by Lia Davis
"Are you there?" He broke his kiss and his motions quickened. "Tell me."
She might want to take her time, but her body reacted on its own, moving with him. "Are you?" She bit down on her lip. The euphoria was taking over, seeping out from the center of her being and bathing her in bliss.
"Now, Leora." He tensed. "Now."
She shook her head. She was in this incredible spot before only to be left hanging. "I can't."
"You can." His words came out between pants. "You need it. Come now."
"Come with me." She buried her face in his neck.
His body shook, his stokes erratic as if he were struggling. "Come on, Leora. It's for you."
"It's for us." The orgasm she fought for was rushing toward her, yet now she did everything to stave it off. "Together!" The second the request left her mouth, her body betrayed her again. This time, not by denying her, but by surrendering in pounding, pulsing exhilaration. Her entire being was engulfed in pure ecstasy, every inch of her quivering in delight.
"Damn it!" Dolan stiffened and he rammed his body further into hers. "Damn it."
Her body filled with his heat and a second, more intense wave hit her. There seemed to be no end to the contractions, as if she tried to milk every last ounce out joy out of them.
"I tried to hold on." He rocked against her. "I tried."
Her body calmed and seemed to float among the candles' shimmering golden light. "We did it together. It was perfect."
He moved off to one side, but kept his arms around her. "My Leora." His lips brushed her temple.
She put her hand over his. "Where do you go when you're not with me?" All her life she tried to get him to tell her.
"It doesn't matter." He answered fast, too fast. "Don't think about it."
"Dolan."
"Don't dwell on it. It doesn't matter."
"What about last time?" She bit the inside of her mouth, but she wanted to be the only one. Damn her.
"I walked around until sunrise." He nuzzled her hair. "You had the control."
She closed her eyes, relishing and hating the relief that encompassed her at his words. Now she tried to concentrate on the way he held her, how they breathed in unison, how his lips grazed the back of her neck. If they were any other couple, they would drift off, share a dream, create new ones in the morning, start a life.
But she was a mistake and he was a demon.
There would be no morning. She knew this. No conjuring, wishing or begging would allow him to return for four years. One thousand four hundred sixty-one days. Thirty-five thousand sixty-four hours. She trapped him. The little girl who wanted to be special, possess the ultimate keepsake, and finally have something of her own.
An unwanted pressure built behind her nose and eyes. No tears. She swallowed the urge away. Tears fed weakness. Weakness meant a demon could take over.
She glanced over at the draped window. Even the heavy velvet curtains Dolan created to block out the world wouldn't hide the small gray stripe of sky that told her morning was on the way. Any time now, he would vanish, return to purgatory or wherever. She took his hand. No matter how tight she squeezed, nothing would hold him here. Still, she tangled their fingers together.
"Leora." Dolan must have noticed the time as well.
"What is it?" She spit the words out, not really wanting anything to interrupt these few minutes.
"Every four years is a big jump."
She was different every time he arrived, a child, a pre-teen, teenager, woman. He was always the same. She shrugged her shoulders. Maybe she was the same, too.
"Give me these next four years before you're with someone else." He pressed both their hands to her chest. "If I can make it back, just give me that, all right?"
"What? What do you mean if? Why?" She ground her teeth together. The tears wouldn't fall. They wouldn't.
"Because I'm asking you." His voice didn't have the power it usually possessed.
She rolled over, but refused to look in those copper eyes and focused on his neck. "No." She tensed waiting for his reaction.
Instead of yells and protests, he laughed. One deep, lone laugh. "I taught you right."
She dared herself and turned up to his face, forced herself to get a good look, engrave the lines and angles into her mind. Remember the perfect amount of stubble and that damn dimple on the left side of his smile.
"You are a selfish bitch." He hooked his hand under chin. "Bravo."
She shook her head. "I don't want you to come back."
He let go of her hand and propped himself up his elbow. "What are you saying?"
She touched his chest, running one finger down the center. No matter what he said, she knew there was a real heart in there. "You taught me everything. You made me strong." He didn't bring out the worst in her, she did it herself and she needed to defy him and care for another. "I want you to do what you need to do. I don't want you to come back for me."
"You want your life back?" He gripped her face preventing her from turning away. "You want to get married, have children, live, die?" His tone mocked her. "You kept me captive all these years, and now you want out?"
She put her hand over his. "All those milestones are meaningless. I want you to have your existence back."
His hand fell. "For me?"
Once more she shut her eyes, needing the strength of complete darkness to get the rest out. "I would wait four, forty or four hundred years for you." A stupid tear betrayed them both and ran down her face. "That's when I'm alive."
He captured the tear and ran his fingertip over her bottom lip.
Salt seasoned sadness tickled her tongue.
"Do you know why I asked you to wait for me?"
"So we can both be tortured." She tried to smile, but it wouldn't come.
"Maybe at one time." He moved his face down to the crook of her neck. "I'm not a demon with you."
"What?" She opened her eyes.
"I tried. I tried to turn you. I tried to be the creature who made you suffer, I could have left you in a state of want that would have never subsided."
"I don't understand."
"I'm not a demon with you. I had you. I waited years. Then I wanted you to be satisfied." He curled his arm around her waist. "Your pleasure, your desire became more important than mine."
With his words, there was no question what she had to do. "You're free, Dolan."
"Leora."
She put her hand on his cheek "I want you to go. You're free from me, I promise." She was through condemning him to this never-ending cycle. Before he could say another word, she pushed him away and got out of the bed.
"Leora, no!"
"I love you." She fled out of that room, that oasis. "I love you, I promise."
He was right when he told her she would never have satisfaction again. No one would ever be Dolan.
Twenty years ago, Dolan made a mistake. One he could have prevented if he only followed his own rules.
Curiosity kept him there that day. Caring about the girl he found kept him coming back.
Leora called him a "fallen demon.” Demons were evil beings, brought out the worst in people, made them do lewd and despicable acts. His was maybe the most deplorable jobs of them all. He didn't create anything, only destroyed the ones he touched in his own search for some fulfillment one night every four human years.
Tonight, he granted another's fantasy, defied those above him and allowed himself to share instead of take, and though he wanted nothing in return, he received the gift of hearing Leora say she loved him.
In the human world, there was nothing grander.
Maybe the same was true for the other world as well.
He walked through the house and put on his pants. Though it would have been much easier to make them appear, he wanted to play at being a human. Of course, humans were a low life form, one to be manipulated and controlled. They only had a few things to offer those like him.
Human or not, he knew right where to find he
r, and headed back upstairs to her old bedroom. Her furniture remained in the room. The desk, the chair, his picture with a bit of sparkle still on the wall.
She stood by their window dangling the pendant he gave her in her fingers. It swung back and forth as a pendulum marking off the seconds. The way she draped herself in a sheet and backlit from a corner light, she appeared as the angel she always accused him of being.
Time was running short. Once the sun rose, he would leave. A strange sinking sensation settled in his stomach. "Leora."
She spun around, drew back her arm, and heaved something in his direction.
He narrowed his eyes to make out what she used as a missile and held out his hand to catch it in midair. The projectile whizzed by him, hit the wall and shattered. A piece landed by his feet and he bent down, picking up part of the small glass globe she threw at him the first time.
"You didn't catch it." Leora shook her head.
"I didn't expect it." This whole night had thrown him off. The edge pierced his finger and he dropped the shard.
"So." She stepped closer.
One lone red blood droplet emerged from the cut, and he watched it slide down his finger. He’d never seen his own blood, didn't even know he had any. "The room is dark."
"It always is." She wrinkled her nose. "Where do you go when you're not with me?"
She asked the question before, and he didn't want to answer. He committed too many errors that wouldn't be forgiven. "I'm not sure." The blood made its way to his palm.
"What do you mean?" She made her way to him and wrapped an edge of the sheet over his cut.
He grabbed her hand. Even with the fabric between them, her body still radiated heat. He had broken every law known to him. There was no point in stopping now. "I didn't do my job. I haven't since I first met you. Tonight was worse. I satisfied you."
"You’re not supposed to give pleasure." She moved closer, hid her face in his chest. "That is your job."
They never truly discussed this. Maybe he wanted to hide his real purpose. "No, I'm not."
"You tried exact your revenge because I made you keep coming back." Her voice vibrated against him.
He put his hand on the back of her head. "I couldn't do it." He didn't want to imagine the punishment awaiting him. He would have to be retrained, or put into limbo, demon death without even the finality of human death. At the finish, he lost complete control, and they made fun of humans for their lack of discipline.
"I know." She sniffed, her tears tickled as they ran down his chest.
"Don't cry." He raked his hand through her hair and watched the window.
"Don't go." Her breath caught and her body stiffened with sobs as she let out the years of emotion he instructed her to keep inside.
His time was almost done. He squeezed his eyes shut and held her, images of her through the years flashing through his mind. He had only a faded memory of other women, they all melded into nothingness yet every vision of Leora remained vivid, a motion picture that never faded. "I came back because I wanted to. Tonight, I fell in love with you." His chest seized at having said the forbidden. "Maybe I always loved you."
She pulled back a bit and turned her face up to him.
"I wanted to know you, watch you, maybe even help you." He stared down at her. Her eyes had become light silver-grey with her crying. "You were so lost."
"I still am." She reached up and traced his chin with her fingertip. "You changed."
He shrugged.
"No." She ran her hand across his face. "You're different, your stubble, it grew."
"What? That's not possible." He touched his chin, the hairs were longer, no longer a sexy shadow, but a man who needed to shave.
"You're bleeding, and you didn't catch the globe." She swallowed. "You came too fast."
He frowned. No male needed to hear that.
"Now your beard." She rubbed his face again.
As if on cue, they both turned toward the window.
She fell back against him. "Dolan?"
He stared at what he was never allowed to witness. A glowing gold radiated inside, and he knew his fate.
Mortality. His stomach seized, a human reaction to a word meant only for humans. Right now he should be pleading to return, spend the rest of his days trying to get back what was taken from him. There was no greater punishment than mortality. Left to die with the humans they despised. Unless, a demon made an even worse mistake and allowed himself to love one of them. "Maybe it was decided we deserve each other." He would now be one of them, he would live, he would die, but he would have Leora. He hugged her.
"You're mine." She spun toward him, taking his face into her hands. Her gaze traveled over him and she nodded. "The sun's out."
* * *
The End
About the Author
Kim Carmichael began writing twelve years ago when her love of happy endings inspired her to create her own. She has a weakness for bad boys and techno geeks, and married her own computer whiz after he proved he could keep her all her gadgets running. When not writing, she can usually be found slathered in sunscreen trolling Los Angeles and helping top doctors build their practices.
* * *
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Website: Www.kimcarmichaelnovels.com
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Twitter: @kimcarmichael4
Veil Break
Savannah Verte
Introduction
Taken from the world he knows, to a place out of time, Holden Henry has a lot of questions when he is redeposited into his world, 150 years in the future. His Savannah isn’t the same anymore.
Chapter 1
Holden Henry cursed the moment he opened his eyes and found nothing had changed. He’d retired from the helm the previous night after guiding his tug into a sloop he could not see. Though he knew his eyes were open, and his hands held up before him, like the night before at the wheel, he could not see them. The thick cloak of fog obscured everything. That was the first day behind the veil.
One hundred fifty years later, the only change was that he no longer needed his eyes to navigate the river. Every new day, like the thousands before, he cursed as soon as his eyes opened. Having managed to survive the Civil War, he rationalized that he should be able to break free from the alternate reality, or, who was he kidding, the hell, that he was living in. Then again, he’d realized a long time ago that he wasn’t really living anymore either. That too had changed he had to acknowledge, and there was no magic he knew, or had ever found, that could change it back.
The first days had been excruciating. He’d tried every channel and current he could feel through the wheel to navigate back the way he had come, thinking that perhaps there was a way to reverse the events. There wasn’t. Days bled to months with no progress, and never a thinner patch. There was also never a return call when he screamed into the thick, gray oblivion. His skeleton crew, like the rest of the world he knew, had vanished into the fog.
The early years had been the hardest. Unlike the first days after the war ended, he couldn’t go home. He wanted desperately to know if his family was still out there somewhere. Eventually, he acquiesced to the only logical conclusion he could come up with, that if they had not been taken into the mist, they were out there somewhere, just without him. That truth buckled his knees and left him vacant for years.
Decades in, having tried repeatedly to end his suffering to no avail, he finally came to terms with the situation. Or, some semblance of rational acceptance anyway. Then again, who comes to terms with, or accepts, that they are dead, or a ghost, or don’t exist anymore, simply because they drifted through the thickest cloud of dense condensation they had ever seen? Somehow it was an easier truth than the alternative, which was that he had lost his mind.
It had taken time, but eventually Holden had come to realize that he hadn’t actually lost everything. He still had his tug. It was an odd sensation to run the river with no
barge to tow, but the notion of sitting in the sloop, or disembarking to stand in the mist were not on his list of plans.
He had actually lowered the gain way once and left the deck, but only for a moment. Stepping off the end, it wasn’t dock planking that he felt under his feet, nor was it the soft, silty soil of the Savannah shore. The line of goose flesh that had marched up his spine forced his retreat immediately. For all of his near misses through the war with different parties trying to acquire his ship, those fears paled in comparison to the unsettled angst in the pit of his stomach as he set one foot down. He would be glad to never experience that again, and he called that memory and sensation to mind any time he considered leaving the tug. It was an adjustment, but not a difficult one.
Like his shipmates, the rations on board had disappeared. He was moderately glad to have learned he didn’t need them anymore. Still, there was something to be said for a meal. There was a lot to be said for companionship though, specifically, the female variety. What he wouldn’t give for a soft, willing woman to help him worry away the hours. He had called himself hoarse beckoning into the mist for someone, anyone, to respond, all the while hoping it would be a female who finally answered his summons. It was yet another thing he didn’t get to have.
Chapter 2
If anyone asked, Esme Anders answered that she was just another old soul. Somehow, the idea of explaining what she meant to say, that she was a reincarnated soul, was a bit more than she thought most people would be willing, or able, to accept. For example, she knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that in the late autumn of 1865, something unnatural had occurred, shifting the reality of the Savannah establishment along the back river. At the time, speculation, and accusations, had run rampant as to who was responsible for the catastrophe. In the time between sundown and sunrise, an entire fleet of tugs, barges, and small merchant ships, along with their crews, had all disappeared as if they had simply been erased from existence, without so much as a trace from the channel.
