by C. L. Parker
“Fuck off, Dante!”
“Blimey! What a foul mouth you have for someone of your standing.” He laughed again. “You’ll say fuck, but you won’t say cock?”
“You are such a child.”
“Oh, well now I think if you’d just turn around you’d see that’s not true.” His ego really knew no bounds. His voice was rich and seductive as he said, “Turn around, Angel.”
“No!” Truth be known, she might have wanted to take a peek, but she’d never admit it or give in to the urge.
“I’m not naked.”
“You’re lying.”
“I’m not. See for yourself.”
Tori turned around, keeping her hands over her face. She wasn’t sure whether she should believe him, but she’d look stupid if she kept refusing to look when he really was decent. When she was facing him, she parted her fingers, providing a slit to see through. He was wearing a black pair of underwear that really didn’t leave much to the imagination in their wet and clingy state, but at least he was covered. When her eyes scanned up his chest, the embarrassment of the situation was completely forgotten. She dropped her hands from her face and went to him.
“Oh my God! Did I do that to you?”
Bruises covered the skin of his abdomen and chest, and he had one angry-looking burn welt across one of his sides where she had nailed him with a ball of Light the day before. Her fingers hovered over the marks, not daring to touch for fear she might hurt him more.
“It’s nothing. Love taps.” He shrugged nonchalantly. “They’ll be healed within the next day or so. Have to say I’m glad you’re on my side, though.”
“Dante, I swear I didn’t realize. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“What, and have you treat me like a nancy boy who can’t hold his own? I think not. Besides, it’s nothing a good soak in the hot spring can’t handle.”
He lifted her chin so that she was looking at him instead of obsessing over his injuries. Or maybe it was just to be sure she was paying attention while he shamelessly stared at her breasts.
“Lovely. I thought maybe you’d like to join me?”
Too wild, too wild, too wild. Plunging a hundred and fifty feet while entrusting her life to a bungee cord, she could do. Skinny-dipping with a man she was finding too damn hard to resist, not a good idea.
Tori shook her head and crossed her arms over her chest. “I didn’t bring a suit.”
Dante spread his arms and looked down at himself. “In case you hadn’t noticed, and I know you did,” he said with a wink, “I’m not wearing a suit either.”
Oh, yes, she had definitely noticed.
He cupped her face and swept the pad of his thumb back and forth over her cheek. That delicious vibration from his touch made her skin feel alive. “Come now, Angel, it’s not like I haven’t seen you in your knickers before.”
“Yeah, but—”
“But nothing,” he said. Deciding on another tactic, he tilted his head to the side and frowned. “Please? It’ll make me feel better.”
Way to play the sympathy card, she thought. Too bad it wasn’t going to work. Mostly because she wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of thinking she was that easy to persuade, even though she really was tempted.
“Nice try, but it’s not happening.”
“Suit yourself. You have no idea what you’re missing.”
“I think I’ll get over it. You go ahead, though,” she said, nodding toward his injuries. “Looks like you could use a whole lot more soaking.”
She let out a squeal of surprise when Dante shook his head, showering her with droplets of water from the tips of his hair. When he made a grab for her to use her as a human towel, Tori laughed and pushed him away.
“Ew, stop it! You’re all wet!”
“Precisely the point, Angel. Play your cards right and maybe you will be, too,” he said with a suggestive waggle of his brows. “Or . . . maybe you already are?”
“And here I thought we were past all the innuendo. Just say what you want.”
“I’d think that should be obvious, but this is fun, too.”
Dante grabbed an actual towel and dried his hair before wrapping it around his waist. Then he climbed onto the bed and lay back, propping himself up on his elbows and giving her a devastatingly sexy smile. “So, what would you like to do today?” he asked while petting the empty spot on the blanket next to him.
Tori laughed and shook her head. Dante Dickens was no quitter. He was persistent as hell and not too bad on the eyes either.
His hair was a mess, but she sort of liked it like that, and the candlelight flickering in his eyes made them even more alluring, as if they were calling to her like the night at the carnival when he had almost kissed her. Unable to resist the thought now that it was planted in her head, she wondered what it might be like if he actually did kiss her. His lips were full, but still manly, and the way his tongue stroked them when he knew she was looking—completely for her benefit—gave her cause to believe it would move the same way inside her mouth. Slow and deliberate with long, coaxing pulls. A shiver ran down her spine at the thought, but she did a damn good job of covering it up.
He was beautiful, and impossible not to ogle at every chance. Even now as he watched her watching him, she couldn’t look away. Especially with the way he was lying on the bed at the moment. Cast in half shadow, the seductive ambiance about him practically oozed with his sexuality. Perfectly toned skin stretched over muscles with valleys, dips, and peaks like the untouched landscape of a world not yet discovered. She wanted to discover it, or at the very least, to remember it forever.
That’s when the idea struck her.
“Stay just like that,” Tori said, taking her journal and a pencil out of her messenger bag. She tossed the bag to the side and sat on the bench directly across from him, flipping to a blank page.
“What are you doing?” Dante asked with a furrowed brow.
“Be quiet, and don’t move or you’ll ruin it.”
Tori’s pencil worked furiously to outline his head and body, capturing every part of him just as he lay, right down to the finite curve of every long finger. Once that was done, she began adding in the details and shading. She would leave the eyes and mouth for last because extra care should to be taken with those parts. He needed to be immortalized, all of him—forever frozen in the pages of her journal even if it was only for her eyes to see.
Dante’s muscles were beginning to cramp up from sitting still, but he paid them no attention. Instead, his mind marveled at the possessed woman in front of him. In all the time they had spent together, she had never mentioned that she was an artist. It was an honor that she considered him a worthy subject, but he was sure there were much more interesting things she could sketch, especially given his current battered appearance.
“Would you mind terribly leaving out the bruises, Angel?”
Tori didn’t answer, but a smile tugged at her rose-tinted lips. Her hand worked furiously, drawing and drawing while looking up at him intermittently with a look of concentration that was even more intense than the game face she wore during their training sessions. He was completely enraptured by her level of passion. This was something she truly loved to do, and Dante wondered how many people actually got to see this side of her.
She angled her head to the side and alternated between biting down on her lip and sweeping it with her tongue. It drove him crazy. He wanted to ask if she knew what she was doing to him, if it was something she did on purpose, but he knew it wasn’t. She was far too innocent to realize how seductive such a simple action could be.
It was getting harder and harder to remain still when all he really wanted to do was pick her up, throw her on the bed, and kiss her until she begged him to have his wicked way with her.
“Okay, you can move now,” she said with a sigh as she sat back to admire her work.
Dante sprang out of the makeshift bed and crossed the room to where Tori sat. He didn’t give her the cha
nce to protest before he took the journal and tossed it to the side, and pulled her against his chest. Her beautiful teal-colored eyes widened in surprise, but he was just as stunned as she the second their lips met and a shockwave of something indescribable, unfathomable, and impossible jolted through his body. That same magnetism he had felt when he nearly kissed her at the music festival magnified to a hundred times its strength, and he knew it he would be forever ruined for any other woman’s kiss. And that was just fine by him.
Swept up by a yearning that had no beginning and no end, Dante lifted Tori off her feet and carried her to the bed where he laid her down gently and hovered over her, still ravaging her mouth. He had expected her to put up a fight, to shove him away and slap his face for taking advantages he had no right to take. But she didn’t. Instead, she went limp in his arms, succumbing to the same maddening need for more as her fingers snaked into the hair at the nape of his neck and pulled him closer. Soft, supple lips moved gracefully under his, relinquishing control and abandoning any forethought of stopping him.
It wasn’t easy, but he managed to tear himself away to look down at her. True to her mixed bloodline and the pet name he had given her, she was angelic in every sense of the word. Too good to be taken in a fit of passion, too pristine to be sullied by the likes of any mere man. Dante wasn’t a mere man; he was gifted, her kind, but he would let her decide how far they took things, and if he didn’t stop then, he wouldn’t stop at all. For now, all he wanted was to give her something to think about, or maybe even dream about, while she lay in her bed that night. As for Dante, he knew sleep would not be his friend, but he hoped the strength to resist sneaking into her bedroom would.
Tori’s hands went to his bare shoulders and she closed her eyes, but she didn’t push him away. Their chests rose and fell in perfect synchronization; for every breath he took in, she let one out, like they were feeding each other life-sustaining oxygen even though it simply wasn’t possible.
Dante kissed her lips softly, and she opened her eyes to look at him.
“If you dare deny what you felt from that kiss, that you enjoyed it as much as I did and want to do it a lot more often, then you would be a liar, Angel.”
Tori swallowed hard, but didn’t turn away.
He caressed the creamy skin of her cheek with the back of his hand. “You’re not alone. I’m right there with you, and I’m a very patient man.”
Tori lifted her head in a silent plea for more, but he pulled back with a lazy smile. “Angel, I don’t think it’s a very good idea for us to get too carried away.” He pushed his hips forward so that she could feel the physical reaction their first kiss had already stirred. He may not have been a normal man, but when his needs weren’t satiated, it hurt just as badly.
“Oh,” Tori said, blushing but not knocking him on his ass in mortification to get away. Her gaze dropped to his chest and then she looked up at him demurely.
“Do you think it would be okay for us to just lie here then? Because I really don’t think I can walk after that.”
Dante chuckled at her admission. “We can do anything you want,” he said as he wrapped an arm around her and rolled them onto their sides to face each other. “Like I said, I’m a very patient man. Just lying next to you is enough for me.”
Darkness fell and with it came the cover of fog for which London was famous. Back in her room, Tori slipped in and out of consciousness, wondering how many ghosts of old wandered the barren streets while the rest of the city slept, unaware. The conditions seemed ripe for a good haunt. Maybe she’d talk Dante into taking a little ghost-hunting trip with her during her stay.
Her heart did a little flip-flop in her chest at the thought of him. That kiss . . . it had been just as she had imagined, only with lots of toe curling. No, better. It was phenomenal. It wasn’t the expertise behind it—although that certainly was enough to do it—it was the way the touch of his lips made her body feel like a thousand butterflies had covered her all over and teased her skin into hyperawareness with the maddening fluttering of their wings.
They had spent the entire day together at the mound, and she was perfectly at ease lying in his arms talking, with an occasional kiss here and there. Being with Dante made her forget about the nightmares, forget about the fate of the world in her hands, forget that she wasn’t like every other girl her age on the verge of falling head over heels for a guy who might feel the same way about her.
Alone in her bed, she knew that was nothing but a fantasy. She couldn’t let herself get carried away by something that wasn’t real because that would mean her guard would be down and she would open herself up to a whole world of hurt. Not to mention she’d let down the people who were counting on her, and there were millions, maybe even billions, whose names she didn’t and likely never would know. Reality ripped her from her silly schoolgirl fantasies like a bucket of cold water being splashed in her face. She needed to stay focused, and Dante was definitely distracting, to say the least.
What she needed was some good, uninterrupted sleep where she didn’t ponder her eventual fate and probable failure. But she refused to let the Sandman and his magic dust steal her awareness and fly her away to his mythical Lullaby Land. Whether it was because she was in a bed without Dante, or if it was because she was afraid the demons might come, she wasn’t sure. Probably a little of both.
She stifled a yawn and snuggled deeper into the most unbelievably soft pillow she had ever laid her head upon. Her eyes slowly closed and then opened before closing yet again. Without even realizing it, her breaths had become slower, deeper, and her mind had become a space of nothingness.
A creak at the foot of her bed made her eyes pop open, and her heart nearly jumped out of her chest. She wasn’t alone.
Scrambling to a sitting position, she backed herself against the headboard of the canopy bed. Protect your back. Make it impossible for them to take you by surprise, she heard her father’s words from her early training. It was like he was there, whispering them in her ear.
Through the dim light of the moon spilling in through her window she could make out the familiar stark whiteness of hair. She breathed a sigh of relief as she put her hand to her chest to calm her racing heart.
“You scared the bejeezus out of me.” She scooted down the mattress, prepared to snuggle back into bed, but before her head could hit the pillow, it registered what his presence meant. “Shit! I fell asleep.”
The man from her dreams wrapped his hand around one of the posts and slid around it until he was clear of the silk curtains and fully illuminated by the sliver of moonlight shining in through the window.
“Not happy to see me?” He made a pouty face and put his palm over his heart. “Oh, my feelings, Tor. Please tell me that’s just the guilt talking.”
Tori pulled the heavy bedspread closer to warm herself against the sudden chill that filled the room. “Hey—”
She wanted to call him by name, but of course she didn’t know what that was. “What the hell is your name?”
She sounded like a broken record. He wouldn’t answer her question.
He looked toward the door of the bathroom and then back to her. “I see you’ve been busy making new friends.” His tone held a note of accusation as he walked over to the door, staring it down in silent challenge. He put his hand on the knob, but didn’t open it.
“You didn’t tell him about me, did you? Because he’ll think you’re crazy and try to come between us, and I’m the only one who can keep you protected from them.”
“Who, Dante?” He turned toward her and arched a brow. “Yes, that’s right, I know his name. And no, I’m not about to tell him about you. You’re right; he will think I’m crazy. Even I think I am. This isn’t normal, you know,” she said pointing between the two of them.
“Define normal.” He walked around her room, examining the furnishings.
“What? Do I look like a walking dictionary? All I know is that this thing between us is most likely the very anti-d
efinition of the word.”
“I’m a man, you’re a woman. I like you, you like me.” He shrugged. “Sounds pretty normal to me.”
“You left out the part where no one else can see you.”
“Listen, just because we don’t exist on the same plane, that doesn’t make our relationship invalid. We’re special. You have no idea how special.”
“And I’m sure you don’t care to elaborate on that thought either.”
“You know I would if I could.”
“Somehow I doubt that. And what are you talking about, guilt? I have nothing to feel guilty about. I haven’t even done anything wrong, unless you count having disturbing dreams about a man who may or may not be real and is always followed by demons that I’ve conjured up in my own mind to kill the people I love over and over again.”
Ignoring her rambling, his long, lithe body stalked across the room toward her. Eyes of glass never left her still form, pinning her in place. His dissatisfaction was palpable, and for a moment, she wondered if he knew about the unbelievably amazing kiss Dante had laid on her earlier. Nah, he couldn’t possibly. It was probably best not to bring it up.
“What’s your problem?”
“I. Am. Very. Real. And as for your not having done anything to feel guilty about, I call bullshit. It’s rolling off you in waves even if I didn’t already know the source. You let a man lie next to you. You let his greedy hands touch your flesh. His disgusting tongue tasted your mouth. His cock bulged with want to be inside what is meant for me.” His face twisted up, and he looked wounded, like he was literally in pain. “How could you do that to me, Tor?”
Well when he put it like that, maybe she did feel just a tad bit guilty. After all, she had considered him not only her best friend, but her boyfriend ever since that first kiss. “I don’t know. It just sort of happened.”
He put one knee on the bed and leaned forward, giving Tori no choice but to lie back as he hovered precariously over her. She should have been terrified by the fire in his eyes, the threat in the way he held his body rigid as if it was taking every ounce of control he had not to pounce on her.