CHAPTER FIVE
“Renée, you and your husband are dead to me,” I hissed, massaging my temples with two fingers as I scowled into the vanity mirror in my best friend’s bedroom. “Dead, you hear me?”
She giggled, blindsiding me from behind and spritzing her fruity perfume into my neck. “You’ll thank me when you’ve gotten some nice Italian sex with a nice Italian,” was her response to my serious threat. “Now you smell like you’re ready!”
I whirled away from my reflection, glaring at her. “You’re impossible!”
When I’d called Ren up that morning and asked her if I could come over for dinner, I never would have expected her to phone Paul Marino, one of Lorenzo’s eligible first cousins, and invite him over as well. It was underhanded, it was unwelcome – and it was just like Renée Colette Marino, née Russo.
Sure, Paul was my type – tall, dark and devilishly handsome, and smart, to boot – but I didn’t need to be hooked up right now. Even if I wanted to hook up with him, my pussy felt so raw and beaten up after being with Andrei, I wouldn’t be much of a lay. Besides, Paul was a cop, ergo, a good guy. Good guys generally didn’t fall for women like me. Case in point: Daniel Lawless. Evil guys were the type that went for me. Case in point: A demon lord that went by the name of Andrei Anghelescu.
I tried to tell myself that my reluctance to get hooked up wasn’t because I’d been “claimed” by a demon king – and was only over at the Marino house for sanctuary because said demon had promised to swing by that night for a blowjob – but I was only lying to myself.
“Get your cute little butt downstairs and make nice, Rae Erickson,” Ren ordered, giving me a gentle push toward her bedroom door. I’d been hiding out in here for a while now. “Paul’s a catch and so are you. I’m going to help my baby with the dishes and you are going to get back to the living room and seduce the shit out of Paul, OK? OK.”
“Has anyone ever told you how bossy you are?” I muttered, marching out her room. Renée was the only person – OK, living person – on this planet that had the power to push me around. Older than me by a year, she’d always acted like she had a decade over me and often assumed an annoying big-sister role.
“I’m a regular dominatrix,” she replied from behind me, and I smiled, approaching the stairs.
Back in the living room, Paul was kicking back on Lorenzo’s beat-up leather recliner watching some classic football game his cousin had recorded. His big Converse-covered feet were on the cluttered coffee table and a bottle of Heineken was in his hand.
“Hey,” I said, forcing some cheer into my voice and sitting on the couch nearest to him. It wasn’t his fault I wasn’t in the mood to be pushed into his lap.
“You OK?” he asked, taking his feet off the table and sitting up. “You look flushed.”
“Just the heat,” I replied, fanning myself for good measure. It was hot. “So how’s work?”
I felt guilty for not asking him earlier. Dinner had been a forced affair because, like a sullen teen, I’d wordlessly poked at my plate of Lorenzo’s scrumptious spaghetti and meatballs, refusing to make Renée’s matchmaking any easier. Conversation had passed over my head while Renée shot daggers at me that I could feel even though I barely glanced at her.
“Oh, you know, the usual,” Paul told me, guzzling down the rest of his beer before slamming the empty can on the table. “I’m practically on desk duty.” Tacoma Bay wasn’t exactly crime free but cops here didn’t get a lot of real action.
“Sucks,” I remarked sincerely, and he gave me a curious look.
“What about you? How’s the book going?”
I almost asked him what the hell he was on about when I – thankfully – remembered that everyone I knew in Tacoma Bay thought I was an eccentric nomadic writer. It was better than telling them I stalked married men in exchange for four figures or so in my bank account. No one would understand why little old Rae Erickson, who’d gone to business school before her poor father mysteriously passed away, was now a private investigator specializing in suspected infidelity cases. They wouldn’t get what Renée got – that it was personal for me.
“Slow,” was my response to Paul’s question.
“Yeah?” he went, his green eyes boring into me. “What’s it about this time?”
“Angels and…demons.” I reddened, averting my eyes. Now why had I said that? Because that’s what’s on your mind, my inner voice helpfully pointed out. Not to mention in your pants.
“Interesting. I think I read about half of Dan Brown’s book before I got bored.” Paul leaned back in his seat, brushing aside a few rampant dark curls out of his face. “But your book’ll probably be as fascinating as you are.”
Paul Marino was sweet. Too sweet for me.
“Did Lorenzo and Ren tell you I was desperate for a good lay?” I asked, sighing heavily.
He choked on something imaginary and straightened up. “What?”
“Because I’m not. You seem really nice, Paul, and any other time, I would’ve wanted to sleep with you. You’re sexy. Totally fuckable.” I paused as he choked again. “It’s just that I’m going through something personal and I don’t need any complications in my life and you would definitely be a complication.”
“Rae,” he said, after he’d collected himself, “I, uh, think there’s been a… misunderstanding.”
“What did they say about me?”
“That you’ve been having a tough time recently. I’m just here as a friend.” His eyes – so identical to his cousin’s – were sincere. “At least, I’d like to be a friend. I mean, I’ve only met you a couple times and those few times, we didn’t even speak. But you seemed real cool.”
Why can’t I have a good guy? I thought, breaking into a rueful smile.
I was going to say that I’d really, really like that, when Ren ambled into the room, her eyebrows doing that thing they did when she was ready to burst with excitement. I was going to have to let her down easy if she was keyed up about Paul and me.
“Rae, you didn’t tell me you had a visitor,” she said breathlessly, looking down at me with animated eyes. She gave Paul an apologetic look. “Sorry, hon. This one’s real competition.”
“What are you on about?” I asked, getting to my feet.
It was at that precise moment that I saw Andrei casually standing in the entrance to the living room like he belonged there, a bottle of beer in his hand and the darkened look of unmistakable lust on his face.
*
“If you hurt my friends, I will find someone that can kill you,” I hissed at Andrei as menacingly as I possibly could in the privacy of Renée and Lorenzo’s matchbox-sized downstairs toilet. We were practically pressed up against each other, something that was doing dangerous things to my nervous system.
From the unruffled look on Andrei’s face, he didn’t find me the least bit menacing. “Now why would I hurt your friends? They gave me beer.”
He didn’t look like he was here to kill people. In a royal purple cashmere sweater and black jeans with his long hair hanging loose, he looked…normal. Like he’d genuinely come over to hang out on a Saturday evening.
Looks could be so damn deceiving.
“Why else would you be here?” I snapped, folding my arms across my chest and glaring at him.
“I believe I scheduled your mouth around my cock for tonight.” He reached out and carelessly flicked a strand of my hair out of my face. “Hiding out at your friend’s house was a big waste of time.”
I couldn’t believe he’d said the first part. I squeezed my eyes shut, breathing in deeply. When I opened them, he was standing right in front of me, his intense blue eyes boring into mine.
“I enjoy defiling you, Rainelle. You have to have realized that by now.”
Oh my God, I thought, heat engulfing my cheeks and other places on my body. I would never get used to how blunt he was about what he did to me.
“Don’t you have anything better to do? Like, I don’t know, rule a dark and evil underworld kingdom?”
His eyes flickered with annoyance. “You ask too many questions.” And he silenced me with his mouth against mine.
His lips weren’t the only things on me; his hands were slipping up the hem of my dress, dancing up my belly and quickly finding the lace cups of my bra.
“Mm,” I murmured into his mouth, fisting the front of his sweater. Even if incubus seduction didn’t work on me, Andrei seduction was proving to be a force to be reckoned with. “I want you so bad.” It sounded like a cheesy line from a teenage porno flick and I was instantly mortified that it had come out of my mouth.
“You already have me,” Andrei groaned, hoisting me up onto the porcelain rim of the sink behind me. “Here. Now. Open up for me.”
“Yes,” I hissed, hardly able to believe that I was about to be fucked in my best friend’s downstairs toilet while she, her husband and his cousin obliviously sat in the living room watching TV.
The only thing I could say was that I was glad East Coast weather had made me wear this stupidly short dress. All Andrei had to do was hike the skirt up, move my panties aside and fuck me senseless.
Which he did.
He had the condom on in seconds – no doubt one of the perks of being a demon – and was balls-deep inside me in a flash, surprising a cry out of my mouth. My legs were coiled around his waist and then our lips were locked, his tongue slowly fucking my mouth in contrast to the quick, sharp thrusts of his cock.
In, out, in, out, in, out… Andrei felt so…right inside me, so deliciously perfect. I clenched around his length, dragging a muffled curse from his mouth as his grasp around me tightened in answer.
I couldn’t deny it any longer: Being with him was the first time I’d ever felt so fully sexually awakened. I’d had lots of sex before Andrei but, looking back, it was as if all I’d been doing was rolling around with Ken dolls. It wasn’t even because Andrei was a demon – although that probably factored into it – it was because of the sheer animalistic power he exerted, and when he was inside me, he owned me.
That’s so sexist, my inner voice chided. She was a die-hard feminist.
“Come for me,” he murmured in the low, slightly-accented and sexy voice he used when he was close to orgasm himself. He was moving around inside me, his cock hitting every sensitive inch of my inner walls and I was seconds away from doing what he’d told me to…
I moaned, bowing my back as white-hot, liquid heat bathed me and I came in a series of spurts.
But Andrei wasn’t done.
“Milk me dry,” he ordered, grunting when I squeezed him inside me. He sucked on my bottom lip. “That’s it. Take my cock. Make me come.”
“I’m…going…to…come,” I gasped, still not used to climaxing so soon after the first time.
“Do it.”
I did it. My second orgasm was only made better by the fact that Andrei was playing with my clit, teasing that little swollen, erect knob and sending jolts of electricity through my body.
When it was over and I made a weak attempt at looking like I hadn’t just got some under my best friend’s roof, Andrei said, “We’re leaving now.”
I narrowed my eyes at his reflection in the miniscule mirror, my strength returning to me in full force. “Are we now?” I snorted. “You need to take a heavy dose of go-fuck-yourself before you even so much as think of ordering me around again like some lackey.”
“I am far from satisfied,” Andrei said, pointedly ignoring my rebuff. He punctuated his sentence by pressing himself into my back and I felt his growing erection dig into my lower back. He was far from satisfied, all right.
I spun around and it was now pressed into my front. Bad idea. It was hard to think in this position, hard to remember that I wasn’t supposed to want this.
“You will not spend another minute with that man,” he said, his voice low and menacing. It was obvious that he meant Paul but that wasn’t what had me so puzzled. No, it was the fact that he almost – almost – sounded humanly jealous, like a possessive boyfriend.
“You have no claim to me,” I told him, forcing myself to meet his eyes. “I just met you last weekend! Even you have to see how ridiculous this is.”
He cupped my chin in one hand. “The fact that I’ve fucked you more than once means that I do, indeed, have a claim to you,” he stated, running the pad of his thumb across my kiss-swollen lower lip. “Incubi do not sleep with the same person more than once. If they do, it means that they have staked a claim to that individual. You’re a smart woman. I think you know what I’m getting at.”
The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. “Why do you want me?”
“Because sex with you is not just for feeding,” Andrei replied, his gaze sweeping over my body, “and you enjoy it. Not because I’ve beguiled you, but because you genuinely want to fuck me. Like I said, after existing for a billion years, that is…refreshing.”
I blushed furiously. “I don’t enjoy it. I don’t know what’s happening to me but I know that this” – I motioned between him and me – “is wrong.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes,” I said, bothered by the wild accusation that I enjoyed sex with a demon. “And just by the way, you don’t have to beguile anyone into sleeping with you. You have to know how hot you are as a human.”
His lips quirked into a half-smile, which only made him look infinitely better. “You think I’m hot?”
I rolled my eyes at him.
“Granted, but that’s not what I meant,” he said seriously. “Even if I don’t have to outright seduce a woman, they’re usually comatose when I’m through with them.”
Something clenched in my belly. “And I suppose you don’t kill.”
“That would be sloppy of me.”
“Then how would you explain –”
“Enough.” His face became an impassive mask as he stepped back from me. “We’ll talk later,” he ground out, and he vanished into thin air.
I had no idea how I was going to explain his vanishing act to my friends. The living room was practically adjacent to this toilet.
***
There were already flowers at my father’s grave and they’d obviously been put there recently. Kneeling before his tombstone, I picked the bouquet up – they were dahlias and I got the distinct impression that they were more expensive than my roses – and sniffed them before putting them back and arranging them beside my bunch.
“Looks like you still have a few admirers, Daddy,” I murmured, slowly tracing my fingertips over the Christoph Raymond Erickson indented on the marble stone.
I knew most of the townspeople had loved my father – we were sort of a close-knit community – but he’d never been the same after Lauren’s disappearance and, as a result, had pushed most of his friends away. They had, of course, stubbornly continued to reach out, especially for his little daughter’s sake but the only people my father had truly communicated with were fellow hunters.
Like Teddy Bunting.
I hadn’t seen Teddy in years but my earliest memory of him was one evening shortly after Lauren’s disappearance, when he’d come over toting old books with weird symbols on it, spouting interesting things about witches and wards and “banishings”. Teddy’s wife was a witch and, if I’d heard correctly from my hideout under my father’s desk in his study, knew how to put up wards to keep supernatural creatures away from our house. If that was what my father wanted.
“No,” he’d told Teddy, “I want them to come here. Or I’ll go to them. I won’t hide behind magic like a coward.”
“Think about Rainelle,” Teddy had said, his raspy voice grim.
“I am. She’ll grow up knowing how to go after demons. All of them.”
That was what he’d thought. Instead, I grew up to sleep with the king of them all.
Sighing heavily, I plopped onto the grass on his grave, plucking a tuft of it and scattering it over the flowers.
“I know you must be disappointed in me,” I whispered, “and I don’t blame you. I couldn’t even kill Lauren for you.” I paused, considering this. “Is that what you would’ve wanted? Were you trying to kill her all that time? I wish I’d listened to you about this shit, instead of burying my head in the sand like a damn idiot.” I let out a bitter laugh. “She had a son with that creature. Can you believe that?” The tang of salt was suddenly in my mouth and I violently wiped at my eyes, refusing to break down completely. “I don’t want to believe that you died still loving her. I want to believe that you’d buried her before I buried you.”
Someone cleared their throat behind me.
“You don’t have to do that, Ren,” I said, my voice calm, and she sat beside me in a cloud of black chiffon and Chanel No. 5.
“I looked for you at Mass,” she said softly, placing a lone red rose on the flowers before her.
“I should’ve told you I wouldn’t be coming.”
I was scared to death of being struck down by a lightning bolt for being a demon-lover and trying to set foot on holy ground. It was irrational but I was equally afraid that Father Brady would point one wizened finger at me and cry “Unclean!” in front of everyone. I had an active imagination.
“Everything OK?” Renée asked, and I could feel her eyes fixed on me.
“I’m fine, Ren. I just...hate coming back here.”
She sighed. “Oh, Rae. I know you do. I understand.”
No, I thought bitterly. You don’t.
“Is your friend still here? Andrei, right?”
“No. He’s gone,” I replied.
“Weird guy. Weird but hot. I mean, what was up with that thing about doors?”
I’d spun a story about Andrei’s phobia of doors and how he’d had to abruptly leave through the toilet window last night. It seemed more believable than telling them that he’d teleported out of the house. The fact that he’d come in through the front door didn’t seem to register to them. Heineken probably had something to do with that.
I gave Renée a sideways glance. “You’re married.”
“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean I’m blind,” she quipped, her voice high-pitched. “Jesus, Rae, and we were trying to hook you up with Paul. I feel stupid. Why didn’t you tell me you had some hot guy hanging all over you?”
“Paul said he wanted friendship,” I muttered, “and I don’t have Andrei. He’s just an acquaintance.”
“Sure. An acquaintance you did the nasty with in my toilet.”
I jumped. I couldn’t help it. “What?”
Renée laughed into the cool morning air. “I’m not stupid, hon. Lorenzo and I have enough sex for me to know what it smells like!”
I blushed, finally looking at her. “I’m so sorry, Ren. I swear, I hadn’t meant for that to happen and he really is just a person I vaguely know so –”
“Babe,” she interjected, holding a hand up, “I love you, OK? I’m just mad that it looks like you’re keeping secrets from me and I’m supposed to be your best friend.”
Now I felt guilty. I looked away. “I wish I could tell you everything.”
“Then tell me,” she gently prodded, taking my hands in hers. “Please, Rae. I want to be your friend. I want to be your sister.”
How could I tell her my mother was still alive but hadn’t aged a day, or that I had a half-brother who was also a half-demon?
“You’re my only family, Ren,” I murmured, tears collecting at my eyes again. I squeezed her hands. “And I love you, too.”
But I couldn’t tell her everything. So I chose to tell her about the safest thing I knew and something I hadn’t thought about in a little while: Mooning over Daniel Lawless.