Vampire, Interrupted

Vampire, Interrupted is a paranormal romance novel by Lynsay Sands, published in 2008 and part of the Argeneau sequence. Its heroine, Marguerite Argeneau, has lived for seven hundred years and has just acquired the first job of her life.

She is training as a private investigator, and her first case is to find an immortal's mother, which looks simple enough until she wakes up one evening on the wrong end of a sword. That is when she realises she has taken on more than she understood, and it is also when Julius Notte enters the story. The assignment, the sword and the courtship all arrive in the same week of her new working life.

Julius decides to protect her, and not only because somebody has just tried to remove her head: she is his lifemate and he is determined to court her. He has not courted anybody for over five hundred years, which makes the courtship as much of a problem for him as the sword is for her, and the book follows both problems at once.