Demon Moon

by Cameron Dane

  “Please.” Connor heard the roughness of his own voice, but couldn’t correct it. “Don’t be scared. Please.” A thousand ways to explain what he was raced through Connor’s mind, but he couldn’t force even one of them past his lips. He would have to say the word “demon” to Cassandra; say it out loud, when he could barely say the word to himself. He opened his mouth, but all that kept coming out was, “It’s me, I promise. It’s me.”

  Cassie’s gaze suddenly softened, and the wildness slid out of her eyes. She tilted her head to the side.

  “Oh, I get it. It’s makeup.” Tentatively, she reached up and feathered the tips of her fingers over his slashing cheekbones and bumpy forehead. A shudder of desire coursed through Connor’s heated body. “That’s what it is, isn’t it?” she asked. “It’s like a costume. You’ve decided to come to the Halloween party tonight, haven’t you?”

  Relief flooded Connor at those words. She didn’t understand that his face was real. He didn’t have to tell her anything. Thank God for Halloween. Otherwise, his absolute idiocy of not locking the door would have allowed Cassie to figure out exactly what he was.

  “Yes.” Connor evaded an outright lie. “I am going to the party.”

  Cassie’s cheeks blossomed with color.

  “I feel like such an idiot for not realizing that right away.” She continued to map his face with an exquisitely tender touch, and Connor slid his eyes closed so that she wouldn’t see the frightening, unnatural hunger living inside of him. Hunger for her. “You should have said something down by the paddock, Connor. You scared the hell out of me when I walked in and saw you like this. I thought you were a demon, or the devil, or God knows what. But this…this is fantastic. This makeup is amazing. You must have been planning to come to the party all along. Don’t even try to tell me that you knew how to do this all by yourself. I won’t believe you.”

  “No.” He practically groaned the word. Her touch was exquisite torture. “I won’t.”

  Cassie innocently rubbed her thumb over his mouth, and Connor knew he could take no more. He grabbed her wrists, his palms heating at merely touching her skin. He deliberately set her a pace away from him. It was the only way he’d be able to clear his head of her earthy, female scent enough to think and breathe.

  “So?” She pressed him. “Tell me when you came up with this.” Cassie’s misassumption had given Connor a reprieve, and he wasn’t about to squander it before she started thinking about it a little bit deeper and figured out the truth. He needed her gone. Now. “Quit annoying me, Cassandra, or I’ll change my mind about going to the party. Give me five minutes to change my clothes, and the shower is yours.”

  “No, no. Don’t rush on my account.” Cassie backed up to the door, her eyes flashing with too much mischievous laughter for Connor’s comfort. But Christ, he would take teasing any day of the week over the fear that had been there moments ago. “You take all the time you need to get yourself all pretty and perfect for tonight. I’ll use the bathroom downstairs.”

  Connor felt his face flood with heat at her teasing. Pretty indeed. Thank God she couldn’t see how beet red his cheeks were under his makeup.

  “You’ve got a half hour. Don’t be late,” he warned. “Or we’ll leave without you.”

  “No you won’t.” She stepped back into the hallway. “But I’ll be ready anyway. And Connor?”

  He simply raised an eyebrow and crossed his arms against his chest.

  “Your makeup really is spectacular,” she told him again. “Whoever showed you how to do it is an artist. You are…” She cocked her head, shifting her long, mahogany braid over her shoulder. “…breathtaking. Yes, that’s the word I wanted. See you in a bit.” With that she waved and disappeared.

  Connor damned Cassandra and the exuberance that had allowed her to wiggle her way into every part of his life, always nudging and forcing him out of the rigid place in which he knew he needed to be. Connor didn’t know what unsettled him more. That Cassandra had seen what he really was, or that when she had, she’d said that word “breathtaking” in regards to him. For the first time in their acquaintance, Connor had detected sexual heat in her tone. What terrified him even more than Cassandra seeing his demon face was that if that attraction he had sensed in her was aimed at him, he was not at all certain he was capable of fighting it.

  Chapter Four

  Cassie gave her appearance one final look in the mirror, blushing all the way down to her partially exposed, practically non-existent cleavage as she did. She wore a white Grecian goddess get-up with a neckline that plunged to her waist and a diaphanous skirt that was slit all the way up the outer length of each of her thighs.

  She never wore sexy outfits like this. She loved her life here on the ranch and had taken to it like a junebug to a duck’s back when she had come to live with her father. She’d lived in jeans and snap button shirts almost exclusively since that day, all the while trying her damnedest to prove to Connor Hawkins that she could fit into his world without causing so much as a hiccup to his orderly life.

  Because she, Cassie Claire, tomboy extraordinaire, from the very first moment she’d laid eyes on Connor, had always thought him an attractive man. That crush had turned to full-on love the day he’d d brought her into his home.

  Cassie’s father had been the Hawkins’ Ranch cattle foreman for five years before he died. She moved in with him when she was sixteen, after her mother was killed in an auto accident. During the two years Cassie spent with him, he taught her to love this abundant Montana land with as much passion as he did. Her dad’s soft-spoken enthusiasm for Hawkins’ Ranch sank into Cassie’s bones quickly, and she had just begun to find some peace after the loss of her mother when, in the blink of an eye, her whole word imploded once again.

  She had been eighteen years old for all of two days when her father had dropped dead of a heart attack while out rounding up cattle, sending Cassie reeling from the devastating, debilitating pain of losing both of her parents within a two year span. Before Cassie could even think about how she was going to live and take care of herself for the rest of her life, Connor, in his gruff manner, had come and rounded her up from the little cabin where she’d lived with her father. He hadn’t said much of anything -- not that he ever did -- but instead guided her with a gentle hand under her elbow into his home. He helped her in dealing with the funeral, with the terrible choice of picking out a headstone for her father’s grave, and had paid for it all without so much as a word mentioned about it between them.

  The financial support and a place to live had been a generous gift, but it wasn’t why Cassie had fallen in love with Connor. She was a level-headed enough girl that she could easily have been grateful for that kind of assistance and not lost her heart to him. Instead, Connor stole her heart without even trying, in the simplest, most basic of ways. That first tumultuous year, living with him and his brothers, Cassie came to rely upon Connor’s constant, stable, drama-free presence while dealing with the pain of her loss and finding her place in a new home. When she needed to be close to another person in order to feel safe, it was always Connor who was close by, allowing Cassie her dignity by not commenting on her desperate need for human contact. He often told wonderful stories about her father. He didn’t shield her from the source of her pain, and after a time, Connor’s voice and those stories began to soothe and heal her wounded heart. Cassie probably loved Connor the most, though, because he found a place for her on Hawkins’ Ranch, and never made her feel like a charity case or a burden. From the very first week, he pulled her out of her isolation and gave her jobs on the ranch that made her feel useful and necessary. He didn’t insult her by only making them “woman’s work.” Sometimes they were, and she didn’t mind it, because she knew just as easily the next day or the next week he would give her a job that would tax her muscles and get her hands dirty, like castrating the cattle today.

  That was why Cassie loved Connor Hawkins. That was why she wanted him to stop seeing her as a teenag
er who needed his calm presence, and start seeing her as a woman who could stand at his side as an equal, in every way.

  Cassie glanced at her appearance once more and smiled. She might not be a perfect size six -- or even an eight -- but what she had was fit from hard work, and it was pretty enough in a simple, uncluttered way that she had to believe a man like Connor would appreciate.

  If only she could get him not only to look but also to notice. With her powerful dream from early this morning still sitting front and center in her thoughts Cassie crossed her fingers and ventured downstairs.

  * * * * *

  7:10 p.m.

  “So, that’s why you’re coming to the Halloween party looking like that?” Caleb asked. His guffaw of laughter grated on Connor’s last nerve. “Because Cassie thinks your demon visage is a Halloween costume? That’s rich, Con, truly rich.”

  “Shut up,” Connor snarled, his darkly tanned, demonic face twisting, his lips thinning down to a hard, cruel line. It was easy for Caleb to laugh, he had donned his old rodeo vest, chaps, and champion buckle, and called that a costume. Cain hadn’t bothered to don a costume at all. That had been Connor’s original plan, too. He rubbed his sweating palms on his jeans and paced. Christ, he hated feeling so exposed in his demon body. “She saw me and made assumptions. I couldn’t very well correct her, now could I? So now I have to live in this wretched face and skin for the next couple of hours, or else face questions from her about where my makeup went.”

  “Or, my brother,” Cain spoke up from across the room, “you could have used the opportunity to tell Cassie the truth.”

  Connor sometimes hated having brothers. Although Cain and Caleb weren’t Connor’s actual brothers. Of course, neither were they technically human, either. Cain and Caleb were cast offs of the demon world too. Cain’s species was different than Connor’s and Caleb’s, but the isolation and solitude they experienced were the same. Cain was of the Naverto demon species, a beast of flight. Caleb, like Connor, was a Dastetier, of the original demon beast species. As three misfits who didn’t want to be what they were, they’d found each other some one hundred and fifty years ago on the poorest streets of London and had become brother and friend to each other ever since.

  “I cannot tell her.” Connor laid a hard stare on Cain. “Nor can you. It would make her sick. It would turn her against us.”

  “Maybe not,” Caleb interrupted.

  Connor ignored that. “She would leave the ranch, without a place to go or a way to survive.”

  “She would be fine,” Caleb insisted, which struck Connor like a knife in his chest. “It’s you who wouldn’t get along well without Cassie here. Admit it.”

  “I admit nothing.”

  “Admit what?” a lilting, feminine voice inquired from the doorway.

  Connor spun around, and as the catcalls and whistling from his brothers assaulted his ears, he assessed the vision before him. Cassandra, but at the same time, not. Pert, firm breasts peeking out from the cutout of a flowing, white dress that accentuated her golden skin. It had slits that went up both legs that, from her stance, he could see went all the way up; he could see the smooth skin of her hip and beyond. He fleetingly wondered if she was wearing anything underneath the glorified sheet at all. All that seemed to hold the garment together was a wide gold band around her waist. Her hair was pushed away from her face with a headband of white baby roses, and the rest of it flowed down her back and over her shoulders in wave after wave of shiny brown glory. This was the natural result of always wearing her long hair in a braid, and it made Connor’s mouth salivate.

  There was only one thing he could say. “What in the hell do you think you’re wearing?”

  Cassie smiled, and he felt it rush all the way through his body, ending at his cock. “A Halloween costume.”

  There was no way. No goddamned way any other man was going to see Cassandra like this. “Not one that you’re going to be wearing out of this house tonight, sweetheart. Go change. Right now.”

  “Not on your life.”

  Connor raised an eyebrow, and with the ridges on his forehead he knew he looked menacing. He really didn’t give a damn. “You don’t do as I say, and it may well be your life.”

  Caleb stepped in between the two of them. “Okay.” He shot a hard look in Connor’s direction. “Let’s get going to that party before we miss all the good food. All right?”

  Connor stepped right up in Caleb’s face. “Not with her looking like that.”

  “Like what?” Caleb posed. “Beautiful? Stunning? Like at least twenty-five other women are going to look tonight, which is sexy as hell in a costume that is completely appropriate for her age and sex?”

  “Thank you, Caleb,” Cassie piped up from behind them.

  Caleb leaned in close to Connor and kept his words low. “Unless your goal is to look like a jealous husband and stake a claim on this girl for yourself -- which I have no problem with, by the way -- then you need to back off before you give yourself away.”

  Connor pulled back and met his brother’s gaze. He saw the truth there, felt it in his gut. He snarled again, adding, “Fine.” He pushed past Caleb and then Cassie too, hating the way his traitorous body almost turned toward her, as if she was a homing beacon shining light in the darkness of his soul. He wedged past the tight space between her and the hallway. “Let’s go,” he barked over his shoulder. “You all are the ones who wanted to go to this damn party so bad. Let’s go.”

  Cassie waited for Cain to follow Connor first, and then stopped Caleb with a hand to his forearm. “Thank you.” She squeezed his arm. She didn’t know what else to say. “Thank you.”

  Caleb’s ocean blue gaze landed on hers. “You’ve taken a big step tonight, Cassie. Don’t make me regret helping you make it. Don’t tease him if you don’t mean it. He’s not built to live through something like that. Do you understand me?”

  Cassie snapped her gaping mouth shut. “Yes.” She gulped, fear and inadequacy suddenly coating her exposed skin in a thin layer of sweat. “Yes.”

  “Good.” Caleb smiled. “Then let’s go.”

  Cassie was too dumbfounded to do anything other than follow.

  Chapter Five

  9:15 p.m.

  Connor leaned back against the living room wall in Mavis Pritchard’s home, the proprietress of the local diner. At sixty-five years old, she loved Halloween every bit as much as a five-year-old kid. She was quite a whirlwind of a woman, and she put on one hell of a party. Too bad Connor was in no frame of mind to enjoy it.

  “Look at that bastard flirting with her,” Connor told Caleb. His natural protective instinct made his hands curl into fists and his upper lip pull back to bare his teeth. “He’s taking liberties that I’m going to end up having to break his arms over.”

  Caleb’s gaze found Cassie in the darkened, crowded living room. She was dancing with a young buck that worked one of the neighboring ranches.

  “He’s got his hands on her waist, Connor,” Caleb said. “That is a perfectly permissible position for two people who are dancing together.”

  “Maybe, but he’s thinking about touching her ass, I just know it.” He scanned the wall-to-wall crowd of brightly dressed, costumed partygoers, all whooping it up and having a grand old time. “He wants to touch her, damn it. Just like every other juvenile prick who has danced with her tonight has wanted to do.”

  “Well then why don’t you ask her to dance?” Caleb suggested. He took a swig of beer before adding under his breath, “That way your slightly less juvenile prick will be the only one close enough to touch her.”

  “Slightly?” Connor snorted. “Try ancient, when you compare it to her. Call me crazy, but I don’t think Cassie would take to my geriatric attentions. Not if she knew the truth.”

  “Don’t use that as an excuse,” Caleb clipped off, his voice icier than Connor had ever heard it. “You know we don’t age in the same way that a human does. Cassie believes you to be in your mid thirties, because that is
the physical age of your human body. Don’t act like you’re too old for her when the simple truth is that you’re too afraid to act on what you’re feeling. You know a cure for what we are exists. Perhaps that cure already lives within Cassie. Think about it.”

  “No.”

  “All right. Then you stand here brooding and holding up the wall all night.” Caleb slapped Connor on the shoulder hard enough to make him stumble. “Meanwhile, I’m going to go and have some fun. Maybe ask a pretty girl to dance. See you later.”

  Connor watched his brother walk across the room and lead an attractive woman dressed in emergency room scrubs to the dance floor. His gaze naturally slid back to Cassandra, though, as it always did. He watched her throw her head back and laugh at something the young stud she was dancing with said. Blood immediately fired in Connor’s veins, and he knew it was pure, unadulterated jealously. Everything felt more heightened and raw today, and having the demon right out on the surface of his very being only pushed and made his possessive feelings that much more acute. In that moment, Connor knew he needed to get away. If he had to stand around for even five more minutes watching another man touch Cassandra, to be near her while he wasn’t, Connor would end up living up to the reputation of his demon predecessors and start tearing heads off with his bare hands.

  Nobody needed to see a bloodbath like that, because once Connor got started, it was very likely that he wouldn’t be able to stop until every man who had put even one finger on Cassandra was dead.

  Cassie watched Connor make his way across the crowded living room to a long hallway, and she wondered what had put such a tight, hard expression on his face. Not that she could see much under all of his makeup, but she had watched Connor enough over the years to know that when his eyes went a flat black like she’d caught just now, something was wrong. Something had upset him. Something he apparently didn’t want anyone to know about. Well, there was no time better than tonight to start getting rid of those walls between them. He’d better get ready to start sharing.