“You’re right. I don’t. It’s because you’re so fucking tight-lipped it’s a miracle I managed to shove my dick inside you.”
“That’s crude, even for you,” I spat.
“I’m not going to lie to you, Ella. You want the truth, here it is. I wrote those things my father told you about before I knew you. I went off pure observation, didn’t weigh in any of the emotional crap. You can’t tell me your opinion of me was any higher.”
I couldn’t argue with that, so I didn’t.
“What my father didn’t quote was how, the more time I spent with you, the more the reports began to change. You’re reckless and savage. Hell, I’ve seen you dismember demons while they were still spitting at you and you didn’t even bat an eyelash. I’ve never seen anyone fight with as much passion as you do. I never told Richard about the phazing, or the bloodlust or any of the other crap you might be thinking.”
I forced a hard shell around my softening, blubbering heart. “You sure didn’t have any problem throwing those things in my face.”
“You’re right, I didn’t.” Micah nodded. “But you sure as hell didn’t pull any punches either.”
“I don’t trust you. Not then and certainly not now,” I said flatly.
Dark fury coalesced in Micah’s eyes. “Why the fuck not?” His words, shouted in my face, rang in my ears.
I bucked against him, fighting the unshakeable hold of his hands on my wrists. Something broke inside me and I screamed at him. “Because I’m terrified, you asshole! You will do nothing but betray me and break my heart. I was once a stupid, hapless teenager. I’m not that dumb girl anymore and I refuse to become one now!”
Micah used the lean, hard planes of his body to force mine into submission. We grappled, breath coming in harsh, quick pants. After a few minutes, he subdued my struggles. He bracketed my thighs between his and pushed his chest tight against my breasts until I could no longer move. Something primal inside me approved. Mate. Mine. His fingers flexed on my wrists and, despite my anger, lust raged through me.
He said in a low, dangerous voice, “I’m not Julian.”
I looked him right in the eyes. “No, you’re not.”
“Think what you want, but I won’t betray you and I’ll never lie to you. I’m not going to leave you, Ella, but I won’t keep chasing you. I’ll be thirty in a few years, I’m too old for this shit. You’re driving me crazy. We start to move forward and then you pull back.”
He took a deep breath. A wariness I understood all too well filled his eyes, mixed with a struggle he held deep inside. I knew the instant he made the decision to open his mouth.
“Julian was a perverted fuck who took advantage of a young girl. You were barely sixteen and still reeling over your father’s death when he infiltrated your life.”
My vision went black for a second. When I spoke, my words were breathy, barely audible. “How do you know that?”
Micah’s eyes hardened and I was glad for the warning. “Whatever the succubus did to us was a double-edged sword. I got just as good a look into that fucked-up head of yours as you did into mine.”
Horror. It was all I could feel at having had him so intimately in my mind, my closely guarded secrets revealed. I’d had no problem poking around in his thoughts. What a hypocrite I was.
“Julian was a sick bastard who used you. He never loved you, not the way I see it.”
I needed space. What else had he seen? “Let me go,” I whispered.
Micah jerked back, yanking his hands from mine as though burned. With his sudden release, the unease wormed inside. How had I gotten so used to his touch so soon? I’d never needed to feel skin against skin as much as I needed Micah at this moment. But the idea stripped me of my independence. Of my space. I slipped out from between him and the wall so I could pace the length of the bed.
“How much more did you see?” We were only going to do this once.
“After Julian left, he fed you images, sensations, of him fucking another woman. I know how he tormented you, how he still does. I know…” He hesitated, and I watched the words form on his lips. “I know how you tried to kill yourself when Julian left you.”
I sucked in a sharp breath.
There was not a soul on this planet who knew just how low and cold and desolate my rock bottom had been. For a moment, I was thrown back in time and I relived how sweet the sting of my blade was against my wrist. Ruby blood welled, dripped to the floor and with it, my pain. When I’d drawn the other knife up my forearm, I’d thought of nothing but myself. God, how selfish. I had wanted—no, needed—to escape Julian and the never-ending guilt plaguing me because I’d trusted him.
Micah stepped in front of me, much as he’d done yesterday in the bathroom, and I snapped back from the memories I’d been drowning in. He tucked a strand of my hair behind my ear and cupped my jaw in his large hand. I looked into his eyes. The warmth I saw undid me.
I clenched my jaw, fought the tears threatening to weaken me. From the moment I’d met Micah, something about him cut to the quick. His words, harsh and abrasive, had stung far too much for a stranger. He had a power over me I didn’t understand and I found my ignorance where he was concerned frightening. I had trusted Julian, given myself to him, and my foolishness had ruined me. If I let Micah in, what would it do to me if, when, he left? I couldn’t stand this helpless feeling whenever I was around him.
“I also know you feel responsible for your father’s death. Ella, you have to let it go. You were only fifteen, you weren’t even a licensed hunter yet. Your father had no business taking you into a nest of demons without backup.”
I laughed. “Isn’t that the pot calling the kettle black? Would you like to talk about your sister, Lily? I know she was murdered thirteen years ago—that you walked into her bedroom while that thing was still on top of her half-consumed body. You blamed yourself for not hearing, for not coming sooner, and when your mother killed herself a year later the guilt only worsened.”
He dropped his hand, stepped back. “Stop.”
The fight leeched out of me and I was tired. So fucking tired. “One day, we’re going to kill each other.”
One side of Micah’s mouth inched up. “I pretty much figured that out the second I laid eyes on you.”
He sat on the bed and ran a hand through his mussed hair. The movement drew my attention to his red, swollen knuckles, still caked with drying bits of his father’s blood.
“I can’t believe you hit him,” I said after a few silent minutes.
“That wasn’t the first time I’ve broken his nose,” he said.
I ran my gaze over the blood splatter covering his chest. Micah glanced down, picked at the flecks. We both looked at the carpet in unison.
Micah sighed. “What a cluster fuck. Things probably would have gone differently if I hadn’t let him get to me. I just couldn’t stand the way he was looking at you. I knew he was obsessed. He’s always been fixated on you, but I don’t even have words for what I just did. I would have killed him. Some switch flipped inside and I couldn’t stop.”
I knelt in front of him, needing to give him some sort of comfort, but not really knowing how. I put my hands on his thighs, slid them up and down a few times.
“If it makes you feel any better at all, you were right. If I’d had a knife, I would have thrown it at his balls. He’d probably rather be dead than castrated.”
Micah laughed as I’d hoped. He tugged on one of my arms, pulled me beside him on the bed and tucked me to his side. There was that strange sensation of comfort again. This time I ignored the blast of fear and went with it. We fell back, the soft mattress cushioning our fall. I stared up at the collection of yellow water spots on the ceiling.
“You know, I was seventeen the first time I saw you,” Micah admitted.
“What? The first time we met was eight months ago.” When I tried to turn and look at him, he held me tighter to his side. I felt him shake his head.
“I broke into my father�
�s office, looking for the key to his liquor cabinet. There was a file on his desk and it had your name on it. Your father had just died and I was curious, so I opened it. Clipped to the front cover was the photo for your application into the Agency. Lust at first sight. You were the most gorgeous thing I’d ever seen. The devilish glint in your eyes and the don’t-fuck-with-me smirk on your face really did it for me.
“I read the reports from your father, from the other seasoned hunters who were brought in to evaluate you. They all talked about how, even at fifteen, you were one of the strongest hunters they’d ever seen. I decided in that moment I was going to marry you.”
“Micah,” I started to say, but he cut me off.
“If I don’t say this now, I might never. You’ve seen inside my head, surely you know how bad things got after my mom killed herself. How Richard treated Eli and me. I sat in my father’s chair, stared at your picture and constructed this fantasy of what it would be like between us. For the first time since losing my mom and my sister, I felt hope. In my head, I saw the sons we’d have and how differently I’d raise them. Talk about pathetic.”
I knew where this story was going, and the thought brought tears to my eyes. “You were just a teenager too, Micah.”
“In the end, it didn’t matter,” he continued as if I hadn’t spoken. “I read on, looked through the marriage petition. I swear my heart stopped in my chest. At first I thought it was a contract between you and me. Any hope I’d gathered vanished. The papers named my father as your soon-to-be husband.”
He paused, shook his head.
“I was so disgusted. At myself for hoping, dreaming, at my father for wanting to replace my mother and at you for doing whatever you’d done to draw his attention in the first place. Over the years, the disgust morphed into hatred. Richard talked about you all the time. When we finally did meet and it turned out you were even more gorgeous than you’d been as a teenager, it pissed me off all the more. You made me remember the things I wanted and couldn’t have. I’m sorry I held my father’s sick fascination against you. I realize now it was never your fault.”
“I don’t know what to say.” I sighed. “I never knew about the proposal. Roy only told me a week ago, explained how badly Richard wanted me ruined. Now I know why.”
“Speaking of Roy, you should probably call him,” Micah said as he idly tugged a strand of my hair. After a moment, he added, “And I should probably call Eli.”
“Probably.”
Neither of us moved or spoke.
I wished this moment, lying in bed with his hand in my hair, wasn’t one of the best I’d had in my life. I knew things were fucked up, but with Micah this close and my skin buzzing, I just didn’t care.
“Does this mean you’ll move into a decent place now?” I wondered out loud.
I didn’t need to see Micah’s smile. The satisfaction was in his voice. “Nah,” he said. “I kind of like it here.” Micah pointed to the bloodstain in the middle of the floor. “I could kill someone in my living room, or maybe it’s considered my bedroom, and no one would care. Besides, do you know how hard it is to find neighbors who will turn a blind eye when you come home at four in the morning, covered in blood and guts? It’s tough.”
“How much longer do you think we have before they call us?”
“Ten minutes,” Micah guessed.
“Five,” I countered.
“Loser cleans the bathroom?”
I laughed. “Deal.”
Four minutes later, Micah’s phone chirped.
“Damn it.” Micah rolled back and did a neat little flip out of bed.
“Show-off,” I called over my shoulder.
He opened his phone. “Hey, dickwad, you couldn’t have waited five minutes? You just made me lose a bet.”
Micah was still grumbling into the phone as he went into the bathroom. When the pipes began to groan and creak, the conversation was too muffled for me to hear. Now what was I supposed to do? Going back to sleep was out of the question. Going home wasn’t an option. Sitting on Micah’s bed in nothing except his tee shirt was just strange. Was this what couples did?
Couples? Were we a couple now?
I shook my head and went over to the coffeepot. After a few minutes of fumbling through the cabinets, I managed to find everything I needed. Coffee beans. Coffee grinder. Coffee filter. The brew was gurgling and hissing when Micah came back into the room ten minutes later. He was freshly showered and, disappointingly, dressed in a pair of jeans and a long-sleeved dark-blue shirt.
He stopped. Sniffed the air. His eyes closed.
“I’m under strict orders never to eat or drink anything you prepare. Please tell me that doesn’t include coffee.” He sounded pained.
“Who told you that?” I sounded defensive.
You almost burn down the kitchen a few times and you’re branded the world’s worst cook for the rest of your life.
“Let’s see,” Micah began ticking his fingers, “Hannah, Eli and Roy might have mentioned it a time or two.”
“It’s your coffee, do whatever you want.” I rolled my eyes and dropped into one of the room’s only two chairs. The wood was startlingly cold against my naked ass. I brought my knees up and smoothed the tee shirt over my legs and feet.
“I can make good coffee.”
“Uh-huh.” Micah spoke as he got out two mugs, filled them. “Eli and Hannah are on their way over. They should be here soon.”
I held my breath as Micah took a tentative sip. He paused, took another sip. His gaze rose over the rim of his mug. Through the steam, I saw the gleam of satisfaction. My stomach did a little flop in pleasure. Good Lord, I was in trouble.
I broke eye contact with Micah and stared at the bloodstain in the middle of the floor.
“We’ll need to cover up the blood,” I said and then added, “Hannah isn’t going to like dirtying the soles of her shoes in a place like this.”
“Hannah’s been here before, so she knows what to expect,” he said. “Since we’re stuck here until sundown, I asked her to pack you a duffel bag with your things. We’re going out tonight to a club, I’ve got a plan. We need to track down the succubus and find out what she did to us. I know someone who might be able to help but you probably won’t like it very much. I’m going to need you to trust me.”
I didn’t pay attention to anything Micah said after the “Hannah’s been here before” part. I couldn’t think of one valid reason for my nineteen-year-old sister to have visited a twenty-eight-year-old man alone in his apartment.
“Did she come here alone?” So what if my tone was a bit more hostile than I’d intended.
With a raised eyebrow, he passed me a mug of coffee. The bold red lettering stood out against the black porcelain, Vampires Suck. Underneath in a smaller font was, So do I.
“Don’t get your panties in a twist. Hannah tagged along with Roy a few months back.”
As usual, I said the first thing that popped into my head. “I’m not wearing any panties.”
Above the rim of his cup, Micah smirked. The devil was in his smile. “Trust me, babe, I haven’t forgotten.”
Electricity crackled between us, pebbled my nipples and raised the hairs on my arms. It was not the same type of lust I felt in the hospital room. Somehow this was different, less visceral and more…concrete. It was the type of sexual tension that said Micah wanted to throw me on the table and do very naughty things to my body. I could almost feel the hard wood beneath my back, the chill of it riding along my spine. I imagined the strength, the rough texture of Micah’s hands as he spread my legs. The vision became so real I almost slipped off my chair.
I might have broadcast my last thought a little too loud, because Micah sat back, tipped his chair until it balanced on two legs and gave me a smug, knowing grin.
“No fucking, remember? Your rules, not mine.”
We stared at each other, my coffee getting cold in front of me. When someone knocked on the door and I heard Hannah complaining abou
t something “totally disgusting” being stuck to the bottom of her shoe, I snapped back to myself.
Micah seemed equally startled, because his chair slammed to the ground. The bounce jarred his mug and coffee sloshed over the side and onto his hand.
“Shit.”
A coy smile split my lips. “Serves you right.” The door opened and Hannah, with her eyes closed, stuck her blonde head inside the door. “I’m not standing out in this rat-infested hallway for another second. I hear thumping and cursing. You’ve got three seconds to put your clothes on.”
“They knew we were coming over, they aren’t naked,” Eli said. He pushed open the door and all but shoved Hannah inside.
Hannah’s eyes opened wide at the thrust from Eli and she looked around, drinking in every detail. She stopped in front of me and her silver hoop earrings bounced against her shoulders before tangling in the long strands of her hair. Today she’d used brown eyeliner, probably mine, to contrast the pale-green shade of her irises. It suited her. She stared down at me, eyes narrowed when she looked me up and down.
“Hussy.” She stuck her chin out.
“Brat.” I smiled.
I stood, careful not to flash the room, and walked to the sink to dump out my lukewarm coffee. I looked back at Hannah. She was wearing a tiny little skirt that showed off a mile of long, slender leg. The thick navy thigh-highs she wore matched her tight scoop-neck sweater.
“Don’t you have a Woman’s Lit class to be in?” I asked.
A sweet blush colored her cheeks. She gave Eli a quick, flirtatious smile. It was the one she normally reserved for men whose IQs were under seventy. Normally my sister didn’t go for the tall, geeky, overly serious type. She was too paranoid about someone finding out just how smart she was to associate with anyone who possessed half a brain.
“I had cramps, so I blew it off. It’s not like I don’t already have the book memorized anyway. Eli came by looking for Roy, who had some magical,” she made some funny gesture with her hands involving a lot of wiggling of her fingers, “meeting or something or other. Eli was nice enough to go to the store for me and get some tampons.”
Dark Cravings Page 13