by Liz Meldon
Phone consultation.
“That’s not so scary.” At least she could hear his voice before she met him. A consultation. She could ask all her questions in advance. That would certainly help her nerves. Maybe he would be more forthcoming about what he actually offered over the phone, too, where there was no written record of the conversation.
Moira just wanted to experience good, possibly great, sex that ended in a cataclysmic orgasm—was that too much to ask for? No guy had ever helped her achieve it, nor had any of the vibrators and various other toys she’d tried. School was crazy busy lately. TA work was at its worst toward the end of the second semester with all the projects and papers she needed to help grade. Everything was ramping up again as spring hurtled toward summer. And her physical appearance, her own body, continued to give her a giant middle finger on the best of days.
Why not treat herself?
Why not let a professional handle this one little thing she might kind of, sort of, maybe, be able to control?
So, hesitantly, she clicked the button to schedule her consultation, all the while hoping that she hadn’t just started down the path toward the biggest mistake of her life.
Chapter Two
The night began with a knock at the door—firmer than usual. Severus glanced at the clock next to the bed, noting that she was about five minutes early. Clearing his throat, he stood and smoothed his hands down the silky soft T-shirt he had opted for tonight instead of the usual suit. Moira was a college girl, if she’d been telling the truth during their phone interview last weekend, and didn’t strike him as the kind who wanted refinement. So, he had chosen a less upscale hotel for tonight’s session, and dressed down in a pair of dark jeans and a deep grey tee. The belt and shoes were still fine leather—he hadn’t lost his sense of style completely—but her voice had sounded young, and he didn’t want to send her running by dressing like her dad.
She knocked again, the sharp rap of her knuckles making Severus grin as he crossed the small hotel room. While missing the luxurious bathroom and generously stocked minibar, the establishment boasted near-soundproof walls. He had a similar arrangement with one of the night shift front desk clerks as he did with clerks across the city, and tended to bring his screamers here. From what he’d gathered of this college student, she didn’t strike him as a screamer, but the hotel was on the south side of town, far from the sanctuary of her north-side campus, which meant she wouldn’t run into anyone familiar in the parking lot.
He’d left his facial hair scruffier today. All the twenty-somethings swooned over dark, brooding, and dangerous—didn’t they? No matter how he dressed, suit or no suit, he had a feeling he would still tickle her fancy, among other things. Most women found him irresistible, and not just because he was an incubus.
Unbolting the door, he opened it with one of his unassuming smiles—one that disappeared the moment he saw her. She stood about a foot away, a willowy, ethereal creature whose chin came up to his shoulders. Dark, mahogany hair, long and straight, hung around her sharp, angular face in curtains, and she swept it behind her ears with trembling hands. Slim, long fingers. Neatly trimmed nails. White. She was so very white that it threw him. And those eyes—an otherworldly blue—flickered up to him briefly before fixing themselves to the floor.
She was undeniably beautiful, and Severus found himself questioning why on earth she would even need his services.
“Russ?” she asked softly, her voice curiously melodic. It snapped him out of his staring, his admiring, and he opened the door with a nod.
“Moira. My apologies for keeping you waiting.”
“It’s fine,” she muttered as she darted in. Dressed in a pair of slim-fit jeans, ankle-high brown boots with just a hint of wedged heel, and a black spring peacoat that nipped around the waist, she looked as though she belonged in the glossy pages of some fashion magazine—not here with him in a soundproofed room at the Kingsview Inn and Suites. His dark brows crinkled as he gently closed the door, making sure that all his movements were obvious as he locked them in. New clients could be jumpy, and seeing him lock the door never helped.
“Now, we—”
“Here,” she said, thrusting an envelope at him, presumably full of cash, as soon as he turned around. The woman still struggled to meet and hold his gaze; she had sounded so much more confident over the phone. Clearly she wasn’t in the business of paying for sex regularly. His eyes narrowed somewhat as he assessed her, before gripping the envelope—holding but not taking, waiting for her to drop her arm back to her side.
She did, sliding that elegant hand into her pocket and finally lifting her stare to him, fixing it just over his shoulder. Severus smiled again, though the expression was far less modest than the one he’d used to greet her.
“Yes, thank you,” he muttered. The white envelope was thin, and as he turned to set it on the dresser, he realized there were only two bills inside. Now, how was little Miss Moira withdrawing two crisp five-hundred-dollar notes from her bank? Did she come from money? Most who paid for his services did. Yet she was just a wisp of a thing—beautiful, puzzling, but still only a girl.
His jaw clenched when he faced her again. This was the first time a client had thrown him by mere appearance alone. Some of the women he catered to were physically attractive in their own way, but Moira was…something else entirely.
And he couldn’t decide if that sat well with him or not.
“Now, tell me, is this your first time with an escort?” he asked, hands clasped behind his back as he strolled toward her—around her.
“Like I said on the phone, yes,” she replied curtly. “My first and only time.”
“I just wanted to clarify again.” He strolled in a slow, easy circle around her, only then realizing he was even doing it. Demons were predatory by nature. With most clients, Severus had no problem suppressing his baser instincts, shifting his persona to whatever the woman desired, and yet with this Moira, he went straight to it—the predator within. He slowed his pace until he finally stopped in front of her. “You seem nervous.”
“I don’t mean to.”
“No, I suspect not.” He smirked, peering down at her with a steadily intensifying interest. “I don’t mean to make you uncomfortable. It’s perfectly natural to be a little uneasy with the arrangement.” Severus went for her hand, but she slid that one into her pocket too—holding her ground and continuing to look over his shoulder. Curious. “If you’d prefer, we can just talk. I’m a good listener, you know.”
During their phone interview, she had told him what she wanted: sex to completion, no oral, definitely no anal, kissing was fine. Many of his clients preferred not to kiss, and Severus didn’t hold it against them. The act was so intimate, perhaps even more so than the sex itself. Studying her lips, pale pink like an aged ballet slipper, he realized he certainly wouldn’t mind kissing her. In fact, if his slowly hardening cock had anything to say about it, it appeared Severus wanted to kiss her.
Strange.
And not entirely unwelcome.
“No.” Her steadfast refusal startled him out of his musings, and he found her hastily unbuttoning her jacket and yanking it off her shoulders. “No, I’m fine. I want to do this. We… It’s fine.”
Severus continued to watch her in a contemplative silence as she crossed the small room and set her folded coat on the chair by the window. While she was an unearthly pale creature, her hair was so stark—and it didn’t match her eyebrows. Sure, both were brown, but not the same brown. In fact, as she stalked back to him, fiddling with her nails, he noted that the eyebrows appeared drawn on. While faded, Severus also made note of dark brown smudges along her hairline, as though she’d recently used dye. Had she done it to disguise herself tonight? She hadn’t given her last name on the phone—and Severus hadn’t asked for it—but it would probably be easy enough to find her online, bad dye job or not.
“I don’t want you to feel pressured,” he told her when the silence dragged on longer than
it should. He suddenly felt the urge to trail the backs of his knuckles across her cheek. Schooling his features, Severus curled his hand into a tight fist, recently clipped nails biting into his palm. Don’t touch her yet. Don’t send her running. Be a fucking professional. “Or we can do other things if you—”
“No, sex is fine.” Her cheeks flamed at the statement, and he found himself trying not to chuckle. She wasn’t a virgin, supposedly, yet her blushes suggested otherwise. “I’m just a little off-balance here with everything. I’ll be fine. Seriously. Let’s…do this.”
She bit her lower lip, grimacing slightly, and this time Severus did chuckle. He couldn’t help it.
“We have the full two hours,” he mused, dropping his voice as he reached out and pushed her hair over her shoulder. It had fallen free from behind her ear when she’d taken her coat off. “There’s no rush.”
Moira took a deep breath, then slowly let it out as she murmured, “Okay. Thanks.”
The air stood still between them, a weighted silence only made heavier by the soundproofed walls. He could always hear something everywhere else; people laughing, a TV blaring, water running. Here, there was nothing but thick air and the sound of her shaky, uneven breaths.
And the pounding of his own blood, headed southbound without delay, the demon within awakening.
For the first time in, well, ever, he found himself wanting to initiate—and not for the pleasure of her life essence. He’d had a client on Wednesday night. Sex. Oral—for both of them. Then a shower together. She’d stayed the night in the room he’d rented, so wiped out that he didn’t trust her to get home at all. He’d been selfish, taking too much, and he’d had to remind himself to be cautious before tonight’s session.
Yet he didn’t want to be cautious. As Moira took two tentative steps toward him, the third closing the gap between their bodies, he found he wanted to touch, to take, to consume.
Instead, Severus forced himself to be still, to be patient. This was just a job. A necessity of existence.
Why was he so riled up? The beast within seldom blinked at his clients, yet now his entire being hummed with interest.
Finally, those hauntingly bright blue eyes studied his face in its entirety, and he felt the blaze of their path as though they’d burned him. In the end, they settled on his lips, and he tilted his face down just enough that if she stood up on her tiptoes, she could kiss him of her own free will.
And she did. Softly. Sweetly. Those blush-pink lips brushed across his as he watched her beneath a hooded stare. Her eyelashes, black with several coats of mascara, fluttered somewhat before settling, her eyes closed as she leaned into him. When her hand came to rest on his chest, her touch like a whisper, faint, barely there—Severus was forced to lock his hands in fists again, if only to still them before they reacted.
For they were desperate to respond. Her sweet, innocent touches. Her diminutive grace. Her beauty. Her smell—heady and intense, like a lotus in full bloom. On their own, nothing. Together, the combination was deadly, for it stirred something within him, something animalistic, something dangerous, something he had suppressed ever since he left Hell, hoping to survive better among the humans than he had with his own kind.
His throat burned, the great cavern of his chest on fire. Desire. He hadn’t felt it in an age. Desperation. Eagerness. The urge to take and to defile.
He knew he ought to send her away. Cut the session short. Make an excuse. Give Moira her money back. Spare her.
Yet as her tongue tentatively swept along the tight seam of his mouth, he couldn’t. Severus succumbed instead, surrendering to a controlled fall as her long, willowy fingers crept to his cheeks, cupping his face. His lips parted, his arm curling around her narrow waist, and he smiled against her mouth when he realized that bold tongue was not quite so; in fact, it was rather shy. It hedged along the outskirts, unwilling to leave her mouth for his.
So, Severus gave her a reason not to be shy, thrusting his tongue, a tongue he could elongate for optimal pleasure should he desire it, into her mouth. Her little squeal of surprise emboldened him, his hand threading through her hair. It yearned to tighten, to wrench her head back so that he might graze his teeth along her neck.
Learn what sort of sounds she’d make then.
For now, however, he could content himself with her little moans, the racing of her breath as their kiss became frantic—dangerously so.
And then her hands fell to his chest again and shoved. He staggered back, startled by her strength, and held his hands out when he found his breath ragged. Jaw clenched, he forced his heart to slow, the damn thing slamming against its cage. If he’d thought her blushes prominent before, they were nothing compared to what he saw now. As if sensing it, she pressed her hands to her cheeks and turned away.
“I’m sorry,” he offered, knowing he needed to say something, and that seemed like the most socially acceptable phrase to utter to a distressed human. “Did I…?”
“You didn’t do anything,” she told him over her shoulder. “It’s me. I’m sorry. I swear I’m not normally this…stiff.”
Well, that was one way to describe it. He ran a hand through his hair, sensing that if he asked her if she wanted to talk again, she might force herself to do something that would distress her further.
“I could give you a massage,” he said, vocalizing the idea as soon as it came to mind. It would give him ample opportunity to take what he needed from her, skin-to-skin, and she could hopefully find some peace. His stamina was exceptional; he could massage her for the next—a quick glance at the bedside clock—hour and forty minutes, ten minutes for sex to what would likely be an easy climax if she hadn’t fallen asleep, and then it would be over. This vexing woman would be gone, and Severus could forget what she did to him, how she roused his inner darkness. Pretend it hadn’t ever happened.
Slowly, Moira faced him again, some of the redness in her cheeks dissipated. “A massage?”
“I find it, er,” he gestured toward the bed, suddenly tongue-tied under the weight of her full, wide-eyed stare, “can be quite relaxing. Many ordinary couples use it for foreplay. I’m sure you carry a lot of stress with school.”
Moira gathered her hair in her hands, tossing it to one side as she nodded. “Okay. A massage sounds,” she swallowed noticeably, “nice.”
“Why don’t I wait in the bathroom?” he offered, needing a few moments of peace to collect himself anyway—yet another first. “You can undress and wait under the sheets, as you would at an actual massage appointment. If you find that’s all you want, we can just do that.”
“No, I want to—”
“Decide on it when the time comes,” he insisted before striding into the bathroom and barricading himself inside. He leaned back against the door with a scowl, then quietly hit his head against the solid wood frame.
What the devil was wrong with him?
Shaking his head, Severus pushed off the door and found himself standing there with a raging erection—all from a bit of kissing. Something must have been seriously wrong. Was he ill? If she hadn’t appeared so innocent, he might have thought her a witch, but he didn’t get a whiff of demon from her. Not in the slightest. No magic. No tricks. It was just her—Moira without a last name. College student. Intriguing beauty. A threat to Severus’s carefully cultivated control if he had ever seen one.
He pinched the bridge of his nose, taking long, deep, even breaths in an attempt to calm himself. However, by the time he’d finished, he was still rock hard, the inner beast demanding he march back into that room and simply take her. Even the slightest adjustment of his jeans was fucking torture. He needed release. He needed her, apparently.
No. This is absurd. Scowling, he stalked to the sink and turned on the cold water, waiting for it to get extra icy before splashing his face. Even the chilly blast did nothing to lessen his ridiculous state of arousal, and as he glared at himself in the mirror, he wondered if she’d drugged him—some hell-born elixir painted a
cross those pale lips. Was he five seconds away from passing out with a massive hard-on? He leaned in to check his lips, his teeth, and his tongue. All looked normal. No lingering residue. His eyes were clear, not the least bit dazed, bloodshot, or out of focus.
Wait.
He leaned closer. His eye colour should have been darker. He’d had a generous dose of skin-to-skin contact. His body had responded eagerly to Moira’s touch, and yet he didn’t feel as he always did courtesy of a little heavy petting. Not stronger. Not sharper. Not energized or refreshed. The same as before. Horny as fuck, sure, but otherwise… Nothing.
He tugged at his cheeks, checked his eyes again, and then took a step back, scowling. He didn’t feel worse by any means. In fact, Severus felt oddly alive for the first time in a dreadfully long time.
It was as though her kiss had awoken the long-dormant demon inside, kept quiet, pliant, and restrained around all these humans.
“Moira, Moira, Moira,” he murmured, looking back to the bathroom door. “What have you done to me?”
And why?
After splashing his face with a bit of cold water again, he patted his skin down and composed himself in front of the mirror. Whether she was aware of it or not, Moira affected him, but he couldn’t let it show. Severus had to be in control here—and his cock, the inner darkness gathering within, suggested otherwise. No one could know, certainly not the temptress waiting for him to return.
Although he didn’t have a watch on him tonight, he knew he’d given her ample time to situate herself under the bedsheets, and after rumpling his hair and checking his eyes one last time, he opened the door.
And found her precisely where he thought she’d be: facedown in the middle of the bed, the white duvet cover folded in half and the thin white sheets drawn up to her mid-back.
“Are you ready?” he asked, fighting the surge of arousal shooting through him at all that exposed skin. Odd, that his first instinct wasn’t what he could take from her, but rather what he wanted to do to her. “Moira?”
