How the hell had that happened? He’d planned it, that was certain. But she couldn’t question him, didn’t have any breath except to laugh when he grinned and said, “Good-bye, monk” and lowered his head to her breast, pushed aside her vest and began suckling her through her shirt.
Her arms rose of their own accord and she slipped her fingers into his thick hair, her nails against his scalp. She meant to shove him away, but her back arched and she pulled him closer.
His teeth caught her nipple. Oh, God, if the pain in Hell was anything like the torturous pleasure of that bite, humans would be lining up to jump into the Pit.
He reared up, unfastened her vest but didn’t take the time with her shirt. Buttons flew.
She groaned, half-laughing. “I told you my salary—”
“I’ve been domesticated.” He stared at her bare skin, her taut nipples. “I’ll sew them back on.” And then his tongue was hot and wet against her.
Her laughter was lost as he began thrusting his hips in time to the pull of his mouth. His arms, braced on either side of her head, trembled as if it took all his strength to keep it slow. The rhythmic friction against her sex was nearly unbearable. For Hugh, too—his shields fell, and she was slapped by a wave of desperate arousal that equaled hers, tinged by surprise and fear. Too much, too fast, too good.
He’d expected to be in control. Her eyes blazed.
His teeth scraped her breast as she tugged his head up. A growl of protest sounded from his throat, silenced when she said, “You still think to resist me? ‘Temptation the demon was; an angelic face and false impotency my only defense. ’ ” Her voice mocked him, though she would have done as well to make fun of herself. “You no longer have that defense, yet you cling to it.”
“I’m no longer impotent, either.” He rocked forward, and smiled wryly when she bit her bottom lip to keep her moan from escaping.
She was so wet; the scent of her arousal should have embarrassed her. Her fingers still threaded through his dark hair. Why did she not let him go? It was a human response, a weakness—
“Lilith,” he said hoarsely, and he was staring at her chest again. “Where are the others? There are but half the symbols here.”
Oh, fuck.
CHAPTER 18
“Get off,” she said tightly. “Now.”
Her glamour had failed. How could his touch make her lose her control—her sense—so quickly? Re-forming it over her skin took barely a thought, but it was too late. His eyes found hers, and she shoved away the shame of his seeing the proof of her Punishment.
He nodded, began to ease away from her. “I didn’t—”
A rasp of metal as the doorknob turned. Lilith’s eyes widened, and Hugh barely had time to pull the edges of her shirt together before a woman—forty, plump, smiling—opened the door and shuffled in, carrying a tall cup of coffee and weighed down by several bags. Her mouth fell open when she saw them.
She recovered quickly. “New student?”
Hugh grinned. “A particularly slow one. Sue Fletcher, Lily Milton.” He introduced them without a trace of embarrassment, though he was still between her legs and she was lying atop his desk. Despite herself, Lilith began shaking with laughter. “You don’t have to go, Sue; we were just finishing.”
“You look as if you’ve just begun,” the other woman said, cheeks pink. “I’ll drop off this stuff and go grab something to eat. But I have an appointment here in half an hour,” she added apologetically.
Hugh lifted his brows. “That’s more than enough time.”
Sue chuckled and turned toward her desk to unload her bags; Hugh pulled Lilith to her feet. The door closed again a few moments later, and Lilith tried to summon the shame and anger she’d felt before the woman’s entrance, but couldn’t. She glanced down at her shirt. “Can you really sew?”
His heated gaze lingered on the vertical slice of exposed skin. “No.”
“Shit,” she said, and busied herself tucking and buttoning. The vest would hold it all together—mostly. She didn’t look at him. “You have friends.”
“A few.”
“Have you told them?”
“No.”
She nodded, then slanted a glance at him. Not much space here behind his desk. Less than two feet away, he leaned against his bookcase, the heels of his hands resting on the shelf behind his hips. Despite his easy posture, she knew he was calculating, weighing, considering.
“It must be lonely,” she said before he could draw any conclusions about the symbols. Distract him by delving into the personal. Once, she would have used sex; but, as touching him had unsettled her so much she had lost her glamours and been unaware of Sue’s approach, she was too susceptible to it to try now.
His half-lidded stare never wavered. “Better than the alternative: did I tell them the truth, they would be forced to decide whether to believe me. It is a measure of trust that I’m not willing to ask from them.”
“You fear rejection?” She snorted. Tried not to remember the regret she’d felt when she’d pushed Taylor and Preston too far. “Fine friends these.”
“Don’t, Lilith,” he said softly. “Don’t twist it.”
And she saw the quiet pain in his expression then, felt the isolation that weighed on him. She should use it against him—would have to, eventually.
But not yet. Not until Lucifer demanded it.
She arched a brow and let her eyes glow. “I like twisted. And I well remember how you began to believe. If you like, you can invite a party of your friends to your home. I’ll show up, attack you, transform and scare the hell out of them. I may not be Michael, but I can be very impressive.” She flashed her fangs before retracting them again and grinned. “I’ll even recite the terrible dialogue from your book. ‘Away, foul fiend! Suck thy bloody heart of death!’ is my favorite—though I don’t recall saying that when we fought the nosferatu in Lille. I was not that ridiculous until I came to America.”
The corners of his mouth lifted into a smile, but his gaze was thoughtful. “You didn’t know about the book when you left last night.”
“Oh, I’ve known for years and years,” she said, rolling her eyes.
Something tense within him seemed to ease. “You pointed them to the nosferatu and Polidori’s somehow, but it was never with the intention of increasing their suspicions of me. You were angry about the book itself, but also because you failed to redirect the focus of their investigation.” His eyes narrowed. “What did you do?”
Sex again, and quickly. “I didn’t kiss you last night,” she said, and stepped forward, crowding him into the bookcase.
“I won’t forget to ask again when you are done. I’m not so easily distracted as that.” He caught her waist, pulled her up against his lean, hard length. “It must have been something ridiculous for you to hide it with a kiss,” he said against her lips. But he did not kiss her—no, he must be waiting for her to initiate it.
“Not very well thought out,” she agreed. “Colin saw me naked.”
His free hand buried in the coil of hair at her nape. “Many people have seen you naked.” Then he stiffened. “He saw the symbols.”
A flash of jealousy from him, and she triumphed in it. His shields were good, but they were not as strong when she was this near to him, touching him. She only had to keep herself under control. Her hands curved over his shoulders, his muscles warm and firm beneath her palms. “Why did you write the book?”
“Are we bargaining?”
“Not officially,” she said. “Just . . . trading.”
“And you’ll kiss me if I do—or if I don’t?” Humor and need in that deep-voiced question.
She slicked her tongue over his bottom lip, quick as a cat. “Come now, Sir Hugh. Don’t disappoint me.”
His eyes darkened, and he drew his moistened lip into his mouth for a moment, as if to savor her flavor. “I intended to give it to Michael. What did you give the detectives?”
“Blow jobs,” she said, and he laughed
. It rumbled from his chest, through hers; her nipples tightened, still appallingly sensitized by his tongue, his teeth. She willed herself not to feel them and concentrated on the shape of his eyeglasses. Not the gorgeous blue behind them. “Colin and I forged a letter. Why would you give it to Michael?”
“Because of Donne. And Shakespeare and Marlowe and Milton. What were the letter’s contents?”
Her throat tightened, and she could barely answer his question. “We described a fake dream, in which Polidori saw the nosferatu and a person who’d undergone the ritual. You remembered what I’d told you during the fire in London—about my attempts to earn a second immortality?”
His fingers smoothed the hair at her temple. “Yes—though for other reasons, as well. And the letter also included the symbols? Colin copied them from your skin?”
“Yes. Why did you publish it?”
He shook his head, and his smiling lips brushed hers. “I never intended to. I had intended it for the library in Caelum, if Michael—”
She had to silence him; there was no control in the way she took his mouth, took the confession from his tongue. It was not gratitude that burned in her chest—could not be. The book would destroy her if Lucifer ever discovered its existence. Knowing Hugh had tried to give her what she’d never obtained on her own should not create such an upwelling of pleasure within her, except that it was another vulnerability of his to exploit.
And Lucifer would make certain that she collected his weaknesses like butterflies in a case, to pin and examine.
Eight hundred years—she should have known them. He should not have been able to surprise her. Even human, even in this modern age, the scent and taste of him should have been familiar. Yet there was a newness in his response, a newness in the impatience and the force of it. His lips moved over hers, heated and insistent, and laced with a hunger that matched her own.
She shouldn’t have been matching anything—certainly not hunger.
And bringing the kiss to a halt shouldn’t have been difficult, but she lingered over it before pulling away. She answered the question in his gaze with a mischievous grin, and twisted her hips, a teasing rub against his arousal. “Not kissing you would have been a repression of your free will.”
“Stopping represses it,” he said ruefully. “But I don’t think half an hour would be enough, so it is best we stop now when we can.”
Best that she withdrew from him, as well. She hid her reluctance as she unwound her arms from his neck and backed up to sit on his desk. His hair was mussed by her fingers, his lips reddened from her mouth. Had she hurt him? Her stomach dropped. It would have been so easy to do so without noticing, as lost as she’d been in that kiss. She looked down, stabbed her fingers into a container full of metal binder clips. Crushed one with a pinch. She knew her strength—she did not know him. Not anymore. “What were your other reasons?”
“You’re cheating,” he said. His gaze fell to her fingers, then back up to her face.
She reviewed their exchange, realized he was right. It was his turn to question. Dammit. “Then continue the quiz, Professor.”
He smiled, and she would have given anything at that moment for the power to shift into a schoolgirl’s uniform. To sway her plaid skirt-covered ass in front of him as she crawled across his desk. She sighed.
Lucifer had taken the fun out of everything.
She shook her head at his puzzled expression. “I was wondering how many students you’ve had on this desk.”
There was something wicked in the way his eyes glinted with laughter, something sinful in his slow, “I thought of you as I had every single one.”
Images flashed in front of her eyes—forbidden sex, bent over the desk, rough and slick. Young, nubile limbs and his masculine strength. She had to swallow her jealousy before she said, “Liar.”
His smile widened. “If you want the truth, you’ll have to ask in the trade.” Obviously considering his own question, he brushed his thumb against his jaw, rasping the afternoon stubble. She tensed, expecting him to ask about the missing symbols on her skin.
It was senseless to be so ashamed of it; but, whether she liked her role or not, her identity had been tied to her demonic powers for two thousand years. For Hugh to have evidence of how easily Lucifer could strip her of her abilities, how she’d been degraded, how little she mattered to those Below—the thought was mortifying. Even demonkind would like to reject her; in that, she was no better than the nosferatu.
But it was almost as difficult to answer when he finally asked, “If the nosferatu and Lucifer are setting me up for Ian’s murder, then why do you try to thwart it? Do you intend to betray your liege?”
She shrugged, and told him what she would have told Lucifer. “It will be difficult to fulfill my bargain and drive you to your death if you sit in jail. Keeping you free will allow me better access to you.” Another clip flattened between her fingers. “What were your other reasons?”
“To be certain I didn’t lie to myself about my past, and my reason for slaying you: to give you freedom, aye—but at what expense?” He drew a deep breath. “And to capture you, in whatever form I could. I have done nothing but search for you since that night. My work, this career is but an excuse to find you again.”
She fought to keep her voice hard, emotionless. “Do you not know I’ll use this against you?”
“I know.” His hands clenched in his pockets, as if anchoring himself to the spot. “Do you not still wish for your freedom?”
“The bargain changes the price,” she said quietly. “Before, fulfillment required my service. Now it requires your death. What is this girl to you? Was she worth your Fall?”
His brow furrowed. “Savi?” At her nod, he said, “I hardly knew her then. It was only after I had Fallen that I returned here to San Francisco to see how she fared. Her grandmother took me in; and, as soon as she recovered, Savi did, too. I did not Fall for her. She was the catalyst, but not the cause.”
“Why does she live with you?”
He smiled slightly. “She is rebelling. And I had an empty room over my garage.”
She heard more than he said: he’d wanted the company, wanted to ease his isolation. Had it worked? Why had he never taken a wife, found companionship in another way?
“What was the cause?” Two questions now, without offering information of her own.
He flicked a glance at the clock above the door. “Our time has almost passed.”
“We are uneven in our trade,” she immediately protested.
His voice was low, entreating. “Spend the afternoon with me, Lilith. I’ll give anything you ask for free.”
Temptation ripped through her, but she shook her head. “I have to get back to work.” The surveillance team had returned—she could hear them in the hall. She could pass off a brief visit as official, but not an extended meeting.
“Then spend the night with me.”
It would leave her absolutely defenseless, when she needed to strengthen her resistance to him. “What was the cause? In the book, you only say that you saved a girl from a demon. I know that is not all of it; you told me that night you forced your Gift on a man.” Her breath came hard and fast. “Tell me, and I will spend the night with you.”
His eyes darkened, his jaw clenched. “I won’t hide it from you—even if you try to use it against me in your bargain—but I don’t want it to be the reason you come to me.”
Her laugh held an edge of desperation. “Then tell me, and I will not.”
“Lilith—” He broke off, laughing and shaking his head. “Nothing is owed in this. Come to me tonight, or do not—but it is not a condition of the telling.” He waited until she nodded. “A demon was working on Savi’s father, an innocent. Murray and his family were inside a restaurant. The demon had followed them, and I found him outside, killed him. I had to wait with the body, make certain it wasn’t found until I could get it to a Gate without being seen.” He paused, rubbed his forehead. “Savi was nine. Sh
e had a brother, a year older. It was late, but their home wasn’t far from the restaurant, and they walked. Mother and father, both successful surgeons, and two children. Easy targets.”
“Targeted by a human?” And nothing to do but watch. A Guardian couldn’t prevent a human from exercising free will, even if that will meant death for others.
He nodded stiffly. “And even I’m not faster than a bullet. Was not. I ran as soon as I heard the first, but—”
“Faster than . . . you tried to stop him? You interfered with his will?”
“Yes. I arrived, too late for all but Savi. And she’d seen him, had seen his face when he’d shot them—he was going to kill her for that. I put myself in between, but the bullets went through, hit her anyway. I took her to the hospital, but it didn’t look like she would . . .” He trailed off, and his face hardened. “So I went after him.”
Lilith’s gaze dropped to his waist, imagined the bullets tearing through him. She’d done worse to him, but the thought of anyone else . . . “Good,” she said.
A tiny smile on his lips. “But it was not that, Lilith. Not only that. It was Vlad, and the boy in New Orleans, and a thousand others I hadn’t been able to help because I had to deny my will for the Guardian code. I had to serve . . . but I could no longer. And I broke.” His smile faded, and his tortured gaze held hers. “But I also knew there would be no one to free you after I Fell. So I found you. I made certain you did not believe in your role, that it was because you were bound to service as well, then . . .” Again he faltered, his throat working. “Though it must have been for naught, for you are bound again.”
Her heart thundered beneath her breast. “You would have let me live if I had believed it?”
“Yes.” His voice was hoarse. “I knew you feared the Punishment failing your bargain would bring. For centuries you told me what would free you without actually asking me to do it—and I knew that if you asked it would be tantamount to a betrayal of your service. But if you truly served him . . . if the only thing that held you to Lucifer was the fear of Punishment, I could not leave you in that.”
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