by Misty Dietz
He hadn’t considered having a serious relationship.
Not ever.
“What’s going on, Nate?”
He swung toward the chair where he’d held her close moments ago. Jessie sat on the floor, wrapped in the blanket once more, glowing and tousled and utterly ethereal. Her outrageous allure suddenly made sense.
He wished now that he hadn’t mocked other Guardians when they’d talked about their compars. Wished he’d listened to how that touchy business was handled. Michael had to be behind this. Angelic justice or a test or something whacked like that.
What do I do with her?
He looked at his smooth belly again. Then yanked on the hair above his ears and groaned.
“Nate? You’re freaking me out.”
That makes two of us. “Uh, I…I need to go. To a meeting.” He inhaled roughly, dropping his hands to his sides. He needed to calm this shit down. But…
He was arse over elbow mental right now.
There was no way—no way—a human was a soul mate.
He’d never heard of anything so epically preposterous. What was the point? She’d die in a handful of decades while he’d live ages without her.
It had been a very long time since he’d felt the urge to flee. Need air. He took slow, deep breaths as he walked back to where she stood by the chair, her guarded expression making him feel like a barmy bastard. “I’ll return as soon as I am able. You have my word.”
The twinkle in her eyes had vanished. “What’s wrong?”
The hairs on the back of his neck prickled the moment before the house security system tripped, the relentless screech of the alarm piercing his eardrums. How had he not perceived anything wrong? Damned distracting emotions. His fingers dug into the blanket around Jessie’s arms as he layered compulsion in his voice to make her obey. “Audi me. Stay put. I mean it, Jessie.”
She sank down into the chair with a bemused look. Satisfied she’d remain out of harm’s way, he raced upstairs, closed the door to the lower level, and chanted a protection ward over it. Approaching the front door, Jessie’s amplio enabled him to smell who was outside. Two of them.
They were human, though. Not demons.
He relaxed and slowed his steps. When he opened the door, the cool fall air hit his bare chest. A tiny woman with a blonde, pixie haircut knelt amid the detritus of what looked like a volcanic purse eruption all over his portico.
Where was her companion? “Can I help y—elch!”
Black dots swam in his vision in a sudden blast of pain. Dislocated jaw. He sank to his knees, reaching out blindly to grasp the solid form that had ambushed him. Together he and his attacker went down hard on the flagstone. A loud clatter shattered the night. He shook his head and saw…
A tire iron?
Fury surged through him. He grappled with the tall, heavily tattooed man who obviously knew a thing or two about street fighting. When Nate sensed an opening, his fist connected solidly with the man’s nose, shredding the hoop from his nostril. The man yelled, but continued to scrap. If Nate hadn’t been a Guardian, he seriously wondered if he’d be able to take the guy.
He rolled on top of the man, bearing down with his forearm on the guy’s windpipe. “You’ve cocked up with the wrong chap, blighter.”
The man managed to spit in Nate’s face at the same moment pixie girl kicked Nate in the jaw where he’d been nailed with the tire iron. Nate’s head snapped back, but he managed to maintain pressure on the pinned, but still-swinging scoundrel. The scrapper was almost as savage as some of the nasty-assed Rephaim he’d tangled with a few weeks ago.
Pixie girl grabbed Nate’s hair and yanked. “Where do you have Jessie, you creeper!”
What? This was about—
“No! Get off him, Nate, you’re killing him!”
Jessie?
She was running out the front door toward him, her blanket flapping open and her fanny—
Mine.
He was suddenly weightless. Then—
Hot waves of nausea spiked through his gut as he was thrown to his back, his head cracking against the decorative boulder next to the driveway. Over the ringing in his ears he heard Jessie scream as the tattooed freak fell on him with more crushing blows.
“Dante, stop! Stop it!”
Nate used the man’s momentary distraction to spring to his feet and bull charge the nutter back against the portico pillar. He reached out with his Earth element to awaken the shrubbery next to them. Scalawag was gonna find out how sharp those rose thorns were if he didn’t calm his shit down in three, two—
Jessie put one hand on Nate, one on his tattooed adversary, and…
Her blanket dropped.
“Jessica, for fuck’s sake!” Nate reached down to swipe the blanket because like hell he’d let this thug see his woman in all her naked glor—
The man’s knee crunched into Nate’s nose and blood rained down onto the flagstone in dark pools.
“Dante, enough! Cheese and rice, stop this right now, both of you, stupid shits!” Jessie turned on pixie girl who was laying the blanket across Jessie’s shoulders. “Emily, what’s going on?”
Nate straightened, breathing through the pain that seemed to pulse over every inch of his skin. He grabbed Jessie’s hand and yanked her toward him. She went willingly into the crook of his shoulder. It soothed his rage, and seemed to make both of the strangers physically back down.
That confused Nate. He looked from Dante to Jessie. He had to know. “Are you lovers?”
Tattoo man barked a laugh, then wheezed and spit blood.
“Dante?” Jessie sputtered. “Are you kidding me? No! We’ve been friends since grade school.”
Nate felt like beating his chest. He smirked at tattoo man. Dante gave him a double bird.
“God save me from testosterone! Stop this ridiculous posturing!” Jessie turned to the little hooligan with the shortest, blondest hair Nate had ever seen on a woman. “Em, what are you guys doing here? Seriously. What the hell?”
Pixie girl’s icy glare would freeze the bark off a lesser man. Nate winked at her, then fought a grimace as his cheek and eye muscles burned. Pixie girl made a rude sound at him and looked at Jessie. “What the hell right back’atcha, Jess! You promised you’d text every sixty minutes!”
Jessie’s mad vanished instantly. “Oh, crap.”
“Really, Blaze? That’s all you got for us after this bowsie banjaxed my windpipe and ripped my bill? Fuck this. I’m out of here.” Tattoo guy’s voice resonated with a faint Irish lilt.
Now that Nate wasn’t locked in mortal combat with him, he noted the man’s ear gauges, goatee, and wild dark hair that was short on the sides, and long and ratted up top.
“Dante, wait.” Jessie lunged for the man, but Nate didn’t release her hand. She jerked around, her mouth opening with a likely threat, but he beat her to it.
“You’re welcome to talk to them. But I swear, Jessie, if that blanket drops in front of Dante one more time, I’m going savage on his ass.”
“They’re my friends. Do you even know what those are?”
He absorbed her glower like fuel for his fire. Hell’s bells, she made him crackers. He released her hand, though he almost chewed through his cheek in the lead-up to it.
As she ran down the driveway, that goddamned blanket exposed her rear bits with every bare footfall. His inner man-beast rose up with a vengeance.
“You would do well to remember the terms of our contract, Jessica.” His voice rang out in the night like a baby’s wail in a holy chapel at midnight mass. Jessie’s friends looked at him like he’d lost his bloomin’ mind. Jessie’s pursed lips and glaring eyes said she’d chop him into tiny pieces if she had access to a sharp implement.
Well, that was fine with him. Murderous intent he could handle.
It was these blasted murky feelings that made him green about the gills. The sooner he got this vanishing scar mystery solved, the sooner he could enjoy his week with Jessie, and then move on
to the next decadent adventure life offered.
Chapter 13
Monday, October 27, 9 pm
Jessie drove up Nate’s long driveway four hours later than she told him she’d be back. Her heart pounded, in fear or anticipation she couldn’t tell. Maybe both.
It had been a miserable afternoon—more arguing with Emily, failing her Legal Research test, enduring snickers and slut-shaming from a table of female undergrads whose ringleader had picked up and read the gist of her and Nate’s contract when it had fluttered from her folder to the floor in the campus’s memorial union. She’d tried to swipe it away immediately, but the rail-thin busybody had honed in on the ‘companion’ terminology, drawing her own lurid conclusions. What if the co-ed was malicious enough to report it to the Law School Dean? Jessie’s entire career could be over before it even began. She would also probably go to jail. Pay fines. Humiliate Gramma and Grandpa, sending them both into a tailspin of stress-related health emergencies.
Horrors.
After that episode, she’d needed to be alone. She couldn’t go to Gramma’s or Dante’s or even her own damn apartment for fear Nate would come looking for her. She wanted to hold Scourge and cry into his smooth fur, but she couldn’t even indulge in that simple comfort because Scourge was staying with Mason, and no way could she go there either. Not after glutting herself on his enemy’s fierce then tender, all-night lovemaking.
Two nights in a row.
Ever since Em and Dante had left Saturday night, Nate had been like a man consumed, imprinting himself on her heart and soul. Forty-eight hours later, she ached all over. Scandalous, yet she could hardly think of anything else.
She’d driven from the university to Minnehaha Park hoping the fresh air would steady her. She’d hiked, gazed at the falls, thrown rocks off the bridge, and sat on picnic tabletops, staying much later than was wise, dusk having long since fallen. But something kept her from returning to the man she was beginning to obsess over. Things about him like how his voice sounded in the dark, how his eyes would twinkle as though lit from within by something not entirely human, the damned dimple that should be thoroughly boyish but steadfastly refused to be that innocent…
His targeted questions in an effort to know her better, and his arrogant, self-abasement to hide himself from her. He made her wonder and sigh and worry and…
Yearn.
During the four hours she’d been tardy, Nate had left five voicemails and twelve texts. Not only that, but multiple staff from TERRA had texted asking what was going on with her and the boss man because he had apparently lost his composure when no one had any answers about her whereabouts.
She hadn’t responded to anyone.
She put her car in park twenty feet from Nate’s garage, sighing into the silence as the engine quieted. As she reached for her messenger bag in the passenger seat, the mansion’s front door opened. Her gut twisted in a dozen coils to see Nate’s body backlit in the doorway, the warm foyer lights casting his face in shadows.
He waited there, hands balled into fists at his sides, unmoving like he was hewn from stone as she exited the car, her pulse hammering so hard against her neck she was almost light-headed.
Say something.
No. He was not her almighty master that she should have to feel like a truant.
His heavy gaze though.
She couldn’t see his eyes, but she felt them roving over her, searching, cataloguing, judging. What conclusions he came to, though, she couldn’t say. But the sensation was thick and palpable in the dry, breezy night.
She stopped five feet from the portico. Closer now, she could see the heavy, dark lashes that framed his eyes, the tautness of his face, could feel the strange mix of energies coming off him. She swallowed a couple times before she spoke. “Have I nullified the parameters of our contract?”
“Are you unwell?”
She almost laughed. “In mind or body?”
“If you are downtrodden or ill, it is my responsibility to provide for your care. You denied me such privilege when you needed my care most, and it displeases me greatly, Jess.”
This time she did laugh. The comment was so absurdly story-bookish. “No one is responsible for anyone else’s happiness.” Still, the comment warmed her.
“Maybe not, but I would like to try. You should have returned my calls.”
“I know.”
They looked at each other for a long moment. How was it that she could not really know him, yet feel like she could share her grimmest secret with him, and he’d not think less of her? That he would lay down with her darkness and never shame her the way she’d let those critical co-eds creep under her heart and lay their barbs. That he could take away all her worries and fears about her family and future with a snap of his fingers.
She wanted to trust…
Her eyes filled.
“Jessie.” He moved from the doorway, lifting her in his arms before she could even wipe her tattle-tale tears away. She tucked her face into his warm neck and wrapped her arms around his shoulders as he walked briskly into the house and slammed the door behind them with his foot. He carried her all the way upstairs into her bathroom where he sat her on the white leather vanity stool, knelt between her legs on the marble floor and kissed her tear tracks until they were fully spent. Her fingers delved into his thick hair, pulling him to her in silent entreaty. Their lips met, a soothing seduction that layered tinder, kindling, logs in a perfect arrangement until her body grew aflame, comfortable and restless at once. His mouth slanted, full-bodied, hungry across hers, his fingernails scoring her hips before sliding up to shape her breasts as he translated her sighs and coaxed her shadows to tiptoe into the light.
She was coming to crave this unconditional acceptance.
Her neck arched as his teeth nipped the tender skin below her jaw. “Nate, I need.”
He stood her up, unzipped her jeans, and peeled them slowly down her legs. She cast herself into his care as he removed each piece of her clothing until she stood naked. She drank in the reverence in his eyes as he gazed at her, trailing his knuckles from her neck down over a peaked nipple across the persistent chubbiness of her belly, to the smooth skin where her thigh met her body, next to the carefully shaped strip of hair.
Her hands sought his chest where his heart thudded as steadily as the massive grandfather clock in his library. She began to unbutton his shirt when he traced his broad finger along her seam, gathering wetness before sliding back up at such a deliberate pace her legs began to tremble, her breath to hitch. He did it over and over, and all she could do was grasp at the folds of his shirt to steady herself as his eyes burned into hers. The fingers of his other hand curled under her ass, tilting her hips to open her further to his erotic assault.
“Sit down, Jess.” His low voice promised iniquity.
She could only obey.
The bench was cool beneath her buttocks, a respite from the heat of Nate’s clever fingers. He followed her down, pressing her thighs wide with his palms. His ardent gaze pinned her. “Grab hold of my hair and direct me. Use me.”
Her fingers slid into his dark hair as his head lowered, a gasp dropping from her lips as his mouth met her body full-on. A wave of obscene pleasure contracted her calves, her feet arching to her toes on the floor tiles. His broad tongue stroked, curling at the tip, as her hands guided him, encouraged by his growls of approval every time she pulled his hair.
Lord, the sounds. Moans, groans, wet sucking. Her entire body blazed from the wicked things he was doing and the indecent picture they presented in the mirror on the opposite wall.
He pushed her back against the edge of the counter, his hand splayed wide on her solar plexus. Through hooded eyes, she peered into the mirror at that hand—so masculine with its purple-blue veins and blunt fingernails flexing, biting, into her breasts. Her climax hit fast, hard, breathless. He shifted his hands to her buttocks to support her through her boneless finish.
She curled her chest down over his h
ead, breathing against his sweaty temple as he pressed delicate kisses against her inner thighs, his fingers running soothing circles against her lower back. A thick knot began to weave in her throat. No one had ever made her feel so special. His manner bordered on overbearing, and she had disappointed him by not communicating with him, but all he’d wanted was connection. “I’m sorry I didn’t call,” she whispered.
The hitch in her voice solidified his growing conclusion. Even if his scar came back—which he was beginning to greatly doubt—one week with her wouldn’t be enough.
He slowly stood—forcing his muscles to ignore the charge and race of his pulse—and gathered her as close as possible, wrapping her in his arms, kissing every part of her his lips could physically reach. Her grasping hands and limb tremors expressed gratitude and uncertainty. He cupped her head in his palms. She opened her eyes, and his pulse climbed higher. There was trust in her gaze, and for once in his existence, he worried about what that meant.
He’d never lived up to someone’s trust. I will surely fail.
She was looking at him, and he was supposed to say something. Supposed to tell her how much he wanted to keep her by his side. How much these peculiar new feelings were tying him up inside. How he didn’t know what to do with them.
Her gaze said she wanted to put her faith him, but he didn’t know how to be the kind of man who deserved a woman’s trust. He was a manipulator, a betrayer, and if he ended up doing what he’d always done, how would he be able to erase the memory of these beautiful hours so he could sleep at night?
Erase the memories of the pain he might cause her.
Jessie wasn’t like the others he’d exploited who were just as selfish as he. She wasn’t innocent so much as…
Honorable.
It wasn’t a principle he had much experience with.
A little of the light died in her eyes at his continued silence. It stabbed at him. He brought his forehead to hers. “I never want to hurt you.”
