Sleeping with the Beast: an Adult Paranormal Shifter Romance (The Conduit Series Book 2)

by Conner Kressley

  “We could do some real good here, Charisse. We just have to be patient.”

  I rose to meet him, bridging the gap between us to challenge him, despite being dressed in only my shirt and panties.

  “That’s easy for you to say,” I said, crossing my arms.

  “I’m not sure what you mean,” he said evenly, staring down at me with that infuriating steady calm of his.

  “You know what it means,” I said bitingly. “You’re old, not stupid.” I could feel all the blood rushing to my face as I thought about what happened yesterday. “That pig of a king, the way he looked at me, the stuff he said. And you just agreed. Hell, you basically offered me up on a silver platter!”

  “I did no such thing!” he growled. “This place has antiquated values, Charisse, and I assure you they aren’t all bad. Second, I offered up women who don’t even exist. This is a charade. You know that.”

  I scoffed. “First of all, antique is a word I reserve for furniture and clothing, not to excuse people who treat other people like objects. And second of all, there is nothing imaginary about me!”

  Abram’s nostril’s flared. “I specifically told him that you weren’t on the menu, that you belonged to me!”

  My eyes got wider than those ugly mega earrings that were in fashion for about a week last year, and Abram knew he had misspoke.

  “Listen,” he said, raising his hands slowly.

  “No!” I said. “Just stop. Do you hear yourself right now? Off the menu? I belong to you? Are you serious?” My teeth ground together. “Please tell me that isn’t the way you really think of me.”

  “Of course it isn’t,” he said. But to be honest, there was less atonement in his voice than I would have cared for. “I told you that I’m doing this because I have to.”

  “You have to?” I was angrier than I cared to admit, and I wasn’t in the mood to try and shut myself down, not while I stood in the castle this macho bullshit mentality had built. “You have to treat me like piece of meat? You have to treat me like I don’t matter? Like I’m some two dollar whore who jumped on your cock because I thought you were gonna make it worth my while? You have to do that?”

  “I have to fit in,” he said, and he sounded about as angry with me as I felt with him. “These people live in a different world, Charisse. Women aren’t their equals here. And, though it might churn my stomach to think of it, they wouldn’t respect a man who looked at a woman with anything more substantial than lust in his eyes.” He moved closer to me, a sign of his intention to put an end to this disagreement. “This is a part that I’m playing, nothing more. I promise I won’t let anyone lay a finger on you. And, if I’m being honest, I expected you would understand that. I had hoped you would know me better than this.”

  “Don’t,” I said, but my voice was softer than it had been before. “Don’t pretend like this was something we discussed. And don’t pretend I’m supposed to know everything about you. You lived for nearly two hundred years before we met. The world has changed a lot since you were a kid. How am I supposed to know what your values are? Maybe you think the same way King Archibald does. Maybe, deep in your heart, you don’t see me as an equal, either.”

  He was at me now, his fingers grazing my palm.

  “You know better than that,” he said quietly. “You’re hurt, and you’re lashing out. But you know me, all of me. And you know better than that.”

  I exhaled loudly. “I do.” He was right. Of course he was. I knew him, the true Abram that existed beneath the guise, beneath the beast. He loved me. He valued me. Not only did he see me as an equal, he saw me as his match. “It still hurts to hear you say those things.”

  “I know,” he answered, brushing my lip with his thumb. “But I’m afraid you’re going to have to bear with me. Not for much longer, and I’ll do my best to keep the nonsense in check, but if we’re going to stand a chance of putting a stop to this, I need us to remain where we are.”

  “All this because of one guy.” I sighed. Of course it couldn’t be a normal suicide. Oh, no. It just had to be something supernatural going on. Something to send Satina hurtling back into our lives and giving our vacation a new “purpose.” I bet she was tickled by the whole thing.

  “No,” Abram said, pulling the phone I’d bought him from his pocket. “Not one.”

  He handed it to me, the screen displaying a web page that featured a news story with the headline “Strange Happenings on Quaint Island.”

  “Fifteen people have died in the last two months,” he said. “Every one of them have thrown themselves off the same cliff. Every one of them had the same strange words carved into their foreheads.”

  “She sleeps,” I murmured.

  “Seems fitting, doesn’t it?”

  I ripped my gaze away from the news article to look at him. “What do you mean?”

  Abram cocked his head. “I told you last night.” He sighed. “Were you mm-hmming me while falling asleep again?”

  I couldn’t help but roll my eyes. “If I was mm-hmming you, I was already asleep. So spit it out. What makes it fitting?”

  “This castle.” He shook his head, as though mesmerized by whatever he was about to say. “This is where it all happened, Charisse. The king you detest so much—he’s the father of Sleeping Beauty.”

  Chapter 5

  “I think I just had a mini stroke or something,” I said, shaking my head. “Because I could have sworn I just heard you say this douchebag king’s daughter was actually—”

  “Sleeping Beauty,” Abram finished, nodding curtly as though he had just told me my chicken salad sandwich was ready or that there was a cardholder’s sale at Saks Fifth Avenue.

  Actually the last one would have required more oomph.

  “Sleeping Beauty?” I asked, leaning forward. “Like the mythical princess Sleeping Beauty? You’re not serious.”

  “When am I ever not serious?” he asked, arching his brows.

  The man had a point.

  “But that’s not possible. Sleeping Beauty is a fairytale.” I didn’t even realize I had stood until I was already pacing the room.

  “So what?” he asked. “So am I.”

  The morning sun glinted off Abram’s dark eyes, making them shine like discs of black water. Somewhere in the back of my mind, it occurred to me that I had wasted an entire night—maybe the only one I would ever get—when the man I loved would be a human.

  He had his arms, his legs, his heart, and several other parts that I had taken quite a liking to. He was himself all night long, and instead of savoring that—instead of pressing myself against him and relishing his form for the Renaissance masterpiece that it was—I had just slept there beside him, probably dreaming about shoes.

  But I couldn’t think about that now. Like it or not (and I absolutely didn’t) Abram had a point. Against my own personal objections, Satina sent us to the castle for a reason. Fifteen people had died, and we needed to figure out why. Even if that meant missing out on what was supposed to be the sexiest vacation of my life.

  Abram moved toward the window, pulling open the drapes and letting the sun invade the room. “The fact is, most fairytales—most mythologies, really—have a kernel of truth to them. They originate from actual events and, because people have a tendency to either exaggerate or play down the truth, depending on the needs of the age, those stories are changed and twisted into what you now know as fairytales.”

  The view outside would have been spectacular if everything wasn’t brown and dying, no doubt a side effect of the drought. Still, the ocean was crisp and blue, and the island was full of gorgeous hills, valleys, and plains. Abram cleared his throat as he pointed to a cliff in the distance.

  “That’s the original site of the Grimoult Royal family stronghold. For two centuries, the Navaars ruled from a stone castle that had once been on that cliff—that cliff people are now jumping to their death from.”

  “How do you know that?” I asked, settling beside him and looking out the
window to where he was pointing. “Have you been to it?”

  “No.” He leaned on the windowsill, resting his forehead against the glass. “That castle has been gone for over five hundred years, long before my time. But I’ve met people who have been to it, people I trust, people whose word I take as fact. This island is where the story originated, and that castle is where the final battle took place.”

  “This is insane,” I muttered, mostly to myself, watching the way the waves crested and fell against the rocks that made up the base of the former castle’s cliff.

  “You haven’t heard the half of it, at least not half the truth.” Abram moved away from the window and, as always, my gaze followed him. No landscape could compete with him, no matter how beautiful it might be. “Jacob Navaar was king then. He’s the man you saw in the painting yesterday, the balding one with wine in his hand.”

  Abram’s eyes glazed over. “There was peace then. He was a good king and a good ruler. He was also a good father. His daughter—her name has been butchered by history, so we’ll call her Rose—was a beauty by any man’s standard. She was the only child of a king so, even if she’d been a troll with bad breath and a penchant for breaking wind in bed, she would have still been a catch. But fate saw fit to give her beauty, brains, and a heart of gold. At least, that’s what I’m told.”

  He ran a hand through his hair and sighed, as though he might be remembering someone or something. He did that a lot. Though, when you had lived for as long as Abram had, it only made sense that you would rack up connections.

  I didn’t press him on it.

  “Her mother died suddenly after being thrown from a horse. King Jacob, wanting to give his daughter as normal and healthy a life as possible, decided to remarry. But it wasn’t as commonplace back then for people to just move on.”

  A chill ran up me, as though there might have been more to that statement.

  Abram continued. “King Jacob met a merchant’s daughter from a far off land, the name also has been lost. To make a rather predictable story shorter, he fell in love with the woman and made her his wife, his queen. But the woman was a Conduit.”

  My entire body tensed up. God, I hated that word. Conduit.

  “And Rose, to her detriment, was a Supplicant.”

  I might have actually hated that word more.

  “The Conduit placed a powerful sleeping curse on Rose and, while she was deep in her slumber, the Conduit siphoned all the magic she could from the poor girl.” Abram shook his head. “It went on like that for years. Day in and day out, the king would sit by his daughter’s bedside, never knowing that it was his own wife who had perpetrated this against him. Stories began to pop up.” He swallowed hard. “And the drought worsened every day Rose remained asleep.”

  “A drought?” I asked, moving forward. “There was drought here then, too?” My mind began spinning feverishly. My eyes narrowed as the realization laid itself in front of me. “You knew,” I said. “You knew about the drought. You knew about the suicides. You knew about the words and the history. That’s why you suggested this place, because you knew there was something going on here.”

  “Charisse,” he started his eyes narrowing. “I didn’t—”

  I shook my head. “I’m not mad. I get it, I think. We have to do what we have to do.”

  “But Charisse—”

  “Just finish the story,” I said softly. “People thought true love would break the curse.” I took Abram in with my eyes, the look on his face and the solidness of his stance. “But something tells me you don’t agree with that.”

  “Love doesn’t solve everything, Charisse. It’s beautiful and vital and it makes life worth living. But it doesn’t fix problems, not even in fairytales.”

  “So what did fix it?” I asked, a bit peeved by his statement. “I mean, we know she woke up. How?”

  “I don’t know,” Abram admitted. “But if you consider the real Sleeping Beauty never married, I don’t think the fairytale has that part right. My guess is Jacob found out what his wife was up to and made some sort of deal in exchange for his daughter’s life…given his current state.”

  “Current?” I asked, brushing stray hair out of my eyes. “You mean the king here—”

  “Archibald.” Abram nodded. “Archibald Navaar, the current king of Grimoult, is thirty seven years old. At least that’s what he tells the world. I found it in one of Grimoult’s online newspaper archives.”

  “Kudos for cracking the internet.” I stared at our hands as his fingers grazed my palm. “But I thought you said this king was Sleeping Beauty’s father. That doesn’t line up.”

  “When we were in the foyer, I studied that painting as closely as I studied the king. There was a purple, star-shaped mark on Jacob’s right hand. I saw the same one on Archibald.”

  “So?” I asked. “Birthmarks can run in families, especially families that are probably as inbred as some of royal ones can be. Maybe he’s just an ancestor of Sleeping Beauty’s father?”

  “That’s not a birthmark.” Abram let out a slow breath. “It’s a branding, a Conduit’s mark sometimes left on their victims to stake their claim. And my guess is that it’s cursing him to a life without end.”

  “You think King Douchebag is five hundred years old?” I asked.

  “At least,” he answered.

  “And you think he has a hand in what’s going on here?”

  “He either has something to do with what’s going on, or he knows something more about it than we do,” he said. “He has to. And it’s probably why he’s suspicious of us.”

  Abram’s gaze moved past me, and his eyes widened. He rushed toward the window.

  “Charisse,” he said, pressed against the window.

  “I see it,” I said breathlessly.

  In the distance, a dot stood on the cliff where the original castle used to sit. It was a man, or a woman. We were too far away to tell.

  “Don’t look,” Abram said as the dot neared the edge.

  “I have to,” I said. “I need to. I need to see why we’re doing this.”

  “We can’t stop it, Charisse, not this one.” Abram took my hand and squeezed it.

  “But we’ll stop the next one, right?” I asked, flinching as the man (or woman) ran toward the edge and threw themselves off. I didn’t take my eyes away. I watched that poor soul the whole way down. I needed to see. I needed to get the beach and vacations out of my mind. I needed to have no doubt that we were doing the right thing by being here. “Tell me we’ll stop this, Abram.”

  “We will,” he answered. “We’ll stop it.”

  I looked over at him, fire and moisture burning through my eyes. “Then let’s get to work.”

  Chapter 6

  The hours after my declaration seemed to drag on endlessly. I wanted nothing more than to get this over with, to find whatever it was that Satina sent us here to find and put a stop to whatever King Archibald (or whoever was ultimately responsible) was up to before anyone else got hurt.

  But the door was still locked and, as strange as it was to think, the magic surrounding this castle had rendered Abram completely human. As such, he was powerless to either free us from this makeshift prison or defend us from whatever might come.

  What if the castle was having the same effect on me? Had my blood been neutralized, too? And, if so, was there any way I might be able to take this castle’s curse with me when (or if) we left?

  I sat by the window, watching that horrible cliff and praying no one else would hurl themselves off of it before we could get out of here. The sun hung low in the sky when the door finally swung open.

  Abram stood, his body tensing as he watched two guards enter. They were dressed in white, so that the pistols on their hips stood out even more brilliantly. Anywhere else on Earth, those pistols might as well have been water guns for Abram. But within these walls, they could spell his end.

  I tried to shake that thought off as the taller of the guards spoke.

 
“The king has requested your company for dinner.”

  A third guard entered with a three piece suit in his hand.

  “You are to wear this,” the taller guard said, motioning to Abram. “And the king has asked what you would prefer your woman to be dressed in.”

  Your woman? He made it sound like I was a dog. Heck, that might even be too generous—they would probably at least strive to make a dog comfortable.

  I balled my fists but, as if sensing my hostility, Abram placed a hand on my arm.

  “She’ll wear whatever is customary,” he said flatly.

  For a long moment, the guard looked at me, as if he had noticed more to my reaction than I had intended to share.

  “I see,” he said. And then he took his leave.

  A few moments later, a short woman who seemed intent on not making eye contact with anyone came and handed me a lengthy blue dress that, while covering every inch of my body below the neck, hugged me like wet paint. Every curve was accentuated and put on display. I might as well have been naked for all it left to the imagination.

  The sun had almost set outside now, stretching our shadows along the floor, and my heart bobbed in my stomach. I frowned at myself in the mirror and spoke to Abram over my shoulder.

  “I suppose this is what is what is expected of ‘your woman’,” I said.

  “Don’t start,” he said, struggling with his tie.

  “How old are you? And you still can’t work a bow tie.” I shook my head, making my way to him.

  I took the fabric and slung it over his neck. He smelled masculine, like pine and musk. But there was something else there—a sweetness that, even now, I couldn’t put my finger on. It had been his scent that had driven me crazy the first time we hooked up. Crashing together against the walls of the nightclub, I had breathed him in and could hardly hold myself together. It was that scent that made me want him then, and that same scent making me want him now.

  “I tend to steer clear of this particular fashion choice,” he said as I moved across the stubble that dotted his Adam’s apple. “It always seemed juvenile to me.”