by Holley Trent
He moved closer and grabbed the door’s edge before she could pull it. “Hey, why don’t you let me buy you a cup of coffee? You look like you could use a cup.”
“I don’t think so, dude.”
She could afford her own coffee, obviously, but no prostitute had ever offered to buy her anything. Must have been a new sales strategy—the hook ’em, then hump ’em.
She just wanted to get back on the road, but he was right. She did need to refill her thermos, fiend that she was. Coffee was her one vice, and she’d forgotten to take the canister into the restaurant with her during dinner. She didn’t want to give the guy the satisfaction, though, no matter how good he looked.
She let her gaze fall on him once again. He looked harmless enough, with his easy stance and hands jammed into the pockets of his coat. His boots were actually quite good quality. Brown leather with some scuffs. Broken in, and wet from snow, but they looked damned expensive. Didn’t seem like hand-me-downs, either. The heels were too good.
There must have been good money in truck stop whoring.
“No, thank you,” she finally managed, and gripped the door handle again after two failed attempts. “I-I need to get back on the road and get this load delivered.”
“Must be lonely,” he said. His grin waned slowly, and this time it was he who looked away, toward a truck entering the lot. He waited until it had circled around to the gas pumps.
“It’s a job,” she said when he looked up again. Damn, those eyes. They were so sad, and for some reason, that made her a little sad, too. “It is what it is.”
“Do you have a long drive ahead? Maybe you’d like some company for a while before you strike out.”
She opened her mouth to make some snarky retort, but closed it without letting the words pass her lips. Loneliness wasn’t really one of her temperatures, but curiosity was. What was the harm in a cup of coffee?
No, no. She wouldn’t go there. She was too smart for that. “Pretty long, yeah. But I’m used to it.”
“Are you on a deadline?”
“Of course I am. I get paid more if I get it there early.” Fat lot of good that extra money would do her. It’d be more money she wouldn’t spend, and she was becoming increasingly aware that the economy didn’t work that way.
“I promise I won’t hold you up long.”
“Sorry, no. I need to get moving.” It was as difficult as swimming against a tide, but somehow, she managed to close the door and start her ignition. She did have a long drive ahead, and she wanted to deliver her load in time to celebrate her birthday. She had great plans for once. She’d find a nice hotel room, order room service, and watch cable television from a soft, clean bed. Maybe she’d find someplace with a spa and get a massage and haircut.
She squealed at the thought as she released her brakes, her mood already improving. It’d be fabulous. A rare indulgence in girliness. She had no aversion to nice things and the occasional slick of lipstick, but since she’d started driving trucks, she’d given up those things, for the most part. The male drivers thought she was a dilettante and talked down to her, and the women assumed she was some sort of lipstick lesbian. Not that there was anything wrong with that, but she liked men.
Sane, normal ones, anyway.
Definitely not like the prostitute she saw watching her depart through her rearview mirror.
Why was it that fifty miles later, she was still thinking about him and wondering: If she drove back, would he still be there?
CHAPTER THREE
After a quick meal to refuel his spent body, Charles strode out of the truck stop restaurant and rooted in his coat pocket for his phone. Fuck, why did he let her drive off?
He’d wanted to be cautious—to not swoop in like a wrecking ball and make her swoon. He didn’t want her drunk off magic until he was certain she could break free of it, but apparently, Charles the man had zero swagger without the incubus mojo. He was running out of time, so when he did catch up to her again, he’d have to be aggressive.
She didn’t know the circumstances of her birth, or that there were people looking for her. Good ones and bad ones. The good ones wanted to draw her into the family, love her. Protect her. The bad ones wanted to use her as payment for what was taken from them.
His phone buzzed in his hand as he studied the map on the display. He slid his thumb across the touch screen to connect the call from John. “Hello, Number Three,” he said, and strode toward the motorcycle he’d parked beside the restaurant. It was way too fucking cold to be riding, and the roads weren’t great for it, but he’d missed taking the old thing out. He’d bought it back in the seventies off a fairy whose old lady thought he was neglecting certain household duties. It’d been in storage for a couple of dozen years, and Charles had gone to fetch it especially for this mission. Usually, he accepted rides from the women he claimed, but given he was on an unauthorized vacation from demonizing, he’d had to arrange for his own transportation.
“Hey, Two,” John responded. “Did you—” Before John could get the words out, Ariel piped up in the background, “Did he find her? We’re running out of time.”
John must have covered the phone with his hand because the sound decreased suddenly, but Charles could still hear his brother’s typically calm response. “I think he knows that, sweet pea. Maybe you should add a splash of whiskey to that cup of coffee. Might make you feel better.”
Charles could hear Ariel’s muffled harrumph, and he chuckled. She wasn’t generally the petulant sort, but with everything going on lately, they’d all been behaving somewhat erratically. She’d probably be back to her usual laid-back self soon enough.
John uncovered the phone and sighed. “Anything to report? Please say yes.”
Charles unzipped his motorcycle bag and pulled out a pair of leather gloves. He wedged the phone between his right ear and shoulder and slipped his right fingers into the first glove as he pondered lies to tell. When he was on the job, he was good at lying. Now, though, he seemed to lack adroitness for it. In the past, he’d teased John mercilessly about his inability to construct believable lies where Ariel was concerned, and apparently karma had bitten him in the ass for it.
He pulled on the other glove. “I’m in the frozen wasteland known as Montana. No, I don’t have her in my sights right now…” There. That was truth. “But I’m certain she was here recently.” More truth. “I should be close to catching up. I found out where her load is due so I’m going to try to get there before she does.” Hell, maybe he wouldn’t have to lie outright as long as he kept dancing around the truth.
“Great. Keep us apprised, will you? If you hear anything, let us know. Clarissa is super-stressed and in some weird nesting mood. Claude’s wondering if we should slip her a couple of Benadryl or something. She won’t stop fretting and pacing.”
“Claude must be pretty stressed himself if he’s resorting to slipping her human pharmaceuticals when a bit of his own magic would do. And you’d truly have me believe Clarissa’s agitated? The same woman who turned Pop into a statue for all of five minutes?”
Clarissa Morton was probably the single most dangerous non-supernatural being Pop ever had the misfortune of encountering. He’d learned the hard way to never come between a woman and the little family she had left. Although she wasn’t particularly reckless, she wouldn’t hesitate to put a fool demon in his place, and could probably freeze over a small corner of Hell if she had to. When Pop had tried to abduct Ariel last year, Clarissa had petrified him with a few deft flicks of the knife she’d borrowed from the angel Mark, carving a symbol onto him a human woman shouldn’t have known. She’d freed him from it only because she didn’t want to add fuel to the fire. The last thing she needed was for the boys downstairs paying more attention to her and her family.
Charles speculated she was a natural witch like Claude and his mother had been, but she’d neither confirm nor deny the assertion. Southern women were so damned coy. That made them dangerous, as Charles was quickly l
earning.
“I imagine her sense of self-preservation is much less heightened than the protective instincts she has for her granddaughters,” John said after a grunt.
Charles shrugged, although John couldn’t possibly see it. He couldn’t imagine what Ariel’s and Marion’s grandmother was feeling. He’d never felt protective about anyone before now, beyond his own mother, and she hadn’t needed his pity. She’d had her own power, even if she’d hesitated to use it. Her not using it was part of the reason she, an immortal, was dead. “Listen, I need to burn rubber now that the snow’s let up, and I don’t know when I’ll be able to charge my phone again. I’ll call you when I land somewhere with heat and wall outlets.”
“Check in and be careful,” John said, and he disconnected in North Carolina.
Charles powered off his phone and shoved his helmet onto his head, chuckling. He didn’t really need the head protection. Cambions were generally indestructible, shy of decapitation. Especially the ones who were less than half human, like him. He’d been shot, stabbed, and even hit by a train once, so he was pretty sure of his durability. Still, his helmet had a visor that kept snow and bugs out of his eyes, so wearing it was worth the inconvenience. Also, the last thing he needed was some cop pulling him over and wasting valuable minutes he could be spending with his lady.
She was going to give him hell, and he was glad for it. The last thing he wanted was a woman who didn’t want to fight back. A woman like his mother.
• • •
Charles had been following Marion’s truck at a close distance for hours, and he marveled at the woman’s stamina. She’d hardly slowed, and rarely swerved. She had to be some kind of machine. Squeezing his knees against his bike’s rumbling frame, he tightened his grip on the handlebars and pondered various means of incapacitating her vehicle. How many tires would he have to blow out before she noticed and pulled over?
This was getting tedious. His plan was to get her someplace public, where she felt comfortable, but he’d stopped feeling sensation in his balls hours ago and was perfectly willing to resort to dirty tricks.
Fortunately, by the time his thoughts flitted to the loaded Ruger in his bag, her brake lights flashed red.
They were approaching a manufacturing facility. He eased off the accelerator to put some more distance between his bike and her trailer, and killed his headlight.
He stopped just outside the gate and watched her slowly maneuver the load to the receiving area in the back. She was obviously no amateur, given her skillful turns and confident reversing. She must have had a hell of a blind spot, as short as she was, but if Charles had never seen her, he would never have guessed the driver was a near-midget. She drove that truck as if she had nuts the size of bowling balls.
He’d need to stay close. Once she got that trailer unhitched, she’d probably make her way toward food, and if not that, then a soft bed to rest in.
She made a U and headed toward the highway.
He followed her for about an hour toward the sunrise, and around seven, she pulled into a truck stop.
“Thank fuck,” he mumbled into his helmet. Maybe he was damn near indestructible, but that didn’t mean he didn’t feel pain. His hands were practically frozen inside his gloves, and he suspected if he tried to avail himself of the facilities, he’d need to thaw out a certain part of his anatomy first.
Keeping an eye on Marion tending to her rig at the diesel pumps, he quickly refueled his bike, stomping feeling back into his feet. So far, she hadn’t seemed to notice she had a follower on her tail. Bad. Awareness of one’s surroundings would be the first lesson he taught her once he got his hands on her.
Well, maybe the second.
As the gallon ticker on the gas pump slowly crept higher, he took in the familiar sights around him. The place had changed a lot in the eighty years since he’d last been there, but apparently alcohol hadn’t dulled his memory of it any. The landmarks were different, but the spirit was the same.
He’d purchased a little house in this place—Coeur d’Alene—for next to nothing back in 1930. Actually, now that he thought about it, he had a lot of little houses in a lot of places. He’d bought them during rare bouts of sobriety when the economy was in the shitter, and then never did anything with them. He didn’t flip them, didn’t try to put them back on the market. Hell, he didn’t know what he’d been thinking when he bought them. To his pickled brain, he probably thought he was in the midst of a flesh-and-blood game of Monopoly, and if he landed on an unoccupied square, he had to buy a house, didn’t he?
Now that he was sober, he’d need to have a close look at his holdings and figure out what to do with it all. He kept his most useful possessions evenly split between apartments in Philadelphia and San Diego, but those places were just closets, really. In the past year, he’d slept more nights at Clarissa’s or his half-sister Julia’s than he had for years at either of his apartments.
So entrenched in his ruminations, he almost missed Marion’s departure from her rig. She hurried into the diner, flapping her hands against her arms. She looked darling with her knit cap pulled down over her ears and brow like a little boy, but how could anyone mistake her for one given the way her hips swiveled? She may have dressed like a man, but she couldn’t take the wiggle out of her walk.
He trashed the receipt the gas pump spit out, relocated his bike to the shadow beside Marion’s truck, and followed her into the rest stop.
Entering the small restaurant, he didn’t see her immediately. Figuring she must have slipped into the restroom, he grabbed a booth near the window and flagged the waitress.
“Coffee, hon?” she asked.
He looked up at her, taking in her sultry brown stare and coy grin and felt nothing. There was no urgency there. No attraction. For some reason, he didn’t feel like he needed to sully her, even though that part of him was always turned on. He could smell her feminine allure—the layers of delicious scent on her skin, some natural, some applied—but he had no desire to touch her. He had no impulse to press his palm to her bare flesh and siphon off some of her spirit.
In the past, he’d fed his body’s urgent hunger without second thoughts because he was born to do this thing: to tag souls and steal vigor. Now, the idea made him feel cold to his core. He didn’t want to touch this woman. Though she was certainly attractive enough, the thought of engaging her in that way repulsed him.
He swallowed and stuffed his gloves into his coat pockets. “Bring me a pot and two cups, please.”
“Be right back,” she said, winking. She idled there for a moment as if waiting for him to ask something else of her. They always did that. They didn’t know why they were drawn to him, but couldn’t help but to be. It was psychic magnetism. He couldn’t exactly turn it off—it was part and parcel of being an incubus. The fact that Marion seemed immune to it gave him a hint of her shield’s power. If he hadn’t been her fated mate, the chances of him honing in on her so quickly would have been slim to none.
He dismissed her with a quick smile and dragged the laminated menu closer.
She padded away in his periphery, mumbling, “Be right back.”
He lifted his gaze from the menu, looked toward the bathroom corridor, and loosened his scarf. What would Marion do when she saw him sitting there? Would she try to flee, or perhaps confront him?
Knowing her as little as he did, he supposed she’d do the latter. She didn’t seem to be the kind of woman who’d leave questions unasked. She was like her grandmother that way.
He shrugged off his coat and folded it neatly, making a pile of his outerwear on the bench beside him.
The waitress returned a minute later with the coffee and two mugs. “Need a minute longer, hon?”
“Yes.”
She paused again, waiting for further instruction. When he neither provided none, nor looked at her, she bobbed away.
Finally, Marion emerged from the restroom with her puffy coat slung over her left arm, her face dewy with a few strand
s of her overlong bangs sticking to her forehead. She’d probably freshened up the best she could.
Maneuvering through the tightly packed tables, she looked pale and exhausted, but lovely. Even in her faded clothes and without a single swipe of cosmetics to enhance her features, she thawed him in a way that waitress hadn’t.
He wanted to wrap his arms around her and bid her to rest in them for a while, though he knew she’d be more likely to shiv him than cuddle.
That was good, in a way. He didn’t know if it was her angel shielding or just natural defenses, but if she was even a little bit unaffected by his psychic aura, that boded well for the relationship they were fated to have. Fate didn’t dictate whether the relationship would be an easy one or hard one—that was up to him and Marion. He’d prefer her to love him for who he was and not because she didn’t have a choice in the matter. He couldn’t keep her if it were going to be that way. It wouldn’t be real enough for him.
He slid to the side edge of his bench and stood.
She paused there between two tables in the middle of the restaurant, staring at him. Her tongue appeared at the corner of her lips and swiped across the bottom one. She squared her shoulders and shifted her weight, staring at him.
More than likely, she was thinking, Fight or flight?
He damn sure didn’t want her to run, but he didn’t want her to make a scene in the diner, either. He needed to play it cool, like they were scheduled to meet in this dreary place.
He made a come here gesture with his hand and held up a menu for her to see. “Hungry, Marion?” he asked calmly and quietly.
Her eyes went round at the sound of her name, which naturally he shouldn’t have known, but she didn’t bolt.
So far, so good.
“I’ve got coffee. Did you want a different table?”
A lump moved down her throat, and her jaw clenched, but as patrons were now turning to watch her, she had to act or they’d garner attention neither of them wanted. She eased through the tables and slipped into the seat across from him, eyes now narrowed.
