elements from both the books and the shows. 

WARNING: ADULT CONTENT

Chapter 4: Red Omen

The paparazzi make camp outside my building and pester everyone who comes out through the front door, even the deliverymen. So far, it’s all going according to plan. I research all the brands to find out which one vampires like the most. After all, if there are going to be vampires in my life, then I want to be able to offer them something if they come by. Granted, I did offer Eric a drink of Sookie last night, but I don’t count that as being genuine southern hospitality.

There’s something called ‘Royalty Blended’ but that has to be specially pre-ordered and you need to wait for a month. It also costs something like thirty thousand dollars per bottle because it’s a blend of blood donated by real life royalty and the highest quality synthetic blood. I don’t see why it’s going to be better than normal blended blood. I mean, I refuse to believe that the biological make up of royalty is better than the biological make up of any other person, provided that they are healthy. Sookie Stackhouse is a great believer of meritocracy.

Finally, I send Norma Jean, my housekeeper, out to pick up half a dozen bottles of a blend that uses paid donors who have to observe a strict diet. It has received pretty good reviews from tech savvy vampires who have bothered to leave comments. One does have to be careful when purchasing foodstuffs. Some of the cheaper brands of blended blood use infected blood donors and stingy vampires have contracted something called ‘Hep D’ from drinking those brands. I find out that there’s a huge lawsuit going on between the infected vampires and the company.

Once Norma Jean’s gone, I finally get dressed. There’s no way I’m going to let people see the huge bandage on my arm, although granted, now that I’m a celebrity simply because I’m ‘dating’ the Eric Northman, if I go out with a huge bandage on my arm, that might become the newest hot accessory. It will cast serious doubt on my fashion credentials, so I don’t try it.

 

House of Cards (Chapter 3)

House of Cards

Disclaimer: I don’t own anything that you recognize. They belong to Charlaine Harris and Alan Ball, as I have used elements from both the books and the show.

WARNING: ADULT CONTENT

Chapter 3: If You Really Knew

Eric’s office is very tidy and organized. He’s into minimalism, I can tell, and really big swords. One hangs on the wall behind his desk. His chair is one of those nice leather executive ones with the tall backs. He fills it up entirely. There’s a bottle of Tabasco sauce on his desk, although I have no idea what it’s for and I’m not sure I’d actually want the answer. There are two other guys inside with him, and together the three of them are probably taking up sixty percent of the space in the office. It’s a good thing I’m not that big, even though I can’t really say I’m that small.

The other two guys are introduced to me as Alcide Herveaux and Trey Dawson. Alcide is ruggedly handsome and his teeth are so white that he can probably get a gig doing toothpaste commercials, although I don’t think a guy like him would see that as a legitimate way of making a living. He seems more like the ‘live off his sweat’ kind of guy, from what I could get out of his head, which is strangely impenetrable, like Sam’s.

All of a sudden, it strikes me that Sam could be something supernatural too. Is he a werewolf? I make a note to ask him the next time I see him. Alcide’s hand dwarf’s mine as I shake it. His palms are rough. Just as I thought; someone who knows the meaning of physical labour. I don’t know many guys like that. Trey is like that too, and I see traces of motor oil beneath his short blunt nails. He tells me that he’s a mechanic. Alcide is in the construction business, but his family owes Eric, so he’s taking this job as a way of repaying the debt. Trey is ‘between jobs’ at the moment so he’s happy to find a source of revenue. It’s not the first time he’s done something like this. They, of course, know who I am, and Eric has told them that I’m his ‘woman’ —I don’t think he remembers that we’ve been through the sexual revolution and the feminist movement— and that I need to be protected, but I can’t go about doing what I normally do if people see that I have two burly bodyguards trailing me. They’re buying his story. I can tell that they’re worried for me. Me and my sanity

“Herveaux and Dawson will watch you during the day,” Eric says.

“And at night?” I ask.

“You’ll be with me.” Oh yes, that’s right. I’m supposed to be dating slash having a sex with him. At least, that’s what I want the murderer to hear. The truth won’t be anything like that. Maybe a few movies, dinner (mine) and drinks (his). There will be absolutely no sex whatsoever. Sex usually complicates things in the worst way. I’ve witnessed enough scandals to know that. I just hope Eric knows it too.

 

House of Cards (Chapter 2)

House of Cards

 

 

Disclaimer: I don’t own anything that you recognize. The character belong to Charlaine Harris and Alan Ball. I have taken elements from both the books and the show.

WARNING: ADULT CONTENT 

A/N: Thanks for all the great responses! It’s really heartening for a writer when she knows that her readers like what she’s doing. Feedback is much appreciated.  

 

Chapter 2: Just Good Business

Being analyzed by a vampire is not so different from being analyzed by another one of my peers. The female at the door takes in the sight of my shoes, my dress, my clutch, my jacket, and then finally her eyes reach my face. “ID?” she asks.

It’s funny. I haven’t been carded in a while, not since my twenty first birthday bash when Tara and Arlene and a few other of my friends insisted on dragging me to a night club to party the night away. I hand over my driver’s licence. A lot of the girls I know have never learned to drive, relying only on chauffeurs and boyfriends, but I like the independence of being able to operate my own vehicle. I have a yellow Volkswagen New Beetle that I drive out to the Hamptons every weekend.

The vampire inspects my licence, checks my face against the photo on it —I have no idea why driver’s licence photos are always so unattractive— and then nods. “You can go in,” she says, giving me one last look. “Good luck getting out.”

As Bill leads me inside, the music and the thoughts slam into me all at once, almost overwhelming me. I thought the minds of the people outside were bad enough, but the people inside are even worse. Yes, the thoughts about sex are still there, but now they’re more specific, and they’re centred on a few identifiable individuals. We sit down at one of the round glass top tables and a waitress in black leather pants and a black leather cropped corset comes to take our orders. I’m definitely not dressed appropriately for this place. My white bodycon dress makes me stick out like a sore bandaged thumb.

I ask for a gin and tonic, and Bill orders bottled blood, of course. As I sip my drink, my eyes are drawn to the raised dais facing the front door. I noticed him when I first came in, but I didn’t want to seem like a tourist at a theme park. However, it appears that he has deliberately put himself on display. One of the bolder patrons of the club crawls up the steps of the dais. I watch in disgust and morbid fascination as he tries to kiss his boot. Without looking up from his Blackberry, he kicks the man away, sending him flying through the air and into one of the tables. There is no mistake about it. This vampire is in charge.   

 

House of Cards (Chapter 1)

House of Cards

 

Disclaimer: I don’t own anything you recognize. The characters belong to Charlaine Harris and Alan Ball. I’ve taken material both from the books and from the show.

Summary: Sookie Stackhouse is a telepathic New York socialite. When business and fate cause her to encounter one Eric Northman, cutthroat businessman and vampire, the world she knows comes tumbling down.  

A/N: Think Gossip Girl meets True Blood/SVM novels. Like any chick lit, it has plenty of clothes and shoes, romance and drama. Just sit back, relax, and enjoy!

 

WARNING: ADULT CONTENT 

Chapter 1: Murder Game

Mornings in the Upper East Side are great daily migrations as people move from home to work. Cars lined the streets, and the horns sound like battle cries as commuters vie with one another to slip into any possible space on the road. Even in my seventieth storey penthouse, I can still hear the incessant angry honking.

Mornings are one of those times when I am particularly grateful for my parents’ ability to churn out cash. That is, before they were swept away by a flood on a road trip when I was seven. After that, our grandmother took us in, my brother Jason and me. Gran was from an old and prestigious family, the Hales. Her grandfather had worked in the property business. Her father had taken over after my great-grandfather died, and so the business had been passed down through the family from father to son, until Gran’s generation. At first, it had been passed to her brother, my great-uncle, Bartlett Hale. The thing was, he…wasn’t the type of person that anyone had wanted to represent the family company. At first, when the news had leaked, no one wanted to believe it. Bartlett, of course, denied the fact that he’d had sex with two underage girls from poor families. I suspected that he paid their families a lot to shut them up and stop them from pressing charges, before running them out of the state. However, it is impossible to wrap fire in paper. Those two girls weren’t his only victims. There was my cousin Hadley, and then…there was me.

To cut a long story short, he’d resigned as the CEO and moved back to Louisiana, and my father, Corbett Stackhouse, took over the running of the company until he went and died in a flash flood. This brings me back to the present as I stand at the window of my living room and sip a cup of perfectly brewed coffee whilst I am still in my robe. I, Sookie Stackhouse, am not one of those people who needed to make the morning commute to my work place, mainly because I don’t have one, unless ‘socialite’ or ‘rich girl’ is actually a profession. Granted, sometimes being a Stackhouse woman does feel like a full time job with no set hours.

I suppose I could have worked for the company, but I’d discovered early on that I had no taste for the family business. When I was little, my father sometimes took me to board meetings. The thing was, he was one of the few people who knew about and sort of accepted my little quirk, as I liked to call it. I am not just any Upper East Side socialite. I am a telepathic Upper East Side socialite. Imagine what that must be like, hearing all the thoughts of the people in this particular circle. Trust me, it’s not fun seeing the most intimate details of Kevin Berger’s affair with one of his married neighbours and then hearing his commentary. There is a reason why I tend to isolate myself in order to try and find a little bit of peace.