by Tessa Blake
“We have verified the presence of toes,” he said solemnly. “Permission to return?”
“Permission granted,” she said, already quivering with the anticipation of a long trip back north to her mouth. By the time he got back up there, she’d be ready to—
But to her surprise, he grasped her by the calves and rolled her over, starting the return trip by nibbling along the back of her calves. Lily was acutely aware that she was not insubstantial—to say the least, she thought—and the casual reminder of his otherworldly strength was a little chilling. And a lot erotic.
Maybe she could get used to this whole demon lover thing. It wasn’t like he’d asked for her immortal soul, if she even had such a thing. So far, there didn’t seem to be a downside to the whole thing.
She wiggled, hoping he’d find some pleasant spots to visit on the newly exposed areas; the small of her back, for example, was a full handspan of erogenous zone all on its own.
Like the mind-reader he swore he wasn’t, he feathered his fingers gently right there, along the base of her spine. She shivered.
Then he poked her, higher up on her spine, between her shoulder blades. Kind of hard. Not very erotic.
She frowned. “Do that other thing again,” she said.
“Lily?” he said, like it was a question—and there was something about the tone of his voice she didn’t like one bit. Something hesitant, and unsure, and … worried. From a man who’d broken four men to pieces without getting a scratch on him.
She could, in fact, verify that every delectable inch of him was scratch-free.
“Lily,” he said, more forcefully. No question now.
“What?”
“Do you have a tattoo?”
“What?” She craned her neck to look over her shoulder at him. “No, I don’t have a tattoo. The way I yo-yo diet? Please.”
“You don’t have a tattoo here?” He traced a little pattern between her shoulder blades.
If she did ever get a tattoo, it certainly wasn’t going to be there. Why get a tattoo somewhere you couldn’t even see it?
“What kind of a question is that?” she asked, trying to get her head far enough around to at least get a glimpse of what he was looking at. Not being a professional contortionist, she had little success. “Is there something there?”
He said nothing.
“Gabriel!” Twisting her head around like the kid from The Exorcist was getting her nowhere, so she stopped and resolutely faced front again, looking directly at the pillow. “Tell me.”
“I think I’d better show you,” he said, and rose from the bed, picking her up effortlessly and depositing her next to him. The dresser was only a few steps away, and he turned her three quarters away from the mirror and said, “Look.”
She looked back over her shoulder and this time, in the mirror, could see very clearly what he was talking about. There was a mark there, vaguely circular, about double the diameter of a quarter—and while she didn’t spend a whole lot of time checking out her own back, she knew damn well there had been no mark there before. It was far too dark and too regular to be a bruise, and it hadn’t felt like a bruise when he’d poked it. And it appeared to have some kind of pattern—a knot, maybe, or vines, or something of that sort. She couldn’t quite make it out.
“What is it?” she gasped, not liking the strangled sound that came out of her throat but unable to do much about it.
He cleared his throat. Just a little noise, but huge to her because it wasn’t an answer.
“Gabriel!”
“It’s….” He pursed his lips—delectable, but she was too distraught to be tempted.
“It’s what?”
“It’s a brand,” he said. “It’s a mark of ownership.”
She shook her head. “I’m sorry?”
“It marks you as my mate,” he said, as though that made any sense, in any way.
“I’m sorry?” she repeated, stupidly. “It does what now?”
He lifted his eyes, finally, met her desperately confused gaze. “It means you belong to me,” he said. “It means you’re mine.”
She fought the urge to repeat herself a second time and instead said nothing for a minute, taking deep breaths, trying to imagine what he even meant. She didn’t belong to anyone.
With her heartbeat returning to something like normal, she figured probably that was the best way to resume the conversation.
“I don’t belong to anyone,” she said. “That’s not how it works.”
“That’s not how what works, Lily?” he snapped.
“I’m not an object to be owned,” she said, and bent to pick up her shirt and pants. She slipped them on, didn’t bother with her bra and underwear. They were practically in tatters anyway. “Don’t get snippy with me.”
“Don’t try to tell me how things work, then,” he said. “You’ve no idea how any of this works. That mark means you can’t be with anyone else now.”
“We’ll see about that.”
She tried to step around him, and his hand shot out and grasped her by the upper arm. It didn’t hurt, but neither was she going anywhere without his say-so.
“Let me go,” she said.
19
The tension in the room rocketed into the red zone. She held his gaze, refusing to back down. “When you told me to decide what I wanted, you didn’t say I was giving up the right to change my mind. That’s not what I want, at all.”
He sighed and let go. “Please,” he said. “Please don’t walk out right now, not until we talk about all of this.”
She pulled her cell phone out of her pocket, thumbed it on, touched the Timer app icon. “You’ve got fifteen minutes,” she said, setting it to count down then dropping it on the bed. “You’d better make it good.”
“That isn’t even enough time to—”
“Then you’d better not waste it. Let me be perfectly clear here: I’m pissed, Gabriel. Fifteen minutes is a concession, because what I want to do right now is walk out and never come back. I feel misled, and I’m pissed that you’ve done this to me.”
“This isn’t my doing.”
“Then whose?” she demanded.
“Not mine,” he said. “Not intentionally. I swear to you, I didn’t know this would happen. I’ve never heard of this happening.”
“Well, you’re still one up on me, because I don’t even know what this is.” She nodded at the timer. “Start talking.”
He sat heavily on the edge of the bed. “I don’t even know where to start.”
She shook her head, reached down and picked up his pants. “Start by putting these on. Shirt, too,” she said, retrieving that as well. “You’re distracting me.”
“I’m certainly not trying to,” he said, frustration in every syllable.
She couldn’t help smiling a little. “No, I wasn’t accusing you of anything. For a change.”
He answered her small smile with one of his own, then patted the bed beside him. “Sit.”
“Sure thing—once you put on those clothes. I know you don’t mean to but you’re doing that … thing.”
He complied, and she watched with some regret as he put his clothes back on and sat on the bed again. She sat cross-legged, facing him, and waited for him to speak.
His eyes strayed to her phone, counting backward steadily to the twelve-minute mark. “Can we maybe reset—”
“Nope.”
“Okay. Cliff’s Notes, then—and please understand, I don’t know much about it myself. I know a little from things I’ve picked up here and there, but it’s not like I had a reason to really ask any questions about this.”
“Noted,” she said. “Now tell me.”
“There are … formalities.” He stole a glance at the timer again. “Contracts, if you will. Covenants. Both of the big guys are huge on covenants.”
“The big guys?” she said.
He tilted his eyes up to the ceiling, then down to the floor.
She felt her own eyes widen. “
You mean—”
“Yup,” he said, but didn’t name them. For all she knew, maybe he wasn’t supposed to. “So, when two people—or entities—wish to form a permanent alliance, there’s a sort of ritual. A ceremony of binding.”
“Okay.”
“And that ceremony … it leaves this mark.”
“Leaves it for how long?”
He looked acutely uncomfortable. “Um,” he said. She didn’t think she’d ever heard him say um before. “For … always?”
“Always?”
“I’m saying it’s permanent.”
She blinked, blinked again, and didn’t even know what to say about that. So she let it go for the moment. “And it means?”
He peeked at her timer again. “It means you’ve bound yourself to a demon.”
“Bound in what sense?” she demanded. “I assume since you said mate, we’re not talking about doubles tennis.”
“Like….” He seemed to be searching for a word, shrugged. “Yes, mates. But it’s not just about the sex. It’s a relationship bond.”
“Are you talking about being, like, married or something?”
He blanched. Typical, she thought. Demon or no, he’s still a dude. Say the word “marriage” and he falls apart.
“No,” he said, quickly. “That’s not— I mean—”
“Do you have one?” she demanded. “A mark?”
“I didn’t bind myself to a demon.”
“Well, technically, neither did I,” she said, tersely. “There may have been some bonding, but I certainly wasn’t embarking on any covenants.”
“I know,” he said. “I don’t know what to say. I told you, I don’t know much about this.”
“Then who does?”
He groaned. “My mother would know.”
“Your mother?”
“She specializes in contract language for….” He paused. “For her particular specialty.”
“Contract language,” Lily said, incredulous. “Like a lawyer? For Hell?”
“That’s not far off,” he admitted. “She’s an Arbiter.”
“She has an actual job title?”
“Well, I mean….” He shrugged. “It’s not a job title. It’s more like a vocation, I guess. But that’s what she does. There are contracts, agreements, covenants. The language has to be standardized. People keep trying to find loopholes.”
“The Devil Went Down to Georgia,” she said.
To her surprise, he laughed. “Yeah. Like that. She sits on the Infernal Council and—”
“The Infernal Council?”
“Do you want me to tell this or not?”
“Sorry.” Her head was spinning. The Infernal Council, of all things. It was too much to take in. “Yes, I want you to tell me.”
“So she sits on the council and she makes decisions about … well, all manner of things. Contracts and enforcement and a few other things.”
“And you said she has a specialty?”
“Of course. She’s a succubus, so … lust. Other carnal sins.”
“Your mom’s a sex demon and a contract lawyer for Hell.”
“More of a judge, really. Or a supervisor.”
“A supervisor.”
“Kind of on par with, maybe, a vice president.”
Her eyes widened again. “And the president would be?”
Gabriel simply arched an eyebrow at her.
“Okay, then.” She swallowed. “So we won’t be going to the president to ask questions.”
“Hardly.”
“Will your mom be able to tell us what happened here tonight? Why I’ve got this mark, what we should do about it?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ll ask her. If she knows anything, I’ll get it out of her. But she’s never mentioned anything like this to me, so I can’t be sure she’ll have any answers.” He met her gaze, held it. “You said this was what you wanted. It matters to me that you made a choice, and if you feel this negates that choice or takes your right to choose away, then I’ll do everything in my power to fix it.”
Lily took a deep breath, held it for a moment. “Okay.”
“I’m not happy about it, either,” he said. “It makes your decision sort of moot, and that decision mattered. I would find no joy in forcing you to be with me.” He reached out and cupped her face in one hand. “But if you keep choosing to be, I promise to make you happy about that choice, every day.”
She closed her eyes against the intensity of his. Everything was happening too fast. She barely had time to incorporate some new fact before some even more unbelievable thing happened. It was exhausting.
But didn’t it come back to the decision she’d made earlier? If she believed him—and she did—that he hadn’t known this new wrinkle would develop, then what she’d already decided still held.
She wanted him.
He’d given her the chance to walk, and she hadn’t taken it. She didn’t want to take it. So why fight about this … bond, or whatever it was, when she was exactly where she wanted to be and had no intention of changing her mind?
All in, then.
She let a smile spread across her face. “You are so lucky I watch so much TV.”
He blinked at her. “Come again?”
“Maybe later.” She laughed. “What I mean is, if I didn’t watch so damn much Buffy and Supernatural, maybe you’d be carting me off to the loony bin instead of taking me home to Mother.”
He winced.
She felt her smile grow even wider. “If we’re some kind of magical, demon-style married, does that mean I literally have the mother-in-law from Hell?”
He rolled his eyes and grinned at her, and she thought, This is right. This is what I want.
It was crazy. It was completely unbelievable. But here she was—here they were—and she supposed that, in time, she would get used to it. Maybe, one day, having Gabriel for a lover would seem mundane.
Yeah, right.
He leaned over her and tapped her phone to stop the timer. “Look at that,” he said. “We did it in exactly half the time.”
There would be time later, she thought, to analyze—and, knowing her, overanalyze—the situation. Plenty of time. For now, he was right here, looking and smelling irresistible, and she was going for it.
She wrapped her arms around his neck and laid back, pulling him down on top of her. “Let’s see what we can do with the other half.”
“Getting it done as quickly as possible isn’t my usual approach.” He slid his hand under her shirt, and she felt her neurons start to misfire. “But I’m happy to try something new.”
She tilted her head as his lips got busy along the length of her neck, and sighed softly. “I think we’ll both have a lot of new things to try,” she said. “Hopefully for a long time.”
And she knew, without a doubt, that was exactly what she wanted.
20
The jet, a Dassault Falcon 2000S, didn’t come standard with a bed, but when a woman had a billionaire demon lover, standard was apparently no longer the standard.
So the airplane wasn’t standard, not when four of the seats had been removed and replaced with a bed nook, complete with folding doors. The in-flight refreshments weren’t standard, as Gabriel had gotten a couple of restaurants at the Bellagio to pack up a miniature smorgasbord of delicacies for the trip. Washing the food down with the four-hundred-dollar Montrachet that Gabriel had procured from the wine fridge in the galley wasn’t really what you’d call standard either.
And the lover was definitely not standard, given the fact he’d tumbled her into that bed four times in the first three hours of the flight.
Lily had forbidden him to touch her again until they were back in New York—and threatened to enforce the rule with punching—so he was sitting in a seat facing hers, looking through some papers he’d taken out of his briefcase. She had her feet propped up on the table between them and was messaging with Miri.
Miri was ecstatic that Lily was coming back to New Yor
k, but was simultaneously requiring a lot of soothing about the fact Lily had taken off without telling her.
And that she’d taken off with Gabriel, whom Miri did not trust.
Lily was exhausted but had agreed to call Miri when she got home, so Miri could come over and reassure herself in person that Lily had been doing exactly what—and whom—she wanted for the last couple of days.
Across from her, Gabriel shuffled his papers into some alternate order, tapped them on the table to align the edges, and slipped them into the slim briefcase standing on the floor beside his chair.
“Are you wheeling and dealing?” Lily asked, smiling at him. He was just so damn pretty. The cheekbones, and the perfectly kissable lips, all that jet-black hair, and those long eyelashes framing blue eyes that could flash into lust without warning, or look at her tenderly when the lust was over, like he was surprised and honored to find her still there. Add in broad shoulders and abs to die for, and it was pretty much the total package.
Speaking of the package … also not standard.
“If I admit that I was both wheeling and dealing, will you take another damn picture?” he asked, his tone light as he reached for his wine glass.
“No more pics,” she promised. They’d spent the entire previous day taking shots for the photoessay, beginning with him tousled in bed, fresh from making love with her, and ending with a nightcap at the wet bar in the suite. She loved taking pictures—and God knew the camera loved him—but it had gotten tedious by the end of the day. Still, he’d been a good sport about it.
As well he should be, since the whole assignment was his fault anyway.
Though she probably shouldn’t be assigning blame, as though getting her a plum assignment for a high-profile magazine was something he should be sorry for. And they’d ended up staying an extra night in Vegas instead of flying home right after the prize fight. With no job to get back to, and her own bed so inferior to the big cushy one in their suite, she’d been happy to change her plans.
Having toe-curling sex against the floor-to-ceiling windows while the famous Bellagio fountains went off hadn’t been half-bad, either.
