Torment: Dark Paranormal Romance (Eclipse Warlocks Book 1)

by Ellie Cassidy

  A few minutes later, the Sheriff left with another invitation to stay the night at his house—declined—and an apology for any distress he may have caused me, which I waved off with a shaky smile and a promise—I’m fine.

  I was always fine.

  What difference would it make if I were not?

  Lex went out to get us pizza. I was so fine, I joked that Shadow Horn wasn’t the asshole of the world. We do have delivery, you know. He murmured something about needing to stop by the store anyway and went.

  I wasn’t entirely sure he’d be back.

  @hawk

  Suicide.

  Fucking suicide.

  On my fucking birthday.

  Lex came back with a pepperoni pizza, “For you,” and a bottle of Jack, “For me,” he said with flair.

  I gave him a dry look. “Someone has a fake ID.”

  His mouth twisted around a grin. “You don’t?”

  “Do you know nothing about growing up in a microscopic small town?” I grumbled. “We can’t get away with things like that.”

  He poured us each a glass of whiskey while I grabbed paper napkins, then we pushed the coffee table aside to make a picnic on the floor.

  I sniffed my glass and winced.

  “You don’t drink whiskey?” he said.

  “I’ll let you know in a moment,” I admitted. “I’m usually a beer girl. Oh, and there was a particularly nasty bottle of tequila Haley bought me for my birthday. That did not have a pretty ending.”

  A chuckle rumbled its way from Lex’ chest as we shared a look. He was leaning against the armchair. I was leaning against the sofa. There was a solid block of space dividing us, yet his gaze caressed me like a gentle touch.

  “I wouldn’t normally be encouraging bad behavior,” he said.

  “Sure you wouldn’t.”

  A smile ghosted his lips. “I thought we could both do with something stiffer than coffee. You keep telling me you’re fine, but I don’t think you are.”

  Way to spoil the moment. I set the glass down on the rug and fiddled with my phone, connecting it to the speaker system.

  “Any music preferences?” I asked as I scrolled through my various playlists.

  He leant in to select a pizza slice from the box, bringing his intoxicating gaze up closer and more personal for a heartbeat, long enough to change my mind about anything being spoiled. My breath hitched.

  Without answering, he leant back again, watching me lazily as he ate the slice.

  I rolled my eyes at myself and tapped a sentimental playlist, a mixture of my mother’s old favorites. The deep-boned strum of Hotel California vibrated the airwaves.

  “What happened back there?” Lex said.

  “Nothing.”

  “The Sheriff said it was too much.” His eyes creased into me. “What did he mean?”

  “Let it go, Lex.” I picked up my glass, my gaze dropping to the contents as I gave it a swirl. “It’s not important.”

  “It is to me.”

  I peered at him. “Why?”

  “Because I want to know you,” he said. “I want to know everything about you.”

  I lifted the glass to my lips and knocked back a healthy sip. The burn hit the back of my throat, choking a watery-eyed gasp from me. By the time the fire hit my stomach, it had mellowed into a coiling heat that stroked my spine and my courage.

  I gave him a doe-eyed look. God, he was gorgeous. “Where’s the romance without a little mystery?”

  His mouth kicked up at one corner. “Is that what this is?”

  My cheeks flushed. The whiskey hadn’t given me courage, it’d turned me into a brazen hussy. I decided another large sip might remedy the situation. There was less burn, more coiling heat.

  “I think I drink whiskey,” I said, redirecting the conversation with a clever smile.

  “I think you’re adorable,” Lex drawled, and before I could process the impact, he was knee-crawling toward me with a glint in his honeyed eyes.

  Butterflies hummed in the basket of my stomach as he reached me, bringing his scent and his musky male heat and whatever else it was about this boy that magnetized my hormones whenever they came into his orbit.

  He tipped my chin with his knuckles and held my gaze while he lowered his mouth inch by melting inch. My blood was pulsing in my veins like a slow-flowing, sunbaked river before his lips finally slanted over mine, brushing a kiss like he worked his art. Beautiful and captivating—and faintly disturbing, because this might just be the one, the kiss that would ruin me for any other guy.

  My lips tingled as he pressed his forehead to mine, his breath slightly ragged on my eyelids as he said softly, “I hurt you. I pressed the Sheriff into dumping facts without any warning because I had no idea it could hurt you. That’s why I want to know, I want to know everything, so I never make that mistake again.”

  He pulled away to look at me and that look, those words, stirred chaos into that dark place buried in my heart.

  I couldn’t find a flippant remark or careless tease to wash this away. “My mother committed suicide on my thirteenth birthday.”

  He went rigid, leaving that terrible truth to hang for a second, another second, and then the tension collapsed.

  “Fuck,” he rasped on a shallow breath, wrapping an arm around my shoulders as he fell back against the sofa beside me, tucking me in as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

  I rested my cheek on his chest. “Exactly.”

  “You can talk about it,” he said gently, his palm cupping my upper arm, not caressing, just holding me close. “Or not.”

  I’d spent a year in therapy and my head doctor had never managed to pry it loose. My friends had comforted me, cried with me, but they’d never prodded me to talk about it. They knew all the sordid details. They hadn’t needed to make me relive it.

  But there was more to the story than the sordid details.

  There always was.

  And for some unearthly reason, it was swelling up inside me like a river in flood season.

  “My father was in town,” I said quietly. “For my birthday. We’d had supper at the Shadow Grill and he…he gave me this beautiful antique music box. It had belonged to his mother, and his grandmother before her. It was the most he’d ever told me about his side of the family, the closest he’d ever allowed me to come to him. I thought everything was about to change. That maybe now that I’d turned thirteen, now that I wasn’t a stupid kid anymore, I was worth his time.”

  “Nothing changed,” Lex murmured.

  “Nothing changed,” I sighed. “But after that night, I didn’t care a whole lot anymore.”

  I closed my eyes and I was back there, my father dropping me off at the curb outside our house. He never walked me in. “My mother always made sure she was home for me when he dropped me off and rode out of my life again. She would always be waiting, but not that night. I should have known something was wrong.”

  I pushed off Lex’s chest to sit up, looking at him, not really seeing. “I assumed she’d gone out with friends, maybe forgotten the time, so I just went up to my room and lay on the bed with the music box on my stomach. I wound it up again and again, listening to the melody while the fantasy played in my mind. My father would realize how much he missed us. He’d be so sorry for going away. He’d come home to us and we’d be a whole, happy family. I was thirteen, but I was still just a stupid kid.”

  A swell of tears blurred my vision.

  “Sage.”

  I swallowed. “I was totally obsessed. Convinced my dream family was about to become reality. I was so lost in the delusion, it was hours before I started to worry about my mother. I ran down the road to Grant’s house. It was the middle of the night. They were all sleeping, but I pounded loud enough to wake the Sheriff…”

  Lex lifted my hand in his.

  I blinked, clearing the blur, focusing on his large hand and how it engulfed mine, how solid and warm it felt. “They found her body in the park at the e
nd of our street. She’d slit her wrists. Deep, long, vertical slits to make it quicker. She wasn’t messing around.”

  “Jesus,” Lex whispered.

  “I was playing happy families in my bedroom while she was bleeding out.” Cue the guilt. Remorse. And so many, many years of anger. “She was supposed to be the one who didn’t drive off. She was supposed to be the one who stayed.”

  Lex said nothing. He just held my hand, his eyes filling with sweet, tender emotion.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” I growled softly.

  “Like what?”

  “Like I’m some fragile, broken thing,” I said, my voice gruff from the strain of holding it together. I’d smashed the music box to smithereens and trashed the pieces along with the remains of any fantasy. “I’m not. And I’m a green belt. So now you know everything there is to know about me.”

  He looked at me for the longest moment as he wiped away the wetness that had leaked onto my cheek with a thumb. “I seriously doubt that, but it’s a start.”

  After that, he pulled the pizza box over and tucked me into his side again. And that’s how we stayed, eating pizza and listening to music until my eyes grew heavy. I remembered thinking I should call it a night…and the next thing I knew, I was waking up to the gray of morning, curled up on the sofa beneath a crocheted blanket.

  Lex was gone, but he’d left a note on the kitchen counter.

  You snore.

  I cleaned away the pizza box and pushed the furniture back. The bottle of Jack Daniels was nearly full and I smiled as I stashed it in a cabinet. There was something particularly intimate about keeping your guy’s favorite drink on hand.

  My guy.

  I tried to brush that off with an eye roll, but it stuck around.

  @hawk

  I think I’m falling hard.

  There weren’t many options for fun in Shadow Horn. That’s why we usually ended up at the lake. But storm clouds were rolling in while I sipped on my morning coffee, so I wasn’t totally surprised to get a text from Kenzie.

  Seemed we were hooking up at The Barn tonight. Attendance is mandatory.

  I smiled at the throwback to our school days…which weren’t all that long ago, but already felt like another life.

  I grabbed a pen and turned Lex’s note over to scrawl on the other side. The Barn tonight.

  Archaic, that’s what we were. Exchanging notes like first graders in home room. I seriously needed to get his cell number.

  With an hour to go before my lunch shift, I shoved the note into my purse and jumped into my car. I hadn’t been out to The Stables since Jonas Mackeson had offered his field for the annual Scariest Scarecrow competition the year before he’d gone into care.

  Not much had changed. The Mackesons had never farmed the adjoining fields, so the approach had always cut through a landscape of long grass and wild flowers and scrubby trees.

  The sprawling manor house was all dark brick and stained wood panels with leaded windows. There was no symmetry to the varying levels of the steeped, slatted roof, but somehow it all fit together with something resembling an elegant shambles. I’d never been inside, and that hadn’t been my plan today. I reconsidered when I saw the double cab Ranger parked out front.

  I checked my reflection in the rearview mirror, smoothed some flyaway hairs and applied a fresh coat of vanilla lip gloss. Then I took a minute to reconsider yet again. I couldn’t see any downside to rocking up on his doorstep unannounced. He’d done it to me yesterday, after all.

  There was no electronic chime on the bolted-iron front door, just a dangling knocker. I gave it three decent bangs and stood back with a skeptical look left and right at the spread of building. Unless Lex was standing in the entrance foyer, I doubted he’d hear.

  Returning to my original plan to slip a note under the door, I was scratching in my purse when the door was answered.

  “Oh, hey, I was just…” My greeting froze in my throat as I registered the dark hair and granite, bristled jaw. The guy, not Lex, was a solid six-foot-plus of sin and sex incarnate, his face a statue carved in angles and ridges and hollows in all the right places.

  A bolt of brainless, carnal desire in its purest form zapped me in the pit of my stomach.

  Thankfully he opened his mouth just then and reminded me of all the wonderful reasons why we’d evolved as a species beyond primal lust.

  “What. Are.” He ran a hand through his swathes of hair, eyes the color of charcoal assessing me. “You. Doing. Here.”

  Not a question.

  More like an accusation.

  I did a double-take, wondering if we’d met before. But no, I would definitely have remembered. He was dressed in black jeans and a long-sleeved, untucked, tailored silk shirt that streamlined his muscle-toned physique. He also wore a cruel twist on that sexy mouth like a personal hazard warning sign.

  Ignoring the accusation, I hit him with a bright smile. “Is Lex here?”

  “Lex is busy.”

  “He is?” I stood there with a dumb stare.

  The guy cocked his head, studying me with an intensity designed to make me feel uncomfortable and undeniably unwelcome in this home.

  It worked.

  “Is he expecting you?” he drawled in a gravel baritone.

  “Um, not exactly.” I wet my lips. This had been a lousy idea. I fished the note out of my purse, folding the paper into a tight square as I moved closer to hold it out. “Would you mind giving him this?”

  He pinched the paper between two fingers. “I didn’t say you couldn’t wait for him.”

  The belated invitation kicked me out of my fugue. The discomfort slithering under my skin turned to a flush of anger. I’d done nothing wrong.

  “That’s okay,” I said briskly.

  “Oh, but I insist.” He drew back half a step, the silvery flecks in his black eyes glinting.

  Not an invitation then.

  An order.

  Or maybe a challenge?

  Well, fuck you then. I strode forward, my shoulder brushing his chest as I stepped into a foyer of stone-flagged floors and wood paneled walls.

  “This way,” he said, pushing the door closed and taking us into a spacious den that led off from the foyer through an arched entrance.

  My gaze swept over the tall, beamed-ceiling and overtly masculine furniture—bulky wood and leather—to what appeared to be a fully stocked wet bar. A wall of heavy, brocade curtains suggested this room could be flooded with daylight if anyone bothered to draw them open.

  “Gideon Crest.”

  “Sage Daniels,” I responded on automatic, wondering why the name sounded so familiar. Then it hit me. Gideon. Of course he owned this goddamn shrine to testosterone. “Lex mentioned you.”

  “He never mentioned you.”

  My spine bristled. “Have I somehow offended you?”

  “That remains to be seen.” Casually, he unfolded my note. His mouth twitched as he read. “You drove all the way out here to deliver this? Next time, try it while you’re kicking him out your bed.”

  I cringed as I remembered what Lex had written on the other side. You snore.

  “Give me that,” I demanded, marching up to him.

  He held the note high, wicked amusement dancing in his eyes. “Unless this is some kinky form of foreplay?”

  My cheeks blazed as I stared at him, a scowl digging the beginnings of a headache into my skull. “What are you? Ten?”

  He quirked a brow and handed the note over, which I scrunched into my white-knuckled fist.

  I was done here.

  If Lex ever wanted to see me again, he knew where I lived.

  Before I could whirl about in a temper, however, Gideon tipped his head to square an intense look on me. His voice lowered to a commanding, “Please, take a seat. You and I are going to have a little chat. I’ll do the talking. You listen.”

  Why not? I’d driven all the way out here to see Lex. Why should I let his rudeness chase me away?

  I m
ade my way to the leather couch and perched at one end.

  Gideon followed, planting one hand on the armrest as he bent in, pressing me deeper and deeper into the back of the couch with his unwanted aromatic scent—seriously? he even smelled sexy, like a hot, tempest night—and his cruel mouth drawing much too close for comfort and his eyes pouring into me. They really were a grainy charcoal, midnight black sprayed with ivory.

  For someone who’d ordered this little chat like takeout Chinese, he sure was taking his time getting around to it.

  He looked and looked into my eyes while his ridiculously unnatural sex appeal ignited fires up and down my body. It felt like we were an illicit chemistry experiment in motion.

  Not being the savage he was, I had absolutely no intention of giving it any credit whatsoever.

  I guess I could shove him away, but this was more satisfying, sitting here, staring benignly into his diamond dusted eyes, proving just how ineffectual his overbearing tactics were.

  Finally he opened his mouth to speak. “You’re an enticing creature all right. I can see how you might get your claws into Lex.”

  Seriously? My scowl dug deep enough to give me a headache as I glared at him, glared into his infuriatingly mesmerizing eyes. He really was a charmer, wasn’t he?

  “Unfortunately, I can’t allow that.” His knuckles grazed beneath my chin, his thumb stroking the line of my jaw, his gaze keeping me so deeply hooked, I felt like I was drowning in a midnight black sea of stars. “Whatever you feel for Lex is a —”

  “What the hell is going on?”

  Lex’s voice reached me from the bottom of that sea, too faraway to distract me from the intensity of Gideon.

  “Nothing, apparently,” Gideon sighed. “We’re done here,” he said to me and slowly straightened.

  My eyes flashed to the arched doorway and Lex, who stood there with a fiercely troubled look—a worryingly justified look. Gideon had been all over me and what had I done? I’d sat there, allowed him to stroke my jawline while I stared into his damn eyes like a lost puppy.

  Talk about compromising positions!

  What stupid point had I been trying to prove anyway? I should have shoved Gideon on his ass the moment he bent in to crowd my personal space.