by Nina Bangs
Speaking of chew toys, Brynn was looking disgustingly relaxed as he lounged in one of the armchairs, his long legs stretched out in front of him. He wore jeans, boots, and a white shirt. He was drinking coffee, and she could see he’d brought some back for her along with a doughnut. Caffeine and sugar, what better way to start the day? How about hot sex in my bed? No, she refused to go there until the twisted twosome had left.
She couldn’t avoid Sparkle and Asima any longer. “Have you agreed on what I’ll wear today?” One should always face life with a positive attitude.
“No.” A simultaneous negative blast.
Kim threw up her hands. “Look, ladies, I appreciate that both of you have taken an interest in making me the best I can be, but I have lots to do today, so let’s get this show on the road.” Had she been firm enough? “And just out of curiosity, Asima, how’d you get Conall to drag all these things to my room?”
“I asked him. How else? He was going to refuse until I pointed out that if I didn’t have to help you with your outfit I’d be free to follow him around.” Asima sat beside the things Conall had dumped on the bed. “And no offense, Kim, but my driving motivation here is to emerge triumphant over the slut queen.”
“What she means, Kim, is she couldn’t screw Mede, so she wants to screw me.” Sparkle swayed over to the clothes she’d left on the couch.
Kim couldn’t help but admire Sparkle. How did she manage a sexy sashay in stilettos high enough to give anyone altitude sickness? And her tight leather pants and skimpy black top made a definite statement that said, I’m here, and I’m sexy.
“Maybe I’ll go down and find Holgarth. We have demon business to discuss.” Brynn was poised to escape.
Fat chance. “I don’t think even Holgarth will be up for a discussion at six in the morning. Don’t you dare move from that chair. You’re the only one on my side, and if you leave, I’ll tell Ganymede you’ve missed having him around.”
“You’re a cruel woman.” He stayed but looked all sulky and gorgeous. Did Brynn have any mood that made him look less than incredible? Kim didn’t think so.
Sparkle made her presentation with sexual innuendoes dripping from every word. “We’ll start with this little black silk camisole edged with ivory lace. It’ll drive men wild trying to figure out whether you’re a sexy lady in black silk or a tempting innocent in ivory lace. To go with it we have a short black leather skirt with an intriguing slit up the side. I brought you black lace panties so guys will have something interesting to see while they’re playing peek a boo with the slit. Add in leather slides with tassels by Manolo Blahnik and a slouchy leather bag from Salvatore Ferragamo, and men will follow you home.”
“I plugged my ears so I wouldn’t hear the dreadful details.” Asima was lying on the bed making a big show of holding her paws over her ears. “But I didn’t have enough paws to cover my eyes. Is it my turn?”
Not even seven yet, and Kim felt weary. “Go for it.”
Asima cast flirty eyes toward Brynn. “Would you hold up my things? I seem to be short of hands.”
Kim did a mental headshake. Flirty? How could a cat be flirty?
Brynn’s expression said he’d rather be out fighting the archdemon to the death than holding up Asima’s clothes. “Sure. No problem.” Liar.
He walked over to the bed and held up a top.
“You need a high-necked lace top to foster the mystique of the untouched virgin. Men are fascinated with virgins.” Asima stared up at Brynn. “Aren’t you?”
“Fascinated.” He stared at Kim. The whites of his eyes were showing.
“I’ve brought a tulle-and-lace skirt to go with the top. It’s swirly and girly.” Asmia stared at Brynn until he held up the skirt.
“Hey, swirly and girly, that’s me.” Kim didn’t dare look at Sparkle to see how she was taking this.
“Finish the outfit off with Hermes leather lace-up espadrilles and a suede pocket satchel with leather trim from Coach, and you’re ready to face the day with flair.” She looked smugly satisfied.
Kim would have to move fast to head off a catfight of monumental proportions. “Okay, here’s the deal. I love everything you guys have chosen for me, but obviously I can’t wear everyone’s stuff at once. So I’ll pick and choose.” She didn’t give Sparkle or Asima a chance to argue. “I’ll wear the top Sparkle chose and Asima’s skirt. I like the lace-up espadrilles, Asima, and the slouchy leather bag is nice, Sparkle.”
Sparkle and Asima glared at each other.
“By the way, where did you get all these great clothes?” Maybe Kim didn’t want to know.
“We have connections.” Asima’s cat eyes turned shifty.
“Many connections.” Sparkle busied herself by gathering up the things Kim wasn’t wearing.
Kim sighed. Connections. Well, at least they’d found something they could agree on. “Thanks for the outfit.”
With much hissing and mumbled complaints, Asima and Sparkle left.
“Why do you let them bother you like that?” Brynn sounded amused now that they’d left.
“For the clothes, of course.” She smiled up at him. “Hey, I’m as shallow as the next person, and great clothes make me feel good.” Fine, so she wanted to look sexy enough to entice him off that stupid couch he bedded down on each night.
“I’d love to wear pretty clothes, too, Kimmie.” Fo sounded wistful.
But before Kim’s sympathy could kick in, Asima padded back into the room. She had Dirk’s detector gripped in her jaws. She leaped onto the night table and dropped the detector next to Fo. “I forgot this.”
“Uh-oh.” Brynn’s comment sounded ominous. “Where’d you get that, Asima? And does Dirk know?” He shook his head and then answered his own question. “Of course he doesn’t.”
Asima blinked her big blue eyes. “He didn’t see me borrow it. When you’re finished, I’ll take it back, and he won’t see that either.” Without a backward glance, she leaped from the night table and was gone. The door eased closed behind her.
Fo vibrated with barely contained excitement. “Flip him open, Kimmie. Now.”
Brynn walked over and put his arm across Kim’s shoulders, lending her his silent support. In that moment, she realized she’d be perfectly happy if he were there to lend his support for the rest of her life.
She swallowed hard. Did she mean that? Absolutely. Funny how the turning points in your life didn’t always come when you expected them, like while you were hanging from a cliff by your fingertips or trying to outrun an angry rhino. Turning points crept up while you were doing something ordinary, like enjoying the warmth of a man’s arm across your shoulders. And those moments changed you forever.
Okay, so standing beside a demon of sensual desire while you discussed fashion with a demon detector didn’t qualify as ordinary. In fact, nothing involving Brynn would ever be normal, mainstream America. But compared to everything else she’d experienced this week, it was a pretty ho-hum moment.
Not that her little life-altering moment meant squat in the grand scheme of things. Because even if Brynn’s compulsion eventually disappeared, as long as he believed he was a demon—and she hadn’t come down on either side of that argument yet—he’d never commit to forever with her.
“Kimmie?”
Fo’s anxious voice pulled her back to what was important right now. Kim didn’t want Fo to be crushed if Dirk’s detector wasn’t sentient, and there was a good chance it wasn’t.
“He might not be like you, Fo.” She picked up Dirk’s detector and flipped it open. “Please don’t be too disappointed if he doesn’t live up to your hopes. We still love you.” We. She automatically included Brynn.
Kim glanced up at him. Brynn smiled his heart-stopping smile that made breathing a real chore for her. Forcing her attention away from his smile, she looked down at Dirk’s detector. It stared back with those scary red eyes.
“I’ll talk to him, Kimmie.” Fo was taking charge.
Kim allowed Brynn
to lead her to the couch. They both sat down.
He leaned close. “This is groundbreaking stuff. Think of the possibilities for online dating services.”
Kim smiled, and her mood lightened a little.
“Hi, I’m Fo. Do you have a name?” For all her seeming confidence, Fo sounded tentative.
The silence stretched on and on, and Kim bit her lip to keep silent. She couldn’t say anything to save Fo from hurt.
“No. Should I have one?”
The deep male voice was a total surprise. Kim didn’t know what she’d expected, but it wasn’t this darkly sensual rumble. She stopped herself just short of thinking it was wasted on a machine. It wasn’t wasted on Fo. But wow, old Sergei had outdone himself on this one.
“Of course. Everyone should have a great name.” Fo was immediately outraged on her new friend’s behalf.
“Why should I have a name when no one ever talks to me?” The deep voice sounded truly puzzled.
“No one?” Fo seemed shocked by the admission. “Well, we’ll talk to you, and we’ll give you a great name, won’t we, Kimmie?”
“Sure will,” Kim frowned. “Wait, Dirk said you spoke to him when you identified the demons, so that means there was some verbal communication going on.”
“I’ve never spoken to him.”
Okay, Kim saw a basic flaw in his statement. “If you’ve never talked to Dirk, how do you warn him when a demon is near?”
“I don’t detect demons.” He delivered his bombshell calmly, but his eyes looked uncertain. “Should I?”
“So what do you do?” Brynn didn’t wait to be invited into the conversation.
“I destroy.” He seemed on firmer ground here.
“Demons?” Kim was still hopeful.
“Anything.” There was something chilling in the machine’s calm declaration. “My creator programmed me to destroy a target with a beam that leaves no evidence behind of how the human or nonhuman died.”
Human or nonhuman? “Why would Sergei do that?” Kim was horrified. No evidence left behind? This was a scary machine.
“I don’t know.” The detector eyed Fo.
“Interesting.” Brynn sounded thoughtful. “Has Dirk ever used you to kill anyone?”
“No.” The detector’s gaze never left Fo.
Brynn cast Kim a meaningful glance. “Why don’t we give Fo and her new friend some time alone? We can wait out in the hall.” He hoped she didn’t fight him on this.
“I guess so.” She stared at Dirk’s detector like it was the reincarnation of Jack the Ripper.
“Thank you.” Fo looked ecstatic. Her new friend’s destructive capabilities hadn’t dimmed her fascination with him. Love must be blind even with sentient machines.
“Give me a moment.” Kim grabbed jeans and a top from her closet and hurried into the bathroom. Once dressed, she picked up her doughnut and coffee and then followed Brynn into the hall.
Once outside the room, Brynn raked his fingers through his hair as he tried to make sense of what the detector had revealed.
Kim paced. “What was Sergei thinking? If Dirk hits the Destroy button to get rid of a demon that’s taken a human host, he’ll kill the human. He doesn’t even know he’s dealing with a sentient being.”
“We’re assuming Dirk doesn’t know. After all, he lied to you about the detector speaking to him.” That assumption might be wrong. Not a comfortable thought, but one that had to be considered.
“Of course he doesn’t know. What good is the detector to him the way it is now?” But Brynn could tell she was turning it over in her mind even as she defended her relative.
“The detector said it had never killed anyone, had never even talked to Dirk. What are the chances, considering how rabid Dirk sounded about destroying demons?” The chances were nonexistent so far as Brynn was concerned, but he’d keep his opinion to himself.
“You’re right.” She looked troubled. “Either Dirk wasn’t telling the truth about loving to hunt demons and tried to make himself look good by saying the detector spoke to him, in which case he doesn’t know about his detector because he’s never tried to use it, or . . .”
“Or he’s used it to kill, and the detector lied to us.” Neither scenario brightened Brynn’s day.
“Why would a detector lie?” Her eyes widened at the possibility.
Brynn shrugged. “You said this Sergei died. How did he die?”
“I have no idea.” Her expression said she knew where he was going with this, and it didn’t make her happy. “I’ll ask Fo to find out. She can access Web info.”
“No matter what we might suspect, someone has to warn your uncle.” This would be a problem.
Kim nodded. “Yeah, and then he’ll know who borrowed his detector. And I don’t think he’ll be sympathetic to Fo’s plight.”
“We can’t involve Asima. Even if we were willing to, your uncle wouldn’t believe a cat got into his locked room and made off with his detector while he was sleeping.”
Kim sighed. “We’ll have to let Asima take it back to Dirk’s room. He won’t catch her. It’d be nice if Dirk was still asleep, but we couldn’t get that lucky. He’ll just have to be left with an unsolved mystery.” Leaning over, she set her coffee and doughnut on the floor and then sat down with her back propped against the wall. “I guess we’ll have to figure out how to let him know about his detector without implicating ourselves.”
“And if he already knows?” Brynn sat down beside her.
“Then we have a problem.” Her expression said she didn’t want to consider that possibility because it would mean good old Uncle Dirk had a secret dark side.
Since neither one of them could come up with a way to inform Dirk that his detector was a little less and a little more than he’d bargained for, they sat in silence for a few minutes.
“We have some time to kill, so let’s talk about your compulsion, or the lack thereof.” She didn’t look at him. “We’ve been together night and day since Monday night. And as of five this morning, it’s been twenty-four hours since the last one.”
He didn’t want to talk about his compulsion. Brynn wanted to sit quietly next to her thinking about her smooth, bare body under her jeans and top, because he knew she hadn’t taken panties or a bra into the bathroom with her.
Kim wasn’t one to sit quietly when she could worry a problem to death. “We have to at least consider the possibility that—”
He put his finger over her lips. “Don’t say it. Don’t even think it.”
“Why not?” She stared at him from wide green eyes.
Brynn exhaled sharply and rubbed the back of his neck to relieve the tension. “It’s like the compulsion is hiding, and if I think or talk about it being gone, it’ll jump out and yell boo.” That sounded really mature.
She smoothed her fingers over his thigh. “We have to face what’s happening.”
We. Warmth curled inside him as she aligned herself on his side. “Yeah, I know.”
“You’ll have to test it.” He must’ve looked horrified because she rushed into her explanation. “You’ll have to stay with another woman for twenty-four hours to make sure I’m not the catalyst.”
“Another woman?” Surprised, Brynn realized he was unhappy with her idea because it meant he’d be away from her all those hours, not because he feared the compulsion might return.
“It has to be someone who knows about the compulsion. That narrows it down to two women. There’s Sparkle . . .”
“And what do you think Sparkle, the self-proclaimed queen of all things sexual, will do the first time I offer her my body?” A nobrainer.
“Right. She’ll pounce. It has to be Donna.” She didn’t look too enthusiastic about her test either, and he immediately felt better.
“When?” The sooner the better. He wanted to know one way or another about the compulsion. But no matter what happened, he’d come back to Kim.
“We can talk to Donna tonight after she rises. I know you have to t
ake part in the fantasies, but when you’re finished you can hang around with her for what’s left of the night. When dawn comes, you can sleep on her couch. Heaven knows you’ve had a lot of practice sleeping on couches lately.” She didn’t try to hide her unhappiness with that fact. “Do you think Eric will be okay with you spending the night in the same room as them? And I never asked if the compulsion cares if the woman is married or single.”
She was starting to think of the compulsion as a separate entity. A mistake. The compulsion was a part of who he was. “When the compulsion hits, I don’t ask the marital status of the woman, I just start getting naked.”
“Okay, then.” She didn’t sound like it was okay. “You’ll be done by early Friday morning.” She offered him a warm smile. “Why does that suddenly seem such a long time?”
Warm wasn’t good enough. He wanted her to give him a sexy smile that said she’d make love with him wherever he wanted—on the floor, under the bed, in the shower, or on top of a building in Times Square. Anywhere but in her bed. He glanced at his watch. Yeah, they had time to discuss the bed thing.
“I want to make love with you.” May as well get it out in the open. “But not in your bed. Maybe on the beach. Making love on the beach at midnight with the moon shining would be incredible.” Or not. It was still a little cold on the beach at night in March. But he’d try to generate enough heat to keep both of them hot.
At first she looked startled by his change of subject, but then something in her gaze said he wasn’t going to escape that easily. “Maybe I need you to make love with me in my bed.” She looked away from him.
Memories of centuries spent as an unwilling visitor to women’s beds lay cold around his heart. “Coming to your bed would remind me of the compulsion.”
She glanced back at him, and something sad shimmered in her eyes. “I guess I’d like to think I could create a different memory.”
She didn’t say it, but Brynn didn’t have to slide into her mind to understand what she meant. Kim wanted to be special enough to make him forget about all those other women.
He tried to think logically. “For five centuries I’ve had to climb into women’s beds and give them what they wanted sexually. That’s a lot of negative reinforcement. I can’t reason away what I’m feeling, because it’s all about hate, self-loathing, and fear. Logic doesn’t get you anywhere with emotions that strong. It would take a more powerful emotion to get past all that baggage.”