Genre: Erotic Paranormal Romance Heat Level: 3 Word Count: 26, 000 ISBN: 978-0-3695-1536-0 Editor: Clara Morgenstern Cover Artist: Jay Aheer

Love Me Forever by Deborah Dickey

Heat Level 3
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Dr. Wendy O’Connor has dedicated her life to saving others. But when Xander Thorne is brought into her trauma bay, she knows immediately there’s something impossible about him.

Xander is a five-hundred-year-old vampire with a violent past and enemies who have never forgotten him. Wendy should fear him, but the attraction between them is impossible to resist. And for a man who has spent centuries taking lives, her compassion awakens something he thought was long dead.

But loving Xander puts Wendy directly in the path of his enemies, and staying by his side may demand the ultimate sacrifice.

She’s spent her life fighting death. Loving him may mean surrendering to it.


Excerpt:

Royal London Hospital, Whitechapel, January 2026

The fluorescent lights of the Royal London Hospital didn’t hum; they buzzed with a frantic, rhythmic intensity that mirrored the adrenaline in Dr. Wendy O’Connor’s veins. It was 3:14 AM, the hour of the wolf, when the thin veil between life and the inevitable often frayed to its breaking point.

Wendy stood at the scrub sink, her hands moving through the mechanical ritual of sterilization. She was thirty-two, with dark circles under her eyes that no amount of caffeine could mask, yet her hands remained the steadiest things in the building. As a trauma surgeon in one of London’s busiest emergency departments, she had seen every iteration of the human breaking point. She had seen the aftermath of terror, the fragility of bone, and the stubborn persistence of the soul.

But she had never seen anything like the man in Trauma Room 4.

"Stats are dropping, Dr. O’Connor," Nurse Miller called out, her voice taut. "BP is 60 over palpable. Heart rate is… erratic."

Wendy stepped into the room, her gloved hands held up. On the table lay a man who looked less like a patient and more like a fallen marble statue. A frantic passerby had brought him in, claiming that a hit-and-run driver had struck him in the shadows of an alleyway near Aldgate.

The man was breathtakingly handsome in a way that felt aggressive—sharp, high cheekbones, a jawline that could cut glass, and hair the color of a moonless night. But it was his skin that unnerved her. It wasn’t just pale; it was translucent, like fine porcelain, and unnaturally cold.

"He’s not responding to the saline bolus," Wendy muttered, leaning over him. She pressed her fingers to his carotid artery.

There was nothing.

No thrum of life. No rhythmic push of blood. She frowned, moving her fingers higher, then lower. "Miller, check the monitor. This lead must be loose."

"Lead’s secure, Doctor," Miller replied, her brow furrowed. "But the EKG… it’s just noise. It’s not a sinus rhythm I’ve ever seen."

Wendy looked at the screen. The green line didn't spike in the familiar QRS complex. It shivered. It looked like a seismic reading of an earthquake happening miles underground.

"Start a line of O-negative," Wendy commanded, reaching for her trauma shears. "We need to find the source of the internal bleed. He’s too cold. Get the Bair Hugger, we need to bring his core temp up."

As she sliced through his expensive, charcoal-grey wool coat—which felt strangely heavy, as if woven with silver thread—she gasped. Underneath the coat, the man wore a silk shirt that was soaked in blood. But as she peeled the fabric away, the wound she expected to find—a gash, a puncture, a crush injury—wasn't there.

Instead, there was an intricate lattice of silver scars across his chest, and in the center of his sternum, a fresh, jagged tear that seemed to be closing even as she watched it.

"That’s impossible," Wendy whispered.

Suddenly, the patient’s hand shot up.

It was a movement faster than the human eye could process. One moment his arm was limp at his side; the next, his cold, iron-strong fingers were clamped around Wendy’s wrist.

The room went silent. The monitors let out a long, flat tone.

The man’s eyes snapped open. They weren't the dull glaze of a dying man. They were a piercing, electrified silver, burning with an ancient, predatory intelligence.

"Do not," the man rasped, his voice sounding like dry leaves skittering over gravestones. "Waste your medicine on me, Doctor."

Wendy froze. Her heart hammered against her ribs, a stark contrast to the stillness of the man holding her. "Sir, you’ve been in an accident. You’re in shock. I need you to let go so I can save your life."

The corner of the man’s mouth flickered—not a smile, but a grimace of weary amusement. "My life was forfeit five centuries before you drew your first breath."

He sat up in one fluid, silent motion, ignoring the wires and tubes. The nurses backed away, but Wendy stood her ground. She was a doctor of the East End; she had dealt with gang leaders and deluded junkies, but this man radiated a gravity that made the very air in the room feel heavy.

"Who are you?" she asked, her voice remarkably steady despite the primal instinct screaming at her to run.

****

The man looked at her then, really looked at her. He didn't see just a doctor; he saw the fierce compassion in her green eyes, the stubborn set of her jaw, and the warmth of the life force radiating from her skin. For a second, the predatory silver in his eyes softened into something aching and hollow.

"My name," he said, releasing her wrist and leaving a faint, cold bruise behind, "is Xander Thorne. And you, Dr. O’Connor, are far too kind for a world this dark."

****

 

Before she could respond, the power in the trauma bay flickered and died. For three seconds, the room was plunged into total darkness. When the backup generators kicked in with a mechanical groan, the table was empty.

The charcoal coat was gone. The blood-soaked silk was gone.

The only evidence he had ever been there was the lingering scent of ozone and ancient cedarwood, and the faint, disappearing red marks on Wendy’s wrist.

Wendy looked down at the empty EKG monitor, which was now flatlining in earnest. She realized then that she wasn't breathing. She took a ragged lungful of air, her mind racing to categorize the encounter.

"Doctor?" Miller whispered from the corner. "What was that?"

Wendy touched the spot where his hand had been. It was still freezing. "I don't know," she whispered. "But I don't think he’s done with us."

Outside, the London fog pressed against the hospital windows like a living thing, and in the shadows of the ambulance bay, Xander Thorne watched the third-floor window, his heart—still and silent for five hundred years—giving a single, painful twitch.

The hunt had ended. The haunting had begun…

 

The Royal London Hospital, London, 2026

The silver-blue light of a London winter morning was bleeding through the floor-to-ceiling windows of the Royal London Hospital’s Intensive Care Unit. It was 3:15 AM, the hour of the wolf, when the line between life and the hereafter grew perilously thin.

Dr. Wendy O’Connor adjusted her stethoscope, her fingers numb from the hospital’s aggressive air conditioning. She was thirty-two, with a face that patients often described as comforting, though her reflection in the glass showed dark circles that no amount of concealer could hide. She was a woman who lived in the realm of pulses, oxygen saturations, and the frantic, rhythmic beep of cardiac monitors.

"He’s stabilizing, Wendy," a nurse whispered, nodding toward the young man in Bed 4.

Wendy sighed, a small puff of exhaustion. "For now, Sarah. But his heart is tired. We’re just holding back the tide."

She stepped away from the station, her clogs squeaking on the linoleum. She needed air. Not the filtered, recycled breath of the sick, but the cold, damp bite of the East End. She made her way toward the rooftop garden—a sanctuary she’d helped fund—ignoring the elevator in favor of the stairs. She needed the burn in her lungs to remind her she was still alive.

She didn't expect to find someone already there.

The orange glow of the London skyline silhouetted Xander; a man who looked like he had stepped out of an oil painting. He looked as though a Savile Row tailor with a dark streak had dressed him. He was tall, his shoulders broad under a charcoal overcoat that looked expensive enough to pay off Wendy’s student loans.

He didn't turn when she approached. "The city looks different from this height," he said. His voice was a rich, low baritone that vibrated in Wendy’s chest—a sound like cello strings played in a cathedral. "Smaller. Less permanent."

"It’s the perspective," Wendy said, stepping up to the rail, leaving a respectful distance. "Up here, you don't see the traffic or the grime. You just see the lights."

"And the souls," the man added. He turned his head then, and Wendy felt a physical jolt.

He was breathtaking, but in a way that felt dangerous. His skin was the color of moonlight on marble, and his eyes were a piercing, impossible shade of amber. His hair, dark as a raven’s wing, was swept back from a forehead that suggested centuries of thought. He looked thirty, perhaps thirty-five, but there was an ancient stillness to him—a gravity that pulled at the air around him.

"I'm Dr. O'Connor," she said, her professional instinct kicking in. "Are you visiting a patient? It's quite late."

"I am visiting a memory," he replied. He extended a hand, his fingers long and elegant. "Xander Thorne."

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