Happy Release Day! Excerpt and Giveaway: Unrequited by Emily Shaffer

Description:

In the town of Belle Ridge there are doctors, lawyers and teachers... but there is only one vampire. Will Leighton has become an expert in making a life for himself amongst the unsuspecting small-town inhabitants, as the high school history teacher. He has spent hundreds of years crafting an identity and routine that make him feel almost human, but he is always missing that important final element, love.

Ashton Wallace is beautiful, smart, and angry. She was forced into an eternal existence, and now her family has moved her away from everything and everyone she knows. In Belle Ridge she is supposed to finish high school and start her life again, but how do you make plans for the next several centuries?

Will has never met another of his kind, and is immediately intrigued by Ashton. He longs to show her that the perceived vampire lifestyle, so popular in storybooks, is far from reality...but will she let him be a friend and guide in this new existence? Can Ashton accept Will into her life, or will she be led astray by a dark stranger with whom she shares an unknown connection?

EXCERPT

Ashton touched her neck, as she had done many times since that night. The holes had long ago healed. They didn’t even leave a scar. Not a visible scar anyway. Sometimes she wished the marks were still there so the world would see she'd been through something horrible, and maybe then she could be understood and accepted for what she had become. 

“Vampire.” 

She spoke out loud to her bedroom. She'd barely been able to say the word over the past several months. Initially, none of the Wallace’s knew the implications of the attack. How could they? It wasn't until Ashton began to experience physical changes that it became clear something unknown had taken seed. Through research and study, her parents were the first ones to finally realize and accept their daughter was now a creature from storybooks and horror films. It took Ashton far longer to acknowledge she'd not only been bitten by a vampire, but had now become one herself.

The past year had been a trial. There had been the days and nights of agony as her body went through unexpected changes. For a time it felt like her blood was a fiery poison within her veins, and the pain of it coursed through every inch of her body. She would at times be sleepless, and stay awake for days. In other turns she would feel almost drugged and stay in bed for a week. As a child she remembered getting aches in her legs, and her mother always called them “growing pains.” She felt a new type of growing pain now, but it attacked every part of her body, creating havoc. Her eyes somehow seemed to get the worst of it, and for a period of time turned crimson before transitioning back to an arresting shade of green that was far from the soft hazel eyes Ashton had grown up with.

Even so, the pain was less terrifying than the idea she might soon crave the unthinkable: blood. Her parents had also assumed she would require a new diet that could only be harvested from a living creature. Ashton made it clear she would never ever drink blood, because drinking blood would mean she truly was a monster. Still, her parents persisted and tried to persuade her to try this new form of nourishment. Elaine was a nurse, and had brought home a packet of blood from the hospital, assuming her daughter would need it to survive and eventually give in. Ashton wouldn’t be tempted, and had decided she would suffer the consequences…even if it meant she would die. 

It turned out she didn’t need the blood after all. She didn’t need food or water either. She could consume regular fare if she wanted to, but it didn’t have any sort of satisfying. Basically, she could just exist, even if she chose to eat nothing. That was one of the many vampire myths her family debunked since Ashton's change. 

The other early worry had been sunlight. For weeks, Elaine was terrified to let Ashton have any sort of contact with the sun. As far as any of them knew, she would turn to a pile of dust if she went out in daylight. 

Ashton was determined to find out, and if she turned to powder, so be it. This life of eternal living didn’t exactly seem ideal anyway. Armed with her courage, Ashton had walked out into a bright sunny Georgia day, and nothing happened. She felt fine and she looked fine. As far as she could tell, the sun had absolutely no effect on her. Later she would discover that too much sun would make her especially tired, but even so, it was nothing lethal. 

All in all, her life pretty much could go on as usual…except for the fact she would probably never age, and of course, would never die. The uncertainty of exactly what would happen was one of the reasons Ashton had agreed to her parents’ plan of moving and starting fresh. At least in Belle Ridge nobody knew of her strange attack, and nobody knew she was actually nineteen and trying to finish high school. Here she could just pass the next year of life in anonymity and then figure out what to do with the several hundred years after that.

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About the author:

Whether writing stories to entertain her younger siblings, or typing up an essay for a class, Emily Shaffer has been a writer for as long as she can remember. Her stories may have changed from talking cartoon frogs to angsty young adults, but her goal to write a compelling story remains the same. When not writing, she lives in Nashville and enjoys all the music, food, and excitement that city has to offer. Her first novel, the well-received chick-lit title That Time of the Month was self-published on Amazon in 2012. Her latest novel, as the others before, are fueled by diet soda and pie.

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