The Devil's Due

CHAPTER 4

It was a Saturday, and Adam was on duty, so I wasn’t surprised not to hear from him. Whatever research he was planning to do on Tommy Brewster would no doubt be off the record, and he probably wouldn’t even get started on it until tomorrow. Even understanding this, I chafed at the delay. Of course, some of my impatience was probably due to my desperate desire to find an excuse to cancel my evening’s planned activity—dinner with Brian.

I’d barely spoken to him since he’d helped Lugh kill my father. He’d called a number of times, and I’d even picked up once or twice, but my emotions had been far too raw to handle an actual conversation. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how I felt about him right now—though beneath whatever other layers of feelings existed, I had to admit that I still loved him.

Or at least still loved the man I’d thought I’d known. Only I was no longer entirely sure that man existed.

Until that dreadful night, I’d always thought of Brian as the quintessential Boy Scout: virtuous, kind, and law-abiding to a fault. Never would I have imagined him being party to my father’s grisly death, and it was the disillusionment, more than the act itself, that put me into such a tailspin of uncertainty.

When Brian had invited me to come to his apartment for dinner so we could talk things through, my first instinct had been to say no. I’m always one to follow my instincts, but Brian is a lawyer, and a good one at that, and whenever I allowed him to draw me into an argument—or “discussion,” as he called it—I invariably came out on the losing end. Which was how I’d ended up promising to show up at his apartment at seven o’clock tonight.

I’m not what you’d call a girly-girl, and it was completely unlike me to spend twenty minutes agonizing over what to wear, but I did it anyway—even though my wardrobe was severely limited since everything I’d owned had gone up in smoke. I knew I was procrastinating, but I couldn’t seem to stop myself.

I finally settled on a pair of tight, hip-hugging black jeans and a clingy, silk-knit green T-shirt that was a perfect complement to my red hair. It was—for me, at least—an understated kind of sexy. Not something that screamed “fuck me,” but not something that screamed “keep your hands off me,” either.

I finished the outfit off with a pair of black leather thong sandals with just enough heel to keep the hem of the jeans from dragging on the ground. After a final inspection in the full-length mirror that hung on the back of my bathroom door, I finally decided I was as ready as I’d ever be. I then looked at my watch and saw that I was already fifteen minutes late.

Cursing under my breath, I hurried to the door—but not before I’d double-checked my Taser to make sure its battery was fully charged. Brian’s apartment was only six blocks from my own. Maybe I should have driven, seeing as I was already late, but I covered those six blocks at a brisk walk instead.

By the time I got there, the thong on my sandals had rubbed blisters between my toes—they weren’t the best walking shoes in the world—and I was sure I’d chewed off all the lipstick on my lower lip. I took a couple of deep breaths to compose myself—like that had a chance of working—before I rang the bell.

I’d expected Brian to be annoyed. After all my dithering, I’d managed to be more than a half hour late, and I’d been too self-absorbed to even think about calling. But his only comment was a raised eyebrow as he opened the door wide enough to let me in. I swallowed hard as I crossed that threshold. I was a mature adult. Mature adults don’t run away from conflict like frightened little girls. Okay, so maybe I wasn’t such a mature adult.

Unlike Dominic, Brian’s kitchen skills were mostly limited to simple fare such as hamburgers or spaghetti with jarred sauce. I guess he’d decided that wasn’t good enough for tonight. There’s a good Italian restaurant approximately every ten yards in Philadelphia, and Brian had ordered takeout from one of them. The fact that the food was still piping hot told me he wasn’t surprised by how late I’d shown up.

Tension sizzled and sparked between us. I fidgeted nervously as Brian laid the food on the table. I saw we’d be eating off paper plates, and wondered if he was just trying to be as informal as possible in a vain attempt to make me comfortable, or if he was afraid of what I’d do if he put breakables in front of me.

By the time we sat down to eat, my stomach was tied in such knots I didn’t know how I’d be able to force any food down. Brian had said little, but I was very much aware of how closely he was watching me. I cut off a hunk of eggplant parmigiana, but the idea of putting it in my mouth made me want to puke.

I must have been wearing my emotions on my face—not unusual for me—because Brian pushed his own food aside and reached across the table to grab my hand.

“My bad,” he said softly. “I should have known we needed to clear the air between us before we ate.”

I let out a whoosh of air, wishing my tension would flow out with it, then slumped in my chair. Gently, I extricated my hand from Brian’s grip and pushed my own plate aside. I couldn’t meet his whisky-brown eyes, afraid of what I’d see in them.

“We can try,” I said. “But you know I suck at this.”

I could almost feel his frown, even though I still hadn’t found the courage to look at him. “What exactly is ‘this’?”

I squirmed. “Talking.”

“Ah. Yes, I know.”

That made me wince, and I finally looked up. “You didn’t have to agree that easily,” I grumbled.

One corner of his mouth was turned up in wry amusement. “You wouldn’t have liked a lie any better.”

“Silence is always nice.”

“Yeah, that was working really well for us.”

Never argue with a lawyer. It’s a losing proposition. “What do you expect me to say, Brian? That I’m okay with you helping Lugh kill my father? Well I’m not, and you know it.”

Brian leaned forward, propping his elbows on the table and fixing me with an intense look. “You’re right, I do. But if I had it all to do over again, I’d do the same thing. If we’d let that demon go back to the Demon Realm knowing what he knew, you’d be dead by now. I’d rather have you hating my guts than dead.”

I rolled my eyes. “I don’t hate your guts,” I said, though I knew he’d just basically manipulated me into saying it.

He shrugged. “Maybe not, but at the moment, you dislike them intensely.”

Even in my muddled state of mind, I couldn’t possibly imagine disliking Brian. I might be disillusioned, and I might have made assumptions about him that turned out to be incorrect, but whatever his faults, he was a truly nice guy. At least, I was pretty sure he was. Had I been putting him on a pedestal all this time, seeing only what I wanted to see?

I grabbed the paper napkin I’d laid over my lap and began calmly tearing it into shreds. “The man I thought I knew would never have been party to murder. You wouldn’t even lie to the police to give me an alibi when they hauled me in for illegal exorcism.”

He let out a long-suffering sigh. “I didn’t lie because I could have been caught in it and that would have made you look guilty. Look, I don’t like what I did. Just thinking about it makes me sick to my stomach. But I love you. I’ve always loved you. How could I let you throw your life away like that?”

Of course, he was right. Der Jäger, the demon who’d possessed my father, had had to die. Not just for my safety, but for Lugh’s. If Lugh died and Dougal took the throne, he’d do his best to make the human race into slaves. There had been far too much at risk to let Der Jäger live. In a way, Brian had even done me a favor, helping Lugh take over so that I didn’t have to be directly responsible for my father’s death. Logic told me I couldn’t hold any of this against Brian. Now, if only emotions were logical. .

I pinched the bridge of my nose, feeling a non-Lugh-induced headache coming on. The napkin lay on the table in front of me in neat, thin strips. I fought the compulsion to start tearing at those strips. I had to swallow past a painful lump in my throat before I could speak.

“I know all that, okay? I understand why you did it, and I know you were right, but I still can’t seem to swallow it.” I’m just not as nice as Brian. I hold grudges and nurse my anger like a well-loved baby. Why a man like him loved someone like me was beyond my comprehension.

Brian’s chair scraped back from the table, the sound making me wince. Was he about to wise up and wash his hands of me? The thought made my stomach clench with dread.

I must have looked as anguished as I felt. Brian flashed me a comforting half-smile, then came around the table to stand behind my chair. When I tried to get up, his hands came down firmly on my shoulders and held me in place. I felt the warmth of his breath on my neck as he bent to whisper in my ear.

“Maybe we need to do something other than talk to break the tension,” he said. He nipped my earlobe gently, just in case I was too clueless to get the hint.

I tried to form a coherent protest. Surely we shouldn’t even be thinking about sex when there were so many issues between us. I even got a husky, grunting sound out of my mouth that was probably the start of a word. Then his hands slid from my shoulders to my breasts, and the protest died in my throat.

“There’s always more than one way to attack a problem,” Brian said in a smug whisper as my nipples beaded under his hands.

I didn’t mean to do it, but my back arched with the pleasure of his touch. My mind was pretty sure this was a bad idea, but my body didn’t give a damn. I tried once more to get up, figuring it was time to take this party to the bedroom, but Brian’s hands tightened on my breasts, holding me in place. It was an odd feeling, being held down by my breasts, but trying to get up would hurt if he didn’t let go, and it seemed he wasn’t planning to.

Against all logic, moisture pooled between my legs. I tried to say something, anything, but my throat was too tight, my breaths too shallow.

When he sensed my capitulation, Brian eased his grip, kneading a breast with one hand as his other hand wandered lower to pull my T-shirt up. I hadn’t figured on getting undressed in front of him tonight, so I was wearing a utilitarian tan bra rather than one of my sexy numbers. Brian didn’t seem to mind. He nibbled on my earlobe, his tongue occasionally flicking to the shell of my ear as his hands slipped under the bra to cup my breasts.

I moaned and pushed myself into his hands, my skin alive with his touch. The damn bra fastened in the back—another sign that I hadn’t been expecting to get any tonight—but instead of bothering to open it, Brian just shoved the cups upward. I’m not exactly flat-chested, so the underwire was painfully tight as he forced it over the fullest part of my chest. I opened my mouth to complain, but then my breasts popped free of the constriction and his hands were back where I wanted them and I forgot what I was going to complain about.

Brian had always been a fantastic lover, and we had so much physical chemistry he could soak my panties with a single smoldering look, but tonight he was. . different. His fingers played with my nipples, plucking and pinching, creating a sensation just on the cusp between pain and pleasure.

Then suddenly, he wrapped one arm around me right beneath my breasts, hauling me to my feet as he kicked the chair out from between us. I gasped as the chair flew across the dining room floor and hit the wall with a bang. Brian buried his face against the side of my neck, his tongue tracing the vein there as he held me tightly against him and ground his erection into my butt.

The feel of his arousal, even with all those layers of clothing between us, dragged another groan from my throat. I wanted to turn around, lock my lips with his, and wrap my legs around his waist, but he was holding me too tight, and his grip didn’t loosen even when I made it obvious I wanted to turn. A shiver trailed down my spine, and I couldn’t have said whether it was arousal or unease.

I stopped caring when Brian went to work on the fly of my jeans. My panties were just as utilitarian as the bra, but I doubt he’d have noticed the sexiest underwear on the face of the earth at the moment. His breath was hot and fast against my neck, and he made little hungry sounds in the back of his throat as he burrowed his hand between my legs.

I was almost embarrassingly wet, but no doubt about it, Brian approved. He stroked me, hard, and I tried to reach behind me to get my hand on his cock. To my utter shock, he stopped me by shoving my shoulders down toward the table.

Reflex had me stopping my descent with the flat of my hands. As I was still recovering my balance, Brian dragged my jeans and panties down to my knees and kicked my legs apart as far as they would go—which wasn’t very, in those tight jeans.

My breath wheezed in and out of my lungs, and my heart slammed against my breastbone. I heard the distinctive rasp of a zipper being lowered, and the equally distinctive sound of a condom wrapper being torn open. I was breathing so fast I almost hyperventilated.

Brian had never taken me from behind. Never. I didn’t much care for the position, and Brian was too nice—and too good a lover—to press the issue. But it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that’s what he was about to do.

Actually, it wasn’t just that I didn’t care for the position: I hated it. It felt too. . submissive. The part of my brain that cared about such things told me that no matter how strange Brian was acting, if I told him to stop, he would. I tried to force myself to say something, to stand up, to close my legs. But just now, my body’s demands overrode my brain, and I stayed right where he’d put me.

The sensation of him sliding into me was somewhere between Heaven and Hell. On the one hand, he always felt so right inside me, as if his cock had been specifically engineered to fit me. Every sexual nerve in my body sang with that pleasure. On the other hand, I was ignominiously bent over the kitchen table staring at a cooling plate of eggplant parmigiana as my sweet, gentle Brian fucked me brutally from behind.

Emotions rioted within me, bumping into and tangling with each other so wildly that I couldn’t have named a single one of them. I tried not to lock my knees and elbows as I braced myself against Brian’s thrusts—I was dizzy and unbalanced enough without setting myself up to pass out.

A trickle of sweat ran down the side of my face, but I barely felt it as my concentration narrowed and focused on the place where Brian and I were joined. Every other sensation became inconsequential as I felt the tension building there, coiling tighter and tighter, until I thought I couldn’t stand on the edge of that cliff for another moment. And yet still I stood there, waiting for the fall, desperate for the fall, hardly able to breathe with the intensity of my need.

When the coil finally released, I screamed, the pleasure too much to contain—wave after wave of it weakening my knees until I could barely hold myself up. Dimly, I was aware of Brian reaching his own release, his cry seeming but a shadow of mine.

It wasn’t until the last wave of pleasure faded that I became aware of the rest of my body. I was drenched with sweat, shivering in a chill that was only partly physical. My arms and shoulders ached with the strain of bracing myself, and the elastic of my still-closed bra was digging painfully into the flesh at the top of my breasts.

After Brian pulled out, I tried to stand up, but my knees wobbled. If he hadn’t steadied me with one hand, I swear I might have fallen down.

I couldn’t even begin to absorb what had just happened between us, could hardly believe this was real. I struggled to find words, but before I could form a coherent thought, Brian had scooped me into his arms and carried me to the bedroom. There, he undressed me and tucked me into his bed, climbing in beside me and cradling me in his arms, once more the gentle, sweet lover I knew. And while I still reeled with confusion, Brian—typical male—fell fast asleep.

I lay beside him until his snores told me how deeply gone he was. He must have been exhausted by the intensity of what we’d done. I know I was, but I was far too unnerved to fall asleep. Instead, I slid out from under his arm, cleaned myself up a little, and got dressed.

My body was sore and achy as I slipped out of the bedroom and closed the door quietly behind myself. Our supposed dinner still sat on the dining room table, the mingled scents of sex and Italian food an unusual combination, to say the least. Numbly, I dropped onto Brian’s couch and tried to figure out what the hell had just happened.

Brian had never been anything like that before. Oh, every once in a while, we had a good, hard fuck instead of our usual tender lovemaking. The last time we’d made love, he’d left bruises on my wrists. But that time, it had been unintentional, a product of the passion of the moment and of our sexual frustration. What he’d done tonight had felt very much intentional—and premeditated. Was it because he was angry at me for being angry at him?

But no, no matter how dominant and rough he had been, I knew that there had been no anger in it. So what had motivated him to take me like that? And how could he possibly have guessed that a control freak like me would actually let him get away with it?

I gasped as an awful suspicion crept into my head.

Who was the one person who knew and understood me well enough, despite all my layers of camouflage, to guess I might get off on a little show of dominance? But no. He wouldn’t dare stick his nose into my love life like that! Brian must have figured it out for himself. He was, after all, a fantastic lover.

My hand shaking because I didn’t believe my own logic, I moved over on the sofa until I could reach Brian’s phone, then began scrolling through his caller ID log. It didn’t take me long to find what I was looking for: a call from my number, made at three this morning, when I’d been fast asleep.

“Goddamn you, Lugh,” I muttered under my breath as good, old-fashioned rage flooded my system. Right that moment, if I could have exorcized him and sent him back to the Demon Realm, I think I would have done it, no matter what the consequences to the human race.