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  House Call

  Royal Vampire Kingdom

  Ivy Banks

  Copyright © 2019 by Ivy Banks

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. For permission requests, email [email protected]

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events, businesses, companies, institutions, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Even vampires can have hearts in need of intensive care

  Contents

  Royal Vampire Kingdom Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  What To Read Next?

  Also By Ivy Banks

  About the Author

  Royal Vampire Kingdom Prologue

  Many eons ago, the first vampire came into existence when a great warrior named Atticus was given the gift of immortality from an almighty warlock. But with the gift of eternal life came great responsibility. As Atticus developed a thirst for blood, he knew he had to leverage his powers wisely.

  Over time, immortality became lonely, and Atticus embarked on a quest to form his own family. Choosing his “children” based on strength of character, fortitude and the ability to navigate an ever changing world for millennia upon millennia, Atticus created a clan that would be able to rule over all other vampires, creating order and hierarchy among them.

  The Vampire King gave sixteen worthy humans the gift of everlasting life. The chosen soon became the fifteen princes and sole princess of the vampire world. Together they became the Hanover family.

  From these original sixteen individuals, all vampires in the world were created. Though vampires now cover the Earth as rampantly as man and beast, the original Hanover clan remains the most powerful among them.

  This is the love story of Weston Hanover.

  Chapter 1

  His body floated to that place between sleep and wakefulness where he was aware of his surroundings, but a dream was tickling the fringes of his mind.

  Alexandra was there, bathing in the lake, her long black hair capturing diamond-shaped sparkles from the sunlight as she turned to catch his eye alluringly. Slowly, she extended a long finger and gestured for him to join him as he watched her from the stony shore.

  Weston licked his lips, his metallic green eyes raking over her smooth olive skin, watching her trail her fingertips over her ample and exposed breasts, taunting him to follow her lead.

  He stepped forward, opening his mouth to respond, a bulge growing in his pants. The erotic pulsation ached, yet sent a wave of euphoria through him.

  “Dr. Hanover! You’re needed in the ER, stat!”

  Weston sat up from the cot in the on-call room and peered at the panicked intern with a frustrated glance.

  Rolling his neck he tried to get the blood flowing and the kinks out. He had not been truly sleeping, of course. With his schedule, it seemed like he hardly ever did. Still, he did not appreciate the interruption. Not when he had been so close to Alexandra. The dreams were so rare now, so fleeting, that he wanted to experience every single piece of them that he could grasp onto.

  How long has it been since I touched her in my fantasies? How long has it been since I could smell her skin, even in my mind?

  “What is it, Carver?” he asked angrily. “You can’t find the gauze again?”

  Dr. Carver seemed hurt by the question, his nervous brown eyes darting about Weston’s face worriedly.

  “Sir, there’s blood everywhere!”

  “Carver, this is a hospital. You’re a doctor. One of these days, you must accept that blood is a part of the job.”

  His irritation with the intern was reaching epic proportions and he was worried that one day he would be unable to control himself.

  Perhaps today will be the day when I silence this maggot once and for all.

  “Dr. Hanover, it was a huge accident. We need every available doctor!”

  Sighing, Weston allowed his feet to touch the floor, stretching cat-like to follow the hysterical intern into Jackson Memorial Hospital. If it was duty that called, he could not very well devour the inexperienced doctor, tempting as it may be.

  He glanced at his pager as they briskly walked toward the elevators and raised a dark eyebrow.

  He had missed several pages apparently as he had dreamt of his beloved in the on-call room.

  I didn’t hear it chime one time, he thought with mild surprise.

  Weston wasn’t particularly shocked at the discovery; visions of Alexandra always had a hypnotic effect on him. When she came to him, everything else disappeared.

  When she disappeared, everything should have disappeared with her.

  “What happened?” he asked the man-child with the stethoscope looped haphazardly around his neck.

  Carver was hopping from one foot to another as if he was going to relieve himself on the white tiled floor of the private hospital.

  “And stop jumping around, Carver!” he snapped.

  The young doctor immediately froze at the resident’s annoyed tone. It was hardly a secret that the head of surgery found him bothersome and it seemed he did not wish to further Dr. Hanover’s poor opinion of him.

  “Two boats collided in Biscayne Bay – sailboat to speedboat. Ten people seriously injured and one dead.”

  “I’m surprised they aren’t all dead,” Weston commented, stepping off the lift toward the C Wing where the emergency room was situated.

  Boating accidents often resulted in maiming, drowning and loss of limbs. It was going to be a long few days to clean up the aftermath of this accident.

  It is a blessing I don’t require much sleep.

  It was only one of the dozens of reasons which made Weston Hanover one of the most successful doctors to ever grace the staff of Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami Beach. His track record was second to none, losing less patients than any doctor in the history of the hospital.

  They do not know what happens to those patients after I save them however, or else they would be less apt to think me a hero, Weston thought wryly, wetting his lips with a sly tongue.

  One of the reasons he had settled on surgery as a career was his ability to have the pick of the most viable donors in the area. He was never stuck dissatisfied after a feasting because he could pick his prey easily.

  As they walked through the double doors of the emergency room, Weston was almost physically slapped in the face by chaos. Doctors rushing to help those most critically injured, a sea of red-splattered lab coats hovering over gurneys, assisting one another and comforting distraught family members. Nurses offered their assistance running from one gurney to the next, each face a mask of grim concentration. The din was offensive to Weston’s acute sense of hearing and he resisted the urge to place his fair hands about his ears to block out the almost incessant screaming.

  “Weston!” Dr. Fancher whipped a curtain aside and beckoned the handsome doctor to follow. “We have two girls bleeding out on beds two and three. Carver, show him!”

  Like a blanket had slipped over his body, Weston was suddenly enveloped in calm, the uproar slowing to a hum. He was in doctor mode now and there was no room for distraction.

  All he could hear was the unusually slow beat of his heart as everything else vanished except the path directly before him, led by the first-year intern. Weston could see his mouth moving as Carver spoke but he did not
hear, nor care, what the boy had to say.

  The boy could offer nothing which Weston could not do himself, and he did not have time to indulge the young man’s opinions.

  He had lives to save.

  Rounding the corner, he steeled himself for the inordinate mess at beds two and three, trying not to inhale the saccharine scent of plasma as it filled his nostrils.

  As his green eyes poured over the scene, his mind was already forming a plan of attack. He turned to the nearest nurse and quickly surveyed her progress.

  The blonde patient in bed three was bleeding from her chest and unconscious. One nurse was bagging her while another performed chest compressions. Dr. Hanover stepped in, taking the breathing bag from her.

  “Get me six bags of O-neg. How long has she been down?”

  “Since they pulled her from the bay. She’s in and out. Lacerations on her chest and back. Punctured left lung I think.”

  Expertly, Weston’s fingers felt along the young woman’s ribcage and sighed.

  “Hurry. Prepare her for surgery,” he told the nurse firmly, glancing over his shoulder to where Dr. Carver stood, staring at the women in shock.

  “What the hell are you doing?” he snapped, jolting Dr. Carver out of his daze. “Get on her. Clean up her face and find the puncture wound to stop the bleeding,” he ordered, pointing at the bright-eyed, yet delirious looking woman in the neighboring bed.

  Her face was not visible beneath the swelling and blood yet there was something familiar about her, something he could not quite identify.

  “What is your name, love?” he called out to her, eyeing Carver to ensure he was acting and not falling into shock himself.

  Slowly, the woman turned her head toward his voice, her eyes uncomprehending.

  “I was on a sailboat. It was nice,” she told him, a faint smile lacing her lips. “I’ve never seen the middle of a sailboat before.”

  “Carver, she’s in shock,” Weston barked. “Tread carefully; if you snap her out of it too quickly, she could go into cardiac arrest. Nurse Bayer! Get me her vitals stat!”

  The nearby nurse jumped to attention as Carver examined the patient.

  “Can you tell me your name, love?” Weston tried again, glancing at the blonde who was waiting to be prepped for surgery.

  Instinctively, he maintained his pumping in perfect time to the chest compressions being performed.

  Weston smiled encouragingly at the conscious patient and she gazed at him blankly, a soft smile still touching her lips.

  Slowly, Carver wiped the red streaks from her face, checking over her head as he moved. With each stroke of Carver’s hand, Weston’s emerald eyes widened. As Carver cleared her face, Weston’s hand went slack on the bag and he felt his jaw drop, recognizing the violet eyes of the traumatized woman.

  Alexandra!

  “Doctor!”

  A swoosh filled his ears and Weston became aware of the patient slipping away under his fingers. Like a clanging of alarm bells, reality came stunningly back to punch him in the gut.

  The nurse picked up chest compressions as he continued to bag the unconscious blonde, but his stare fixated on the raven-haired woman who held his eyes.

  “She’s got multiple contusions on her head, Dr. Hanover. She’s going to need surgery,” Carver announced urgently.

  Weston could not answer, his vocal cords stolen, as he continued to watch the woman.

  It is Alexandra. She has returned to me. I knew she would come back.

  “Dr. Hanover! What should I do?”

  Reluctantly, he pulled his eyes away and stared balefully at the intern.

  “Book an OR and page Dr. Beltrand.”

  A stretcher was brought into the room and the shocked patient was placed upon it, but she seemed unable to tear her eyes away from Weston.

  She recognizes me, too. Can you hear me, my love?

  As the staff began to wheel her away, her throaty voice called back to him.

  “Lexie. My name is Lexie.”

  Chapter 2

  It had taken all night to get the catastrophe under control. Two more victims of the crash had died throughout the night and Weston desperately wanted to find Lexie, but every time he tried to check in on her progress, he was called to tend to someone else. It took every ounce of his resolve to finally leave the others to fend for themselves.

  She cannot die. She will not die. I have lost her once already. I will not allow it to happen again.

  The pale light of morning was beginning to slip through the glass skylights of the hospital, and while Weston was not affected by the weak rays of sunshine, he longed for the cloak of darkness. It was what made him feel safest.

  It was almost six o’clock in the morning and Weston was scheduled to be off duty at seven, but he knew he would not be going anywhere until he saw his beloved.

  “A girl was admitted into the ER last night with the boating accident. I cannot find her in the patient manifest,” he told the head nurse. “She went into surgery around midnight with Beltrand.”

  “Name?” Nurse Carson asked, her fingers posed over the keyboard.

  She smiled up at the handsome doctor alluringly and Weston suppressed a shudder. Nurse Carson had a reputation for being a man-eater, and it was no secret that he was top of her list for entrees. She was a middle-aged woman, attractive in a trashy, once-surfer girl kind of way, but the thought of touching his lips to her throat was deplorable.

  The thought of touching anyone but Alexandra has only become bearable in the past five hundred years. And she has returned to me. There will never be another woman.

  “Lexie. That is all she offered. She was in a great deal of shock.”

  The head nurse punched the name in and peered thoughtfully at the screen.

  “Alexandra Pointneuf. She’s out of surgery and in ICU right now.”

  Weston was already flying toward the A Wing, bounding up the center staircase.

  “Great work tonight, Wes,” the chief of staff called as Weston flew past him. “Care to join me for breakfast at the club?”

  “I can’t this morning, Charles. I have to follow up with the patients from the crash.”

  The Chief scoffed, yelling after the senior resident’s retreating back.

  “That is why we have underlings, Wes! They can handle it!”

  “Someone has to oversee the underlings,” he laughed with mirth he did not feel.

  Charles retorted something, but Weston heard nothing with his vision tunnel-focused on one thing: Alexandra. He did not even know how he had managed to make it through the night after seeing her. A hundred years ago even, he would have burnt down the hospital before being kept from his mate.

  Weston had singlehandedly been responsible for saving at least four of the accident victims, but he had no idea how he had managed to do it with his mind so consumed.

  The image of Alexandra was emblazoned in his brain and while he worked robotically, he felt something growing in him which he had not felt in literally eons.

  Of course, it can’t be Alexandra, not truly. But what if it is…somehow? After all this time, why can I not hope? They share the same name, the same eyes and face…

  He used his access card to enter the intensive care unit and hurried toward the nurse’s station.

  “Where is Alexandra Pointneuf? Which room?” he asked and the nurse told him.

  Without so much as a thank you, he stole through the almost empty hallway of the early morning and made his way to room 40E.

  He paused in the doorway, suddenly unable to breathe.

  Lexie lay asleep in the bed, her head wrapped in white bandages, her luxuriant black hair shaved off. She seemed to be having a pleasant dream as her full lips turned upward at the corners.

  Silently, Weston slipped toward her, taking in her surreal beauty despite the beating her body had taken the previous night.

  She will be out of intensive care soon, he thought as he approached. His hands reached for her face as if poss
essed. He would never normally dream of putting his palms on a patient so lovingly, but this was Alexandra.

  Lexie. Her name is Lexie now. You must remember.

  His fingertips traced the delicate lines of her face as if he needed to commit her to memory.

  Oh, my love, it has been too long. Why have you stayed away so long?

  As if she had heard his silent call, her eyes fluttered opened and she sighed weakly.

  “Am I dead?” she asked, her voice hoarse.

  Weston chuckled.

  “No, my lo—,” he corrected himself. “Lexie. You are very much alive.”

  Her violet eyes lit up with recognition.

  “I know you,” she breathed and Weston realized his fingers still stroked her face, but he could not pull himself away.

  He nodded eagerly.

  “Yes,” he told her. “You know me.”

  Suddenly, a flash of concern flew through her face.

  “Why are you touching me?” she whispered, fear beginning to creep into her expression.

  It was enough to set Weston back and he stared at her hopefully.

  “It has been so long since I’ve seen you,” he told her quietly. “I can’t help myself.”

  “You… you are the doctor. Oh my God! How long have I been asleep? Was I in a coma?”

  She struggled to sit up, looking around wildly, but Weston gently restrained her, disappointment washing over him like a tidal wave.

  She doesn’t know me. She only remembers me from last night as her doctor.

  “Shh, shh,” he whispered softly. “You have not been in a coma. You were in an accident.”

  Horror overwhelmed Lexie’s fine features and her black eyebrow shot up.

  “My friends!” she cried. “Where are my friends? Are they okay?”

  Weston swallowed quickly.