“Is she here?” Dean asked again, quiet now, stabbing a finger at the floor as if she might be buried in the basement. “In this house? Right now?”
William narrowed his eyes and refrained from doing something he might regret if incarcerated for aggravated assault. “You swear to God you had nothing to do with this?”
Dean raised his right pinky finger. “I swear it on Britney Spears’ underwear.”
“Then where do you think she came from?”
He shook his head with vague uncertainty. “Heaven?”
“I considered that.”
“Really?”
Yes. “Don’t be stupid.”
“No,” Dean said, and leaned closer. “Think about it. You’re about to get married. I mean, not that that’s a bad thing. Emily’s hot and everything. But marriage! Whew! Maybe God thought, Hey, you-know-who needs a little fun before he—”
“I should have taken her to the hospital,” William said, and paced. “But she looks so young and . . . and she doesn’t have any ID.”
“No.” Dean made a face and shook his head. “No ID. ’Cuz she doesn’t have any clothes, right?”
What would happen if Will hit the idiot in the head with a chair like they did in the movies?
“Just out of curiosity . . . is she naked right now? In your bedroom? Is she naked?” Dean asked.
“Leave her alone.” The words sounded a little gritty, a little dangerous.
Dean’s brows now resided in his hairline. “Sure. Sure I will. I’m just trying to help. And I thought . . .” He shrugged again. “Maybe if I took a look I might recognize her. You know. From a strip club or—”
Anger sizzled through Will like summer lightning. “You think she’s a damned stripper?”
“No! No. Of course not. But . . . maybe I’ve seen her . . . somewhere.”
“She’s not from around here.”
“How do you know?”
“Her voice. It’s . . .” He tried to think of something that wouldn’t sound idiotic. But there was nothing. “It’s like music.”
“A naked chick with an accent?” Dean sounded dreamy, and maybe pre-orgasmic.
Will leveled a glare. “I think it’s time for you to leave.”
Dean opened his mouth but then just took another swig of vodka and nodded. “Yeah, I suppose you’re right. I should leave you alone. You got things to work out.” He turned toward the door, shook his head. “Emily’s going to have a shit fit.”
Try as he might, William couldn’t seem to recall his fiancée’s face. He was pretty sure she had one. “She already has.”
Dean stopped dead in his tracks, turned back, croaked a laugh. “You told her?”
“She was here.”
“You’re shittin’ me”
“I wish I were.”
“She was here here?”
Will slammed his gaze to the bedroom, but the door remained closed. “Keep your damned voice down.”
“And you still kept the girl in your house?”
William winced.
“Ballsy! Dumber than hell. But ballsy.” Dean chuckled, then jiggled a little. “Hey, can I use your can quick? Got half a quart of vodka on top of a gallon of coffee. Bladder’s about to erupt,” he added, but William had already turned toward the bedroom. She was in there. So close.
“Buddy?”
“Yeah, sure. Just be quiet.”
Dean slapped the bottle into the other’s hand and hurried toward the bathroom.
Outside, something scraped against the house. What was it? Or who? Nerves taut, William paced through the living room and stepped outside, but a cursory glance showed nothing. Shutting the door behind him, he pattered onto the sidewalk and looked around. All seemed quiet. Only the ethereal girl in his bed was strange.
Going back inside, he shut the door and stared at nothing in particular. He’d have to sleep on the couch. There were no other options, of course. He had some spare sheets in the bedroom, but when he glanced in that direction, he saw that the door was open.
“Fern?” he said, but there was no answer. Reality hit him like a jackhammer. Abbot! He stormed into the bedroom, heart pounding. And there was Dean, standing beside the mattress, staring through the dimness at the girl.
William was about to curse, to call names, to toss the other out on his ass, but the angel in the bed was all-consuming. Her silk-soft hair wisped in undulating waves around her body. Her lips were slightly parted as she slept and her lashes, lowered in repose, seemed somehow to be whispering to him.
“Holy hell,” Dean said, and vaguely William remembered he wasn’t alone with the girl.
She was lying on her side with one supple endless leg slightly bent. Her borrowed pajama top had worked up, showing the sweet curves where her thighs met her buttocks. Desire stormed through Will like a spring blizzard, but with it came something else. Something achingly akin to jealousy.
Reaching out, he snatched the crumpled blanket from the foot of the bed and whipped it over her golden legs. Then, grabbing Dean by the shirtfront, William dragged him into the hallway and pulled the door shut behind him.
“Holy hell,” Dean muttered again, and turned his head robotically toward the bedroom.
“Go home,” Will rasped, and nudged him toward the front door, hand still fisted in his shirt.
Dean stumbled a little but went nowhere. “Good God! She’s . . . She’s . . .” He shook his head. “What is she?”
“Get the hell out of here.”
“An angel?”
“Keep your voice down.”
“A mermaid?”
“Shut the hell up.”
“A nymph?” Dean said, and then, for reasons Will would never quite understand, he drew his fist back and struck his best friend square in the nose.
Chapter
6
Avalina awoke with the dawn. Stretching, she drew in a breath, tasted the air on her tongue, and scowled. Things smelled strange. And felt strange. Coarse and . . . She glanced down and frowned at the blue-striped garment that covered her torso. Something was wrong, she thought, and then memories rushed in. Memories of a whisker-shadowed face, a tall form, hard and solid. A male. The thought came to her easily. He had held her against his body. Had felt warm and potent against her palms. She squirmed a little at the hot flow of feelings, then stopped, for her actions seemed odd, out of character. But what was her character? Surely ’twas to enjoy a male’s touch. To take plea sure and give the same.
Searching her memory, she found scant information. Just a few scattered remnants of scents and sounds. Of colors and feelings. Greens and reds in a tumble of fragrances. The distant sigh of a morning lark’s call.
Where was she? Who was she?
Rising from the bed, she crossed the room. The flooring felt scratchy beneath her bare toes as she stepped into the hall. One glance told her she was yet in the strange abode in which she had found herself the previous night. The abode with the lovely male with the lovely voice and the lovely . . .
She stopped, for he was there, sprawled across the settee, his right foot draped diagonally over the edge, his left leg bent beneath him. One arm dangled over a cushion while the other was stretched above his head. He lay on his back, but his eyes were closed and his chest was almost entirely naked. And strangely, unmistakably beautiful. She smiled and took a step toward him.
William moaned and shifted, warmed by his improbable dark velvet dreams. The angel princess was kissing him, lips like plum wine, hands like music, touching his face with delicate fingers, caressing his chest with tender strokes. He tried to reach for her, but his left arm felt strangely drowsy. He jerked at it. Feelings tingled irritably from his fingers to his shoulder, but he remained as he was. Waking grudgingly, he grimaced as he tried to change positions.
That’s when memories stormed through him in wild waves. Memories of an angelic face and devilish body. Memories of an idiotic attempt to keep himself from the most luscious—
“Who
did this?”
He opened his eyes with a snap and she was there, sitting inches away, lips slightly parted, tousled hair caressing his chest. He jerked, only to find that his left hand was tied to the couch.
“Hi.” He cleared his clogged throat and sat up uncomfortably, feeling foolish and startled, and hopelessly hard as he tried to wrestle his shirt back over her chest. “Hello,” he said.
She remained as she was, scowling a little, then reaching out, touched his tied hand. Tilting his head back, he steeled himself against the feelings that crashed through him like thunder.
Her fingers trailed from his fingers to the rope as she shifted her worried gaze to his. “Why?” she asked.
“Oh . . .” He tried to breathe and forced a laugh. It sounded like the bray of an inebriated ass. “That. I just . . . I like to sleep that way.” What the hell, he thought, and made another vain attempt at sanity. “Sometimes I . . .” Trying to shift upright without touching her, he reached over to untie the cord with his right hand, but it had pulled tight during the night. “Sometimes I sleepwalk.”
She was still scowling at his foolishness. Maybe he was the one who was concussed. Or maybe it had been a stroke of genius to truss himself up like a Thanksgiving goose. At least he hadn’t ravaged her during the night despite her unearthly appeal, her petal-soft skin, her flirtatious hair, her—
“I walk in my sleep,” he explained, desperately fiddling with the rope. “And I didn’t want to . . .” He glanced at her face and abruptly lost his train of thought, his breath, his bearings. Good God, she was beautiful, as fresh as the sunrise, as . . .
She laid her hand on his chest.
He actually gasped as he jerked his head back. But he was capable of little else, for he was frozen, mesmerized, breathless. Her hand felt like a whispered prayer against his skin, and then she was leaning in, lips parted.
Jailbait! The word burst inside his cranium like a squashed melon, and suddenly he was scrambling backward, arm still caught on the leg of the couch as he stumbled over the back of it.
She rose to her feet, devastatingly bewildered.
“Clothes!” he rasped. “You need clothes. I shouldn’t be lying around all day when you don’t have any . . .” He made the mistake of lowering his gaze to the edge of his pajama top. The damned lucky edge. The edge that ended just below her crotch. “Holy crap,” he ended poorly, bent nearly double over his secured arm and working wildly at the knot. For a moment he entertained a rabid, fleeting thought of chewing off his arm, but she came around the corner of the couch, forcing him to move to the end of his leash. He held his breath as she bent, but she only touched her fingers to the bond. It fell away. He straightened and tried to run, but it was no use, for she had already taken his hand in hers and was smoothing it with her fingertips.
Hope flowed through him. Hope and happiness melded irrationally with hot need.
“Are you well?” she asked.
It took him a moment to find his voice, longer still to quell the demands from below. “Yes. Well. Quite well.”
“Your hand, it does not hurt?” she asked, and kissed his knuckles with mind-numbing tenderness.
He jerked spasmodically, then found his senses with a jolt.
“No!” he croaked, and yanked his hand away. Feelings of bereft confusion gasped through him, but he held himself steady. “I’m fine! Good. Fine.”
She stepped toward him. He stepped back, swallowing. “Have you . . . Have you remembered anything? Your name? How you got here?”
A smile tugged at the corners of her mouth. “I remember you,” she said, and reached out.
But he was still backing away. “Good. Excellent. But listen . . . Fern, I have a lot of work to do today. Another day, another million.” He laughed croakily. “So you’re going to have to . . .” What? What was she going to have to do? Haunt his thoughts until he was so horny he was nothing but a greasy spot on the carpet? “You’re going to have to . . . leave.”
The world went silent.
She blinked. Her eyes looked unearthly bright. Was she going to cry? Dear God, what if she cried!
“I mean . . .” Shit. Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit. If she cried, he’d crumble, spewing apologies and promises like a TV evangelist caught flagrante delicto. “Not immediately. I’ll get you some clothes and . . .” He glanced at her legs again. They didn’t end. Ever. And her feet . . . “More clothes. Anyway . . . we’d better get going. Here.” He rushed toward the bedroom, found his pajama bottoms with soaring, painful relief, and tossed them at her. “Put those on. I know they won’t fit ’cuz you’re so . . .” There were no words to describe her. No thoughts even. Just colors and sensations and dreams. “So . . . Holy crap! But . . . I know . . .” Bending, he untied the distal end of his tether and held it out to her, mind tumbling, words at an end. “Here,” he said finally, tone defeated and hushed. “You can use this for a belt.”
But Wal-Mart seemed to be the only store open at 7:00 A.M. that offered clothing. Stupid retailers. What did they expect a man to do when he found a naked angel princess with plum-wine lips and musical fingers sprawled on his bathroom floor?
An angel princess who looked adorable even in his ridiculously large pajamas and mismatched tube socks. He’d been unable to find shoes that would fit, and barefoot was out of the earth-shattering question. So she padded across the parking lot beside him, wide-eyed and half-smiling, motioning now and then to a car or a tree or a sign, and stopping dead in her tracks as a jogger trotted by with a terrier on a red nylon leash.
Her eyes were as bright as candlelit amethyst. “What?” she asked, pointing.
It took him a moment to make sense of her question, for once again he was struck dumb by her gilded beauty, pulled under by her incomparable allure. But he had to get over it, accept it, move on. It was what he did. Another day . . . and all that crap. “Terrier,” he said. “Airedale, I think.”
She nodded. Her cheeks were dimpled, her eyes bright with intelligent interest. “Airedale,” she repeated.
“Good. Very good.” Maybe her memory was returning. Maybe soon they’d be discussing politics, the price of salami, and why, oh God why, he couldn’t look at her without thinking of swimming naked beneath moon-drenched waterfalls. And where the hell did he get the word “moon-drenched” anyway?
She was still gazing after the jogging pair. “Never,” she said, and shook her head in wonder.
“You’ve never seen an Airedale?” They were almost to the gaping maw of the mega-store. A trio of men had stopped dead in their tracks near the cart corral to watch her walk by. “Well . . .” He glared over his shoulder at them. Bastards. Hadn’t they ever see an angel princess with plum-wine lips and musical hands before? “They’re fairly rare, I think.”
She trilled her fingers up the rough cornerstone of the building and seemed not to notice that two more men and a gangly teenager had stopped to stare. The kid’s pimply jaw dropped like a bad investment and stayed there. Maybe it was because of the pajamas. Will glanced at her. Maybe not. His own forehead felt damp, his joints uncertain, but he soldiered on.
The glass doors slid open before them. Fern twitched and held back, but he urged her inside.
“What?” she asked, half-turning in awe.
“Automated door,” he said. “They’re activated by a sensor that’s—”
“Door?” she said, and turned back toward it, but he curled a hand carefully around her arm and tugged her past the suddenly speechless greeter. He was as old as dirt and absolutely bald except for two hairs that grew from the exact center of his head, but he turned nevertheless and tottered after them.
“Automated door,” Will said, and scowled at the small parade of men who seemed to be trailing behind.
“Door,” she repeated.
The rest of the trip was equally surreal. As they roamed through the women’s department, she touched most garments and smelled several. When she touched the tip of her inquisitive tongue to the sleeve of a cotton
jacket, he almost passed out. But he didn’t dare, for her fan club seemed to be expanding. There was not, he noticed with growling irritation, a woman in the entire transfixed troupe. In fact, there seemed to be an angry mob of females gathering near Housewares.
“Choose anything you like,” he said, still eyeing the men and nodding toward a pair of boxy trousers. “Anything that will . . . ,” he began, but she was already weaving her way through the racks, only to stop in the swimwear department. He scurried after, a human barrier between her and the restive pack of jackals.
His heart did a little trick beat as she touched a glittery bikini, but then her eyes lit and she lifted a long garment to her face, grazing it along one satin cheek.
“Comely,” she said.
“Comely? Oh, pretty. Yes.” And it was. Made of sheerest emerald gauze, it boasted a tiny frill at the plunging neckline and a flirty ruffle at the hem. The thought of it sliding off her sun-gold shoulders made his knees shudder like wind chimes.
“Mine?” she asked.
He swallowed hard and tried not to imagine her wearing it. Or not wearing it. “Ummm, well . . . ,” he said, “I believe that particular garment was meant to be worn over swimwear. I don’t think you can—”
“Swim.” She dimpled shyly and suddenly the image of her floating on her back filled his head like lightning. She was skimming through velvet blue water, with the emerald gown translucent against her glorious skin and her hair flowing around her like molten gold, hiding and revealing, teasing and caressing.
His brain felt hot. “Well . . . ,” he said. “Okay.”
Still smiling, she flipped open the top button of his oversized shirt. One sparkling nipple shone like a harvest moon above the flannel. He gasped like a B-movie starlet, then grabbed her hands. Steeling himself against the lightning bolt of skin against skin, he ignored the glower of the man mob and stilled her movements. “Not here, though, honey. Not here. Just a minute.”
By the time they had exited the store, he was as hard as a Roman candle, but he had managed to buy her three garments. The emerald gown plus a pair of khaki pants and a sweatshirt baggy enough to hide a Honda. They were, very probably, the ugliest clothes ever made.
Faeries Gone Wild Page 9
