He cast his eyes heavenward, as if looking for inspiration. Or asking permission from some bird.
“I don’t care what the bird says,” she said, tugging the pick through her tangles. “If it wants me to sleep with you, it has to let you talk to me.”
He laughed. “Good luck ordering the bird around. Stop attacking your hair, girl.” He stood—a fluid, graceful cat- serpent-river—and took the pick. Gently, he worked through the snarls. How relaxing to be ministered to like this. She closed her eyes and sighed, and desire crept silently into her belly.
No. No way would she let him seduce her into abandoning her questions. “I glanced through that book about you. I’ve read articles, too. There’s never much on your early years, except that you lived with your mother on the Navajo reservation. You gloss over it as if nothing happened, but you were eight years old when you left there. Your life didn’t start in New Orleans. It started out west. Why don’t you talk about it?”
“It’s not a pretty story,” he said. “What I recall of it is mighty unpleasant.”
“You don’t try to suppress all the other unpleasant stories about you. Why this one?”
“It’s over and done with, and it doesn’t matter anymore.”
“It does,” Marguerite said. “It made you who you are.”
That struck a chord; his aura flared. “It’s not just my story. It reflects badly on my mother and on the Navajo people, too. I’ve already done enough harm. I don’t want to do any more.”
Memories of what she’d read about the Navajos flooded her mind. “You carry a lot of violence and anger. I bet you could use a healing ceremony.”
Now his aura was majorly annoyed. He moved behind her, combing the hair at the back. “Not going to happen, babe. I don’t belong there anymore. I have to find my own way.”
“You’ll feel much better if you get it off your chest. Anything you clutch to yourself like that literally weighs you down.” She huffed. “It’s in your aura—guilt and shame and misery all wadded up together.”
He rolled his eyes but moved to her other side as if he hadn’t been trying to hide anything at all. As if he was cool with being so vulnerable, which he wasn’t.
“You know I have this gift.” She hated this. “Just believe me, damn it. You’ll feel much better if you let some of it go.”
A struggle went on in his aura. Her own chest tightened in response, but she sat quiescent while he finished with her hair. Finally, he said, “I’ll tell you about my wife, but if you really want to have sex with me again, we should do it first.”
He eyed her from beneath heavy lids again, sending her tantalizing images of what they would do together, visualized the blood pounding languidly through her body, pulsing in her pussy, moisture gushing to welcome him.
She blushed but scowled. “Stop that.”
“Are you going to fuck me or not?” He winced and telepathed: Would you prefer romance? Touch me, sweetheart.
She closed in on him, took his penis in her hand, ran her fingers lazily up and down. He shuddered. “I don’t expect you to fall madly in love with me,” she said, letting him go again, “but I also don’t want to feel lousy about myself afterward.”
“Talking about my wife will make you feel lousy for sure, without the benefit of any good physical stuff. It may turn you off for good, and I’d like to get laid again first.” Sorry about the lack of finesse. He went to the window that looked out over the rooftops of Bayou Gavotte. Denser clouds were building overhead; soon a shower would break the tense Louisiana heat. “Something bad is going to happen tonight.”
Marguerite came up beside him, put her arms around him, and stretched up until her lips brushed his. “Not between you and me.”
Zeb downed four iced coffees in a row, staying awake to reassure Zelda that he wasn’t planning to kill himself. It wasn’t doing any good. She knew something was wrong, and she wouldn’t let go. Sweet, persistent little bitch. He wanted a lifetime of friendship with her, but how likely was that?
He stood, yawning. “Give it up, Zelda. I’m not suicidal, but I might become that way if I don’t get some sleep. I’ll walk you to your place, and then I’m going home to crash.” He said the last sentence loud enough for the cop a few tables over to hear him.
The cop, who looked wet behind the ears, was a friend of Zelda’s mom. She’d greeted him and they’d exchanged some small talk, and then he’d got a free coffee and pastry and taken a little table in the corner.
Usually cops took a short coffee break and then left again. This dude had been sitting in the corner doing Sudoku puzzles for half an hour. Maybe lack of sleep was making Zeb paranoid, but he didn’t think so. He was pretty sure people had been watching him ever since this morning at Hellebore U. First a guy he thought was one of Constantine’s roadies; then an old lady who’d sat beside him on a park bench followed slowly behind him until he’d begun to run. When he’d turned to glance back at her, she was on a cell phone. After that, one of the waiters from the Impractical Cat, a big, tough-looking dude, seemed always to be close by, even when Zeb had gone to the supermarket to get sugar and chocolate for his dad. Fortunately, Dad hadn’t been home when he’d dropped them off, so he’d escaped… and now he was being watched by this cop.
Sure, the cop’s too-casual glances their way might be meant for Zelda, or maybe he thought he was playing knight in shining armor, protecting the cute little vampire from statutory rape. Sorry, man, I’m way too stable for that. Zeb had wondered all day if he should go ahead and screw Juma as a sort of last meal, just in case, but… no. If he was going to do Juma, he’d do her right.
Zelda’s cell phone chimed, and she held up a hand. She read the text. “Can you walk me to the Cat instead? I’m meeting Juma for peach cobbler and ice cream.”
“Sure, why not?” He hadn’t been able to make a decision anyway, so why not tempt fate?
“Maybe you can talk to Constantine if he’s there.”
“Maybe so,” Zeb said. More and more, this truly was a temptation: to lay his burdens on an experienced pair of shoulders, especially since the possessor of the shoulders had absolutely no emotional investment in Zeb’s dilemma.
“Really? Yay!” Zelda trotted along beside him, talking nonstop about how fabulous and what a great friend Constantine was.
A patrol car turned out of the coffee shop parking lot even as he and Zelda headed down the main drag toward the Impractical Cat. Aw, fuck. Constantine would probably just shunt him over to the police. Maybe he already had done so—otherwise why was he being shadowed by a cop now rather than some bodyguard-in-training?
He still hadn’t made up his mind by the time he opened the door of the restaurant and ushered the still chattering Zelda through. “We’ll go straight to Lep’s office and—”
“Fuck,” Zeb said under his breath, pulling Zelda behind a row of booths in the direction of the kitchen. “My father’s here with his girlfriend.”
“So?”
So he couldn’t stomach pretending with his father anymore. “I said I would be home tonight working on French verbs.”
“But what about talking to Constantine? If I ask, he’ll let us sneak upstairs. Your dad won’t know.”
Zeb glanced back; the cop was coming through the front door. “Later, girl.” He kissed Zelda swiftly on the cheek, ducked through the swinging doors, crossed the kitchen, and went out the back. A surprised shout followed him, but he skirted the dumpster, vaulted the back fence, and took off into the neighborhoods beyond.
He couldn’t go home. The cops would look for him there, and he needed to be out and available, just in case. He kept moving, but once the adrenaline rush of escape drained away, exhaustion took over. He had to sleep now. Anywhere—a garage, an alley, a shed… a car.
He should have four hours free before he had to be on watch. Once again, he put himself into the hands of fate. He made it through two more blocks without passing out and crawled wearily over the fence into the parking lot whe
re Eaton Wilson’s black Ford van was still parked between two Hellebore University vans. If the cops found it—found him—so be it. Zeb climbed inside, flopped onto the bench at the back, and slept.
Constantine pulled Marguerite hard against him, destroying what resistance remained to her in a blast of desire. Within seconds, they were on the bed, naked and entwined. They kissed and kissed, exploring each other in luxurious abandon. His hot hands roamed her and his erection brushed her belly. She’d never felt like this with a man before—so desperate with want and need and love.
No, not love. She’d meant what she said. She didn’t expect him to fall in love with her. She didn’t know what she wanted anyway, and his past had bent him so badly that he might not even be capable of love.
She didn’t want to think about all this, and then she couldn’t think anyway because another blast of images overwhelmed her. It was crazy: images of being undressed, slowly and tantalizingly, when she was actually naked. Visions of copper-brown hands cupping her breasts, while in reality one played in the crack of her butt and the other toyed with her clit. His mouth on her breast, his penis in her hand, while her mind saw him entering her, filling her, fucking her hard. Her vaginal walls clenched and clenched. She wanted him in there, in there now, before she exploded. “Oh, God,” she said. “It’s going to be over too soon. Don’t you ever do this slowly?”
“Next time,” he said, ripping open another condom and sheathing himself. He loomed over her, took her in a long, deep kiss, and pushed himself inside.
She groaned, spasming again. She wrapped her legs around him, thrills rocketing through her with every stroke, and again she was helpless in the grip of the heat between them. “I don’t want to come so soon.”
“We’ll do it again, really slowly.” Visions of languid, lazy sex rolled into her mind, driving her to bliss as he pounded into her, his head thrown back, his features alight. Her heart burst with sheer, cataclysmic delight.
Afterward, they lay silently until he slipped out; then he rolled off her, chucked the condom, and gathered her into his arms, pulling the sheet over them. This felt like love, so sweet and together.
Had it been like this with his wife? She didn’t want to ask. She didn’t want to break this blissful mood. She closed her eyes and held him.
She dozed, waking to darkness and the enticing smell of food. From the next room came the sound of his guitar. She dressed, combed her hair, and went to join him. He waved toward a platter of muffaletta sandwiches. His aura was suffused with uneasiness, which might be about discussing his wife, as he’d promised.
She should give him a little time. Her stomach grumbled. She took a sandwich and bit into it.
She had almost finished the sandwich when he said, “Whoever killed her saved me the hassle of a divorce,” he said. “We shouldn’t have gotten married in the first place. She might still be alive if we hadn’t. I didn’t love her—never did—but I didn’t want her dead.”
She swallowed the last bite and wiped her mouth with a napkin from a pile on the table. “Then why did you marry her?”
“Pigheadedness. I knew better, or in hindsight it seems that way. The bird warned me, but I didn’t act on what it said or what I knew.” He laughed.
“What?”
“I was imagining what it would have been like if I’d tried to talk to Jonetta about my spirit guide.”
Now it all made much more sense. “The bird you keep talking about is a spirit guide?”
His fingers stilled on the guitar. “You could call it that. I’ve had it since I was a kid, and without it, I would have been dead long since—that or a murderer without even the excuse of being a vigilante. If you think I’m twisted now, you should have seen me then. Power and hatred are a lousy combination, and the bird guided me through a lot of crap. Even knowing that, I got sick of being told what to do and not to do, and too much of it making only partial sense, and none of my questions having real answers.” He closed his eyes. “You grow up and realize that answers are elusive and that it all depends, but I wasn’t there yet. It never approved of my beating up and killing people, but it nursed me through it all. Then I married Jonetta, and it abandoned me.”
He was babbling. He opened his eyes. Blinded by the concern in hers, he shut them again. He’d begun to think of her as he did of Lep—a trusted friend—and then, while she was asleep, Lep had directed him to Nathan’s latest blog—an interview with Professor Lutsky that more than confirmed this morning’s little scene in the restaurant. That had upset him more than it should, but she hadn’t known him before yesterday. Why shouldn’t she agree to check him out for a researcher friend?
Then, on a whim—or perhaps he should see it as a compulsion—he’d gone through her backpack. What he’d found there had, quite frankly, confused him. He supposed he would have to confront her about it… but the real problem was that he didn’t want to believe anything against her. He hadn’t thought much farther than getting back in the saddle, but instead of a couple of quick fucks, he’d been making love to her. She didn’t expect him to fall in love with her, but what if he already had? Love and trust were supposed to go together… and he was mighty naive if he believed that.
The bird said nothing, which could mean anything. As usual, it all depended. On something or other.
Fuck.
He set the guitar between his knees, and she took his hand. He welcomed her touch. He couldn’t help it. “But it came back again,” she said.
Constantine gave a mirthless laugh. “Back to the rescue.” He sucked in a deep breath. He had to get his head together enough to explain. He twined his fingers through hers. It felt so damned good. And safe. Since when did he want to be safe? She could blab all this to Lutsky and the media for all he cared. No one could distinguish the truth from lies anyway. “Jonetta and I married for promotional purposes.” That pretty much said it all.
“Sounds like a weird reason to get married,” Marguerite said. He tried to read ‘and stupid’ into her tone of voice, but she was a lot more polite than the bird.
“Big rock star, hot new actress, lots of publicity. We had it all planned—a hasty marriage and then a spectacular divorce, and if we disagreed somewhere along the line, there was a watertight prenup, so neither of us could screw the other over financially.”
“What happened?”
“She fell in love with me.” Again he found himself comparing Jonetta with Marguerite, who never in a million years would go for such an arrangement. “Our agreement was clear. It was a fake, from start to finish, no love involved, sex if she wanted it. Not that I objected to screwing her, but I didn’t care one way or the other. But before long, she became obsessed with me. She wasn’t the first one; there was a vampire way back when, when I was just a kid…” Hurriedly, he pulled out of that pathway. Marguerite didn’t need to hear about his first kill. Which just went to show that he wasn’t thinking clearly. No one needed to hear about it, especially someone who might well blab it to the whole world. “I don’t know why I’m digging up that crap. Women tend to fall for me, but if I ignore them, they usually go away. I was stuck married to this one. She desperately wanted me to fall in love with her, while I frankly and openly didn’t give a damn. I got annoyed and then bored with her, and replaced, uh, what little relationship we had with orgasms.”
“Huh?” Marguerite choked on a half-laugh.
“Not too clever of me, because she got addicted. For a while she just craved more and more quick and easy orgasms, but soon they weren’t good enough. She had to have me inside her while I gave her the orgasm fix. I didn’t want to be inside her. By then, I didn’t want to touch her or even see her. But I felt it was partly my fault, and she’d gotten into drugs instead, but that didn’t do the trick, and she was so damn desperate…”
He took a deep breath and plunged. “That’s when I started hurting her.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Hurting her,” repeated Marguerite numbly.
“When w
e had sex,” he said. “I should have refused her point blank, but by the time I figured that out, it was too late.”
Ah. Jonetta’s claim about nightmarish sex with Constantine had been the simple truth. “You hurt her with your mind.”
“What else?”
What else, indeed? His mind was an instrument of torture. “But you didn’t mean to. Stop beating yourself up, for God’s sake!”
“What choice do I have?” he snapped. “When you’re stuck with a mind like mine, you have to know how to control it.” His aura flared and swayed. He wrapped it around himself. Hugging himself. Then embarrassment flooded his aura and he let go. He took refuge in the guitar, and for a while just played and played, one riff after another paralleling the changes in his mood. “She said it hurt. I didn’t know what she was talking about, so I tried slowing down, being gentler. Not that I was being rough, exactly, but I wanted to get it over with.”
No wonder he hadn’t wanted to talk about this before having sex.
“That was only the beginning. No matter what I tried, it got worse every time. She’d start shrieking and punch me. I’d pull out, and she’d get even madder and hit me some more. I guess the need outweighed the pain, but the next time we tried it, she ran away screaming.”
“You didn’t mean to hurt her,” Marguerite said.
“I don’t suppose she meant to beat on me either. She was acting in frustration and self-defense.” Pause. “I refused to touch her after that, so she waited till I was asleep and came at me with a cleaver.”
Marguerite sucked in a horrified breath.
“My spirit guide must have realized I was finally ready to listen. It woke me up just in time. I took my guitar and moved here. She spouted all kinds of shit about me, and I countered by giving the fans one-touch orgasms. Then somebody fed her that cocktail of drugs that killed her.”
[Bayou Gavotte 03.0] Heart of Constantine Page 22
