Lauren smiled. “The way I treated him yesterday, I wouldn’t blame him if he never asked me out again.”
Angeline chuckled. “Oh, he will! Believe me, he will.”
Glancing down at her watch, Lauren realized they had been sitting at the table for over two hours. She looked up guiltily at her employer. “It’s almost two o’clock.”
“So?” Angeline inquired, lifting a fine brow in challenge. “Who’s gonna fire us for getting back late?”
Lauren laughed, rising from the table as her companion did. She started to open her purse, but Angeline put out a hand to stop her.
“This lunch, and the tip, is my treat.”
Walking back to the store, the two women spoke quietly, laughing together, giggling like schoolgirls. Neither saw the darkly handsome man watching them from across the street although Angeline felt his presence as she always did when he was near. As she held the door open for the younger woman to precede her into the store, she turned her forest green eyes across the street and smiled.
He didn’t smile back.
Maxine Fowler bent over and, with the back of her arm, swept everything from the little mahogany table in her foyer. Crystal burst as it hit the hardwood floor, flowers scattered about the area rug, water dripped down the wainscoting, little china figurines collapsed as they broke.
“God damn you to the everlasting fires, Angeline Brewster!” she screamed. “You filthy, rotten, whoring bitch!”
Turning, Maxine stormed into her living room and cast about for something else to render to rubble. Stalking to the long sofa table in front of her, she picked up a simpering little Precious Moments knick-knack and hurled it against the far wall, chipping the plaster and crushing the smiling figurine to dust. Her fingers closed around a marble egg in its brass stand and sent it flying through the archway into the dining room where it struck the cheery wood table and took a small nip out of the veneer as it skittered across the high sheen of the Queen Anne table.
“I loathe you!” Maxine snarled, her lips drawn back over clenched teeth. “I despise you!”
She snagged the afghan from her rocking chair and tore at it, her fingers grasping like a crone’s claws as she pulled viciously at the crocheted stitches. The material twisted in her hands, stretched, but the stitching held the pattern together. With a growl of frustration, Maxine threw the afghan to the floor and stomped on it, her heels catching in the pattern. Kicking it away from her, she flung herself into the rocking chair and glowered sightlessly at the far wall.
“I’ll see you in hell for your interference, Angeline Brewster!” she mumbled. A thin stream of saliva eased down the left side of her mouth. “I’ll see you roasting in the eternal flames of the Pit for what you’re trying to do to me!”
“What is it you think she’s doing to you, Maxie?”
Maxine Fowler whimpered, slowly turning her head toward the softly accented voice that had spoken. As her vision took in the speaker, her mouth sagged open and she flinched, pressing back into the rocker, her hands gripping the arms with such force her knuckles bled of color. A groan of fear dredged up from the bottom of Maxine’s dark-tinted soul and she stopped breathing as she watched the man who walked toward her.
Syntian’s sensual mouth twitched with humor. One thick brow lifted in challenge as he stepped up to the chair and stood gazing down at the woman in the rocker. He smiled slowly as he saw the terror flitting across her wrinkled face. Putting out his hands, laughing silently as he saw her flinch away from him as he took hold of the rocker’s arms and bent his knees to hunker down in front of her, he kept eye contact with her, refusing to allow her to look away from him as he settled at her feet. His head cocked to one side as he looked at her. “Why is it always you, Maxine?” he asked quietly.
Maxine’s throat had closed with fear, but her body was aching with a deep-seated hunger that his nearness only intensified. The heat between her legs was so great she felt sweat oozing down her thighs. A rumbling, clutching twist in her womb made her painfully, acutely aware of the warm, animal smell coming from him, the smoldering directness of his hot gaze.
“Please,” she managed to whimper, her teeth chattering. “Syntian, I need you.” She squirmed in the rocker. “I need you so badly.”
“I imagine you do.”
“I gave you pleasure once,” she whispered. “The least you can do now is pleasure me!”
“Do you remember when you called me from my lair, Maxie?” he asked her as he moved toward her an inch or two until his body was pressed against her trembling legs. He smiled at the hopeless groan that was pulled from the depths of her being as his flesh touched hers.
Where his body was in contact with her own, Maxine felt a radiant heat that pulsed through her. His chest was braced against her knees. Pressing, searching, and, without thought or conscious effort, her knees moved outward, away from one another, and the heat of him moved closer, settling itself between her spread thighs.
“You wanted what I could offer you, Maxine,” he said softly. His hands slid from the chair arms to her quivering thighs.
She moaned deep in her throat. Her head fell to the tall slats of the rocker.
“Did I not give you what you wanted, Maxine?”
His voice was a silky caress that reached out to erase the passage of time. It slid sensually back through space and years and misery, taking her along with it, until Maxine stood on the steps of her grandmother’s house, an ancient, crumbling black book in her hands.
“I held to our bargain, Maxine,” he reminded her. “Do you remember?”
Ah, but yes, she remembered! A thrill of sweet, aching pleasure drove through Maxine’s body and she trembled. She remembered it all: finding the old book in her grandmother’s trunk; reciting the incantations; calling forth the glorious essence now pressing so intimately between her legs.
“I gave you all that you wished for, did I not?”
He had. Her lips lifted in a sad smile. Everything she had demanded, he had given in full measure. He had been her knight in shining armor, her rescuer, her instructor. He had been her all.
“Was I not all that you wanted me to be?”
That silky voice was like a fondling of her most secret parts. It always had been. From that very first moment when she, thirteen years old and unschooled in the ways of the flesh, had first opened her arms to him.
“Take me,” she had ordered him. “Take me and make me a woman!”
There had been no hesitation as he swept her up into his arms and carried her inside her grandmother’s house. There had been no hesitation as he stripped her clothes from her and pressed his own naked body over her own. There had been no hesitation as he had entered her, hard and demanding, filled with such glorious heat she could still feel it inside her. There had been no hesitation as he had plunged so deeply within her, taking away the barrier of her virginity, replacing it with the throbbing shaft of his ownership. There had been no hesitation as the ice-cold fluid of his lust had spurted into the very core of her.
“Yes!” she had screamed, her legs wrapped around the smooth flanks riding her. “Yes!” She had grunted at the hugeness of him, the pain of his penetration, but her cries soon turned to ecstatic groans of fulfillment as the rhythmic thrusts of his manhood drove deeper still into her.
“Did I not pleasure you, Maxine?” his soft whisper swirled around her.
“Yes, Syntian, you did.” She sighed, lowering her head to look down into his dark, sinful eyes. Her hand came up to cup his smooth cheek and she moaned softly as his head turned and his lips pressed familiarly into the palm of her hand.
He felt her threading the fingers of her free hand through his hair. He moved his lips from her flesh and smiled. “Was I not everything you wanted me to be?”
She nodded as her fingers pushed through the flowing, shoulder-length silk of his dark hair. “All any woman could want, Syn,” she answered.
His right hand moved, slid under the fabric of her dress and unerr
ingly found the wetness at the juncture of her thighs. He felt her clamp down on his fingers as he slid them inside her. “Do you still want me?”
Her hand tensed in his hair. “I will always want you, Syntian.”
His fingers probed gently. “And what will you give me if I pleasure you this day, Maxine Grant?”
All her fear had vanished with the touch of his flesh against her own. Her hunger was so great she would have devoured him if it were possible. Her hand on his cheek caressed him; the hand in his hair smoothed the soft strands from his face. “Whatever you wish for, my demon,” she answered.
“Your daughter?” he queried. “Will you give me your daughter?”
There was no hesitation. “Yes.”
He smiled.
Lauren was out of breath when she reached the telephone. “Hello?”
“I just called to tell you I’ll be going away for a few weeks.”
“Mama?” Lauren’s brows drew together. “Going where?”
“To visit your Aunt Ivonne,” her mother answered in a dreamy voice. “I needed a vacation and that’s where I’m going.”
“Isn’t this rather sudden?” Lauren inquired, not liking, nor understanding, the tone of her mother’s voice.
“Don’t get impertinent with me, missy!” her mother snapped. “You’ve got the number in Wewahitchka if you need me.”
Lauren stared at the telephone, as the connection was broken. Slowly she replaced the receiver and stood there in her living room, confusion moving over her face. She nearly jumped out of her skin when the phone rang again. “Did you forget something?” she asked.
“Are you still angry with me?” His voice was gentle, reflecting the uncertainty of his reception.
Lauren’s heart thudded hard in her chest. “No,” she whispered, wanting to apologize to him for the ugly insinuation she had made earlier that day, but not knowing how to begin.
“Then will you please let me take you to supper this evening?” There was a thread of insecurity in his tone that told her he was prepared for her rejection of him.
“I would love to,” she answered immediately. She smiled at the sigh on the other end of the phone.
“Seven?” he whispered.
“Seven would be fine.”
Maxine Fowler lay with her arms behind her head, intent on the expensive clothes that were covering Syntian Cree’s magnificent body. As he buttoned his silk shirt, she licked her lips, watching as his strong fingers threaded the pearl studs through the buttonholes. “How old were you, Syntian?” she asked, her regard moving over the width of his shoulders and down to the tapering of his waist.
He looked around at her. “When I left the world?” At her silent nod, he shrugged. “Thirty-four in Earth years.” He reached for his jacket that hung on the footboard of her bed.
“Will you ever age?” Her face had taken on a look of intense sorrow.
He shook his head. “No.”
A remorseful sigh escaped Maxine’s lips and she turned over in the bed, a bed still damp from their wild lovemaking, and buried her face in the pillow. “I will,” she said.
“You already have,” he said in an unkind voice.
She flinched, tears gathering. A shaft of anger drove through her to replace the languid warmth of a moment before. “Just as Lauren will,” she reminded him.
He slipped into his jacket. “I am aware of that, Maxine.”
She looked over her shoulder at him. “And will you want her when she is old and gray and wrinkled as I am?”
He glanced up at her as he moved his shoulders to settle his jacket more comfortably about him. “I will teach her what she needs to know to keep her beauty for as long as humanly possible. Had you been a different sort of woman, Maxine, I would have taught you such things.”
“Like you have taught Angeline?”
He shook his head. “I have taught her only ways of the flesh. That was all she required. Others have taught her what she knows of maintaining her looks.”
Maxine sat up. “Why did you abandon me?” she shouted at him. “It was I who called you, demon!”
He walked to the door, intending not to answer her, but a spark of annoyance lit and he turned to face her. “Do you remember what pledge I had you make before I ever laid hands to you, Maxine?” At the furious shake of her head, he nodded. “Oh, aye, you do. Think back, Maxine. What did I ask of you in return for the demands you made on me?”
She stubbornly refused to answer, not wanting to remember her own foolishness at the bargain she had made. She turned her face away from the glorious beauty of his dark face.
“Answer me, Maxine,” he ordered, his voice stern, uncompromising.
She looked around at him. Her mouth was set in a mulish pout.
“Maxine,” he warned, taking a step toward her.
“You made me swear an oath,” she said grudgingly.
“In your own blood,” he injected.
“In my own blood!” she snapped. Her chin lifted. “That I would never do harm to another like myself.”
“But you did,” he prodded.
Her mouth twisted with memory. “Angeline Brewster was a little nothing!”
“A little nothing just like you,” he taunted. He stepped closer to her, smiling at the way she scooted herself up in the bed, fearful he would lunge at her and do to her what she knew him capable. “Angeline hungered just as you did for the very things I gave you. But you tried to murder her, didn’t you, Maxine? And you would have succeeded had I not stepped in to take the bullet meant for her!” His eyes were hot with accusation. “Instead of trying to help her, you put every obstacle you could conjure into her path then you tried to kill her. For that, I took revenge in her name.”
“But you were mine! You are blood-pledged to my family line! Not hers!” she protested, her lips trembling.
“I heard her calling, just as I heard you calling,” he answered. He stared at her. “And she is blood of your blood, Maxine. Family of your family.”
“Fourth cousins don’t count!” Maxine denied.
“Aye, they do,” he responded. “The bloodline carries on from generation to generation. You know that.”
“But you had made a pact with me!” Maxine whimpered. “With me, Syntian Cree!”
“And I fulfilled that pact,” he reminded her, “until you broke it by attempting to harm your own flesh and blood. I did what you wanted. I made you a woman.”
“Then left me for that whore!” Tears cascaded down her cheeks. “I loved you, Syntian. I loved you!”
“You still do,” he said with a snarl. “And you always will.”
She turned her head away.
“But you didn’t learn from that time years ago, did you, Maxine?” he asked, driving the spur of his dislike further into her. “You have tried to keep your own daughter from learning of her heritage, haven’t you?”
Her head snapped around and she flared at him. “I tried to keep Lauren safe from brutes like you!”
“Safe?” he scoffed. “You tried to deny her the very humanity with which she had been born!”
“I wanted to keep her pure!”
“You wanted to keep her ignorant,” he shot back. “You wanted to keep her under your thumb for as long as you paced this Earth.” His face was hot with fury. “But I would not allow that.”
“You will do to her what you did to me then abandon her just as you did me!” Maxine shouted. “She will grow to love you and you will corrupt her as you corrupted me and Angeline and every other mortal woman who’s known your evil touch! Lauren will pay for letting you put your filthy hands on her!”
His sneer was deadly. “Just as you let me put my filthy hands on you?”
“Get out!” she yelled at him. “Go to her! Take her, for all I care! She deserves what you’re going to do to her!” She flung herself down in the bed and began to wail in fury.
He stood there for a moment, disgust and loathing stamped on his handsome face. “Consider your
self lucky I did not come to you as I did to those other women, Maxine.”
Her sobbing stopped and she flipped over in the bed, staring.
“Aye, lady,” he said savagely. “They knew the hate of the NightWind. Would you like to feel it, as well?”
Maxine pushed herself up against the headboard. “That was you?” she whispered.
“Don’t interfere with what I plan, Maxine,” he threatened. “You would not like to pay the price for meddling this time, I can assure you.”
Chapter Nine
“Aren’t you going to eat?” she asked him.
Syn shook his head, put his hand on his stomach. “I started feeling a little queasy on the way over to your place.” He smiled ruefully. “I think it was something I ate yesterday that’s upset my system.”
“Maybe we should just skip supper then.”
“Nonsense,” he declared, shaking his head. “I can get just as much pleasure watching you dine as I could from ingesting the food myself.” He laughed. “And not gain any of the calories.”
Her laughter was like a tinkle of silver bells. “But you don’t mind me having them, huh?”
His gaze smoothed over her flushed face. “I like my women full-bodied.”
Lauren felt her face grow hot. She looked down at the napkin in her lap, not sure how to answer such a blatant attempt at flirtation.
“I really should apologize for the other day,” she finally said, glancing up to see him watching her. “About what I called you.”
“Actually,” he said, leaning back in his chair and folding his arms over his wide chest, “after I thought about it for a while, I rather liked the notion that you thought I was a gigolo.” He grinned openly at her look of acute embarrassment. “No really,” he continued. “At least you don’t find me unattractive and I was beginning to think you did.”
NightWind 1st Book: HellWind Trilogy Page 13