Demon Lover

by Heather Guerre

  Demon Lover

  Heather Guerre

  Copyright © 2020 by Heather Guerre

  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 author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Epilogue

  Also by Heather Guerre

  1

  For the third night in a row, Autumn Havener woke alone in her bed, basking in the afterglow of what had been an incredible sleep-orgasm. Each night had been a different dream, a different dream lover, but the outcome was always the same—a climax so mind-blowing she woke up gasping and writhing.

  The first night, she’d dreamt that she’d been captured at sea by a ruggedly handsome pirate and ravished in his quarters belowdecks. For a lawless cutthroat, he’d been surprisingly earnest about consent.

  “Do you accept the covenant of fornication?”

  “What?” His face seemed to shift, his skin flickering between sun-weathered brawn and unearthly blue.

  “Do you agree to this union of flesh?”

  Distracted by the mutability of his face, she hadn’t quite grasped the question. “‘Union of flesh’…?”

  The pirate had the temerity to look slightly annoyed with her. Eyes that had previously been brown suddenly gleamed flame blue. “Do you want to fuck me?” he enunciated impatiently.

  “Oh. Yes, please.”

  His features seemed to settle then, locking into the raw-boned, scarred pirate. “You will forget this conversation,” he told her before he set to a thorough ravishing.

  But she hadn’t forgotten. The next night, her dream lover had been a nomadic barbarian king, dressed in animal pelts, wearing a sword. He’d captured her from her peaceful, pastoral village and taken her to his tent as a war prize.

  Again, the barbarian king had been unexpectedly concerned about consent, refusing to rip her simple shepherdess’s robes off of her quivering body until she’d assured him that she accepted the covenant of fornication.

  The third night, her subconscious had flipped the script, making Autumn the aggressor. She’d been an evil sorceress who’d captured the golden hero sent to destroy her, and turned him into her helpless sex slave.

  “Do you accept the covenant of fornication?” the noble knight asked as she chained him to her bed.

  “Dude, what do you think?” She began to unlace his breeches.

  “I need you to tell me.”

  Autumn sighed impatiently. “Yes. I consent. Do you?”

  He blinked, taken aback. “What?”

  “Do. You. Consent?”

  “Do I consent?”

  She raised her eyebrows, waiting, her hands poised at the laces of his breeches.

  He squinted at her, clearly confused. “Uh. Yes.”

  “Good. Now look angry. You’re my unwilling victim, remember?”

  “Right.”

  Autumn lay in her bed, remembering the way the honorable knight had fought to resist her sorcerous allure. In the end, his body had betrayed him, and he’d succumbed to pleasure as she rode him to her own crashing climax.

  The dreams had to be her subconscious’s way of telling her that her current dry spell (eighteen months, to the day) had gone on for far too long. The problem was, Autumn wasn’t emotionally equipped for casual sex, so she wasn’t going to find relief in a hookup. And the shambles of her life meant that she didn’t feel like suitable girlfriend material, either. So, until she got her life back on track, it was nothing but her battery-operated boyfriend and filthy dreams.

  Thank god for the dreams. They gave her more than a vibrator did, leaving her with the bone-deep satisfaction that came from good sex—the kind of sex usually had with another person. It was probably because they felt so real. Instead of the slowly fading impression of an impossible scenario, the dreams felt more like memories. Savoring the feeling, she drifted back into a dreamless sleep.

  The harsh light of morning was a sobering reminder of just how deeply unsatisfied Autumn was. She sat up, pulling the blankets around her shoulders, and stared bleakly at her surroundings. A year and a half ago, she’d been living in a renovated loft in Chicago’s Loop with the man she thought she’d marry, while helping that same man build the company that had turned him from a scruffy, broke grad student into a multi-millionaire.

  Somewhere in the five years after meeting each other, Dylan had changed. Instead of the shy, brilliant, kindhearted computer scientist she’d fallen in love with, he’d become an entitled, arrogant prick of a CEO. Entitled enough to think he deserved as many women as he could get, arrogant enough to think she’d forgive him once she found out. He’d been wrong.

  Now Autumn lived alone in a spider-infested studio apartment in Back of the Yards. Her only window overlooked an alley crowded with dumpsters. She’d been too proud to keep working at Dylan’s company, so instead of managing the visual branding for the fastest growing software company in the United States, she was stuck designing direct mailers for a poorly funded, badly managed non-profit that nobody had ever heard of.

  With a sigh, she dragged herself out of bed and started getting dressed for another miserable day at a job she hated with coworkers she could barely tolerate. The Weldon Hope Foundation was ostensibly a charity devoted to funding medical research for genetic birth defects. As a graphic designer, Autumn had no access to the foundation’s accounting, but she suspected that things weren’t exactly on the up and up with the cashflow. The whole place was so badly managed that its continued operation was somewhat of a mystery. The only rational explanation Autumn could come up with was that the Weldon Hope Foundation was not interested in actually funding anything, and that it only existed as a front for its wealthy founder—Harold Weldon—to illegally shift money around from his various corporate enterprises.

  Regardless, after the way things ended with Dylan—loudly and bitterly—she’d had to find a new job without the benefit of a good reference from her last six years of employment. Of all the places she’d applied, interviewed, pleaded, and begged, the Weldon Hope Foundation had been the only one to offer a job.

  It’s not forever, she told herself, staring dispiritedly in the mirror as she brushed her teeth. Yes, her current workplace was a dysfunctional house of cards, but she was closing in on two years of employment there as the principal designer. If she could stick it out for another year or so, she’d probably be able to jump ship to a much better company, with better pay, and better management.

  For now, she had to resign herself to an interminable future spent sharing a windowless office with Bitchy Therese, fixing the endless mistakes of Incompetent Colton, and dodging the persistent flirtation of Creepy Kyle.

  At least it was Friday.

  Even so, the day went no different than any other.

  Therese made a thousand passive-aggressive comments that Autumn pretended not to notice. Colton sent proofs over to the printer that had a major misspelling and some photoshop fuckery that resulted in a stock model with three hands. Kyle cornered her in the break room with an endless monologue about his brother’s wife’s dad’s boat and how maybe someday Autumn would want to go boating with him, he can borrow it any time and they could spend the day on the lake, he’d bet she looked great in a bikini, and they could bring a bunch of sunblock a
nd beer and just… have a good time, wink.

  The supposed marketing manager—one of Harry Weldon’s useless nephews—tended to show up one day a week, and never for the full day. Someone must’ve threatened to cut off his trust fund, because he was in his office on Monday, constantly calling Autumn in to answer trivial questions that even a stranger off the street could have answered.

  At the end of the day, Autumn sat at her desk, listening to her coworkers as they shut down their computers, gathered their things, and left the building. If she lingered at her desk for a little longer, she was less likely to run into Kyle waiting for the train. Within ten minutes, she was entirely alone in the building. All the other employees at the Weldon Hope Foundation left work the exact minute that the clock struck quitting-time. As well they should, Autumn reasoned.

  When she’d worked for Dylan, she’d put in hours upon hours of overtime perfecting every microscopic detail of Apollo Technologies’ visual presence. In fact, before he’d officially hired her on, Autumn had designed the company logo, vastly improved the website design, and created professional letterhead and business cards—all without receiving a single penny in return. She hadn’t expected anything. She’d done it because she cared about his success and believed in his talent. And sure enough, as soon as Dylan implemented her cohesive, crisp designs, things started to take off. Shortly after, Dylan asked her to join the company full-time. With visions of their future as a love-synced power couple, Autumn had happily accepted. And for nearly six years, things had been amazing.

  Or so she’d thought. She had no way of knowing how long Dylan’s cheating had been going on, or how many other women there’d been. In the eighteen months since Autumn had discovered his infidelity and left him, he’d replaced her in every way. Apollo Technologies had a hotshot new Brand Manager straight out of Harvard Business school. Dylan had an unbelievably beautiful new girlfriend straight out of the pages of Maxim. And Autumn had nothing.

  On that depressing thought, she pushed away from her desk and made her way out of the building. The sky was dark, but the city was bright and bustling. Thanksgiving was nearing, and Christmas was little more than a month away. All the holiday cheer seemed like a personal affront to Autumn, who had nothing to celebrate, and nobody to celebrate with.

  Friday night stretched ahead of her, empty of plans or company. When Autumn had left Dylan, their friends had—without explicitly saying it—taken his side. After all, he was the genius computer scientist well on his way to becoming a billionaire. Autumn was a nobody with a fine arts degree and a chip on her shoulder.

  She returned to her empty apartment with a bag of Thai takeout. In her old life, she would have never eaten takeout in bed. But in her current life, her bedroom and her living room were one in the same, and her bed had no choice but to moonlight as a couch. Propping pillows into a comfortable backrest, she turned on her TV on and resumed the low-budget sci-fi series she’d been watching over the last couple weeks. She opened her takeout and dug in. Curry and spaceships were as close as she got to happiness these days.

  The ugliness of that realization swept away the small measure of contentment she’d managed to find, and she sat in her bed, staring blankly into her takeout container. Bleakness warred with anger until all she was left with was exhaustion. Defeated, she turned off the TV and laid down, pulling the blankets over her head.

  “Do you accept the covenant of fornication?”

  A handsome, sweaty stable hand loomed over her in the hayloft. The ties on his rumpled tunic had been pulled open, revealing a broad expanse of well-muscled chest. Autumn trailed her fingertips along his collarbone.

  “Why do you always ask me that?” She licked the salty taste of his sweat from her fingertips.

  The stable hand did a double take. “What?”

  “You keep asking. I say yes every time. Can’t we just agree that as long as I keep dreaming you up, I’m obviously more than happy to have sex with you?”

  “You—you remember me?” His face flickered. Formerly gray eyes gleamed electric blue. Golden skin turned the color of chicory flowers. Faint tattoos wrapped around his throat, disappeared beneath the cover of his tunic.

  “I’ve been a lucid dreamer since I was a kid.” She squinted as the flickering of his features intensified. Tightly cropped brown hair transitioned into shaggy, curling locks of cobalt blue. Long, pointed ears poked out from his hair. Small golden hoops glinted along the edges of his ears. “I can often tell when I’m dreaming—and I always remember my dreams.”

  His eyes widened with alarm. His grip on her arms tightened. “You’re not supposed to remember!” More and more of the golden-skinned stable hand fell away, revealing a monster. Naked, pallid blue skin stretched over a huge frame, ropy with sinewy muscle. Faint tattoos ran over his skin in angular, abstract patterns created from complicated, pointed sigils. Midnight-colored claws curled from his fingertips. His face was broad and hard as an anvil, with a blunt nose and eye-teeth that jutted like small tusks from his lower jaw. A thick, golden hoop pierced his septum. Curling, satyr-like horns protruded from the wild blue tangle of his hair, just above a pair of long, pointed ears. A sinuous tail twitched behind him, catlike in its agitation.

  Autumn blinked. “Oh boy,” she said uncertainly.

  The creature looked down at himself. “What the—” The surrounding hayloft flickered and faded just as the handsome stable hand’s features had.

  In a few seconds, Autumn was back in her apartment, laying in her own bed, wide awake.

  But the creature was still there. The physical reality of his presence was undeniable—she felt the heat of his body, felt his weight pressing her down into her cheap mattress. She stared at his harsh, brutish face, felt the razor touch of his claws on her arms.

  A scream rose into her throat—

  The monster stared back at her, utterly gobsmacked. Autumn was terrified, but the monster had the stunned look of someone who’d been hit in the head with a mallet. When she finally opened her mouth, instead of screaming, shocked laughter burbled out.

  Wild with panic, the monster shoved off of her. “Look away!” he barked, leaping from her bed. He crashed into the nightstand. The lamp, her phone, her stack of books all went crashing to the floor along with the monster’s heavy body as he tripped.

  Autumn bolted upright, nearly helpless with laughter. “What are you—” she gasped for air. “What the hell are—” She couldn’t breathe.

  “You’ve seen nothing! This is a dream!” The monster leapt to his feet and bolted. He only made it one step—the phone cord and the lamp cord were both wrapped around his ankle and they brought him crashing back to the floor like a snared rabbit.

  Autumn doubled over, clutching her sides. She couldn’t breathe. She was blinded by tears.

  “Don’t look at me!” the monster roared, covering his face with on claw-tipped hand while the other struggled to disentangle the cords from his ankle.

  “You’re just—” Autumn gasped for breath, clutching her aching sides. “You’re making it—” She doubled over again. Struggling for composure, she hauled in a breath. “You’re just getting more tangled,” she gasped, grinning like an idiot. She slipped from bed. The monster froze as she approached him. He stared at her from between his fingers. His irises were an unnatural, electric blue, scored with vertical pupils.

  Autumn knelt beside his feet and pushed his hand away so that she could unravel the cords. His feet were paw-like, with his weight borne on claw-tipped toes, while the rest of the foot arched upwards towards a backward-pointing hock. Unlike animal paws, though, his strange blue skin was as smooth as human skin.

  It took Autumn a few seconds to untangle the cords. Her laughter subsided to slightly hysterical giggles. By the time she freed him, she’d gotten her breath back. She sat back, clicked the lamp on, and looked at the bizarre creature.

  He was composed entirely of shades of blue, ranging from the midnight color of his claws and horns, to the cobal
t of his hair, to the ashy cerulean of his skin. Golden piercings winked against the blue—small hoops in his ears, a thicker hoop in septum of his nose, pointed barbells through his nipples. A jagged, blue-black scar ran across his throat from ear to ear. The tattooed lines and runes that ran over his skin seemed to pulse softly with a faint glow. Cobalt hair furred his chest and drew a narrow line down his torso, leading straight to a majestically endowed, human-looking cock, for all that it was blue.

  She’d been staring at his dick for too long, Autumn realized with a start. She tore her gaze back to his face. He’d lowered his hand and was staring at her with a frown that drew his cobalt eyebrows together, giving her the same searching assessment she’d done on him.

  There wasn’t much to see. Autumn was not the kind of woman who turned heads, but neither was she the kind who invited ridicule. She was dark-eyed and dark-haired. Her skin was smooth and even, but had the ghostly pallor of someone who spent all her daylight hours under fluorescent lighting, along with perpetual shadows beneath her eyes. She was a woman of average height and average weight, with a tidy waist, but the kind of voluptuous hips that made buying jeans incredibly frustrating. Her breasts were small, but nicely shaped. Her sable hair was thick and long, but also frizzy and entirely resistant to styling. She wasn’t unhappy with her appearance, but she wasn’t particularly thrilled by it either.

  Grateful for the cover of her nightshirt, she tugged it low to cover her thighs. “So…” she said, fiddling with the cords. “You want to tell me what the hell is going on?”

  The monster’s expression blanked. He shifted his weight to a more dignified sitting position.

  “You’re having a dream.”