The Demoness of Waking Dreams (Company of Angels)

by Stephanie Chong

  Too late already. He was dragged off course and drugged into senselessness, merely by her presence. He was losing his edge, and wandering into dangerous territory. She had some strange hold over him that he could not explain.

  “What is it you want?” she asked, the question that had been burning between them all this time. “You said no more games. We could play at this forever, waiting for the other to give in. We will be sitting here for another century. Stuck in this stalemate of wills. Or we could simply give each other what we both want. But you have to tell me what that is.”

  She thought he had come for seduction. Maybe he had.

  Whether he had really come to warn her, he doubted severely.

  He resisted. And yet, somewhere deep within him, the answer to her question surged up within him. What he desired was simple.

  You.

  Luciana was the only thing he wanted at this moment.

  She was what he wanted most, and what he absolutely could not have.

  “Say it,” she whispered.

  What he wanted could not be voiced, at least not to a lady. She might not be a lady, but she was still a woman, and at that moment he was struck wordless by an odd silence that had nothing to do with mere shyness.

  No, he was flat-out shocked by his own desires.

  He wanted to plunge into her.

  To take her against the wall like a wild animal and not stop, to take her in every way he knew and in ways he had not yet begun to imagine. To let go of his angelic nature for just one instant. To give in to the desires of his physical body. Desires that had not been truly sated for a very long time. Desires that could not be fulfilled with the politeness required of intimate relations with other angels.

  “Enough talking. Let me show you what I want.”

  He kissed her, far more urgently than he ever had before.

  In that kiss, he felt her response, every bit as demanding and impatient as his.

  He pulled open the silk tie holding her bathrobe closed, letting the garment fall open. His hands moved over her body, exploring its contours, fingers dragging on her still-damp skin. Moving up her back, he reached up to cup her breast, caressing, testing its heaviness in his hand. He fondled her, felt the nipple tighten beneath his thumb. In his pants, his cock throbbed, at maximum pressure and ready to explode.

  She moaned, a sound that vibrated all the way into his gut as she moved against him, arching up into him, offering herself to him.

  In that moment, he felt the possibilities open up, as though the universe were cracking wide-open and offering itself along with her. As he gazed into the green depths of her eyes, he saw infinite possibilities.

  Perhaps things could be different between them. That possibility arose in his mind for the first time.

  What if…? he asked himself. What if the woman standing before me wasn’t a demon? What if we weren’t mortal enemies on opposite sides of a never-ending war?

  Julian Ascher had been a demon. He had found redemption in the arms of his lover.

  Was it possible…? Brandon’s mind began to churn through the possibilities, contemplating exactly how he might be able to reform her. It wouldn’t take much, he reasoned.

  She already seemed amenable, responsive to his lead.

  She ran her hand down the front of his jeans, fingers teasing open the button of his fly.

  What are the consequences of sleeping with her, anyway? he wondered fleetingly. Serena St. Clair survived, although barely....

  But he was not Serena. He knew that if the woman who had her hand on his most vulnerable appendage chose to sink her claws into him, it would be game over.

  “That’s it. It’s just a matter of getting it out,” she whispered.

  “Getting what out?” He held her at arm’s length, separating them a little, his eyes flickering nervously over her half-bared body as she stood in front of him.

  She ran a finger down his chest. “The darkness in you. You’re not like the other angels. You pretend to be at peace, but inside you, a storm is raging. I’ve seen it.”

  She had hit a nerve. She saw it in the twitch of his jaw, the stone-hard stare of his gray eyes. Heard it in the low rumble of his voice, as he said, “Luciana, you’re treading on dangerous ground.”

  “Why not let it out, that rage inside you?” she whispered. “You don’t know how much pleasure darkness can bring. Or how beautiful a storm can be.”

  Her hand reached out, down. Stroked his thigh, once, twice.

  For an instant, he considered it. She saw that hesitation in his eyes, the momentary pause. The yearning. The need.

  Gently, oh, so gently, he put his hand on top of hers.

  And pushed it away.

  “This isn’t the way,” he said. “I’m the one who came to save you. You’ve got to realize that. It’s the only way things can work between us.”

  “Oh, you’re so mistaken,” she said, leading him to her bed. “Let me show you exactly how mistaken you are.”

  He said nothing. She watched him swallow, the delicious movement of his throat, the dryness of his mouth audible.

  And that was the moment she knew she had won.

  In the corner stood an elaborate mirror, nearly the height of the room, framed in gold.

  He caught her gaze in it, staring back at him, so very green and glittering in the semidarkness. He saw himself reflected, leaning over her, as she half turned and looked over her shoulder. He turned her, so that the front of her spectacular body was reflected, and himself behind her.

  “Look,” she told him, nodding toward their reflection. “Watch us. You’ll see that we’re the same, creatures of pleasure, both of us. You’re no different than I am.”

  He ran his hands over her body, fever-hot and lush. Held her in front of the mirror, staring into her eyes as he felt her gyrating slowly against him.

  “Don’t make this into something ugly,” he told her. “I want you to realize how beautiful you are.”

  “I’m beautiful in body. But not in soul,” she said.

  “You’re beautiful in both. Every soul is beautiful,” he whispered. “Some just don’t realize it.”

  She opened her mouth to protest, and he cut her off with a kiss.

  “Don’t argue. Just let me make love to you.”

  In the mirror, he watched every reaction as it crossed her face, watched their two bodies as he knelt behind her on the bed. His view of her from behind was of the toned, perfect muscles of her back. Gently, reverently, like a man worshipping at a temple of her body, he ran one of his big hands up to cup her breast. Held its heaviness in his palm, spilling out of his hand.

  God, she felt good.

  Rubbing himself against her, he felt himself harden; he had thought he could not get any harder.

  In his arms, she turned, his partner in an intricate dance, still watching themselves doubled in the mirror. They writhed, slid around each other and then somehow she was on top of him, straddling him, lowering herself over him.

  He entered her, feeling her stretch as he eased her open.

  He waited, easing his way in by fractions of inches, holding himself back, mentally steeling himself to go slowly. To enter her fully would take such a simple movement, an upward thrust of his hips he fought against. Otherwise, in an instant, he would come inside her.

  As he buried himself to the hilt, he felt her relax. Felt her sink down onto him, melting around him.

  In that moment, he knew the absolute and utter rightness of sexual connection, of the pure and unadulterated pleasure of it, a celebration of the divine. Demoness or not, she was still essentially a part of the divine, irrespective of who or what she thought she was.

  He exploded inside her, emptying himself into the vessel of her body.

  At that moment, it did not seem to Brandon that she was herself at all, but some female incarnation of an urge much more primordial that had emerged at the beginning of time. She existed beyond the binary oppositions of angel and demon, good and
evil. She was a conflagration of innocence and temptation that spun around him and melded in his mind.

  She was Eve in the garden.

  She was the forbidden fruit, ripe and temptingly lush on the bough of the great tree.

  And she was the green-eyed serpent, all at once.

  He felt her tremble on top of him, quiver around him. The sensation brought him reeling back to consciousness, tumbling back to earth and to the certain knowledge that whatever else she might be, she was a woman.

  Flesh and blood, with a heart beating beneath the perfect breast around which his fingers still remained curled.

  * * *

  Luciana had the moment of orgasm down to an art. She knew exactly when to moan, how to writhe at just the right times, which muscles to tense and when to collapse, seemingly out of exhaustion.

  “Mio caro, I’m coming,” she purred loudly, at exactly the right second.

  He lay half sprawled over her afterward, utterly spent, with a small, satisfied smile on his face. For an instant, she resented him, because it was clear that the sex had been much better for him than it had been for her.

  And while Brandon was busy thinking of Eve, Luciana was thinking about Lilith.

  Before there was Eve, there was Lilith. Poor Lilith did not show up in the official versions of any religion. Her life was relegated to folklore, her history passed down through hearsay and whispered stories. According to these stories, she was Adam’s first wife, created at the same time as he was, out of the same earth. Created as equal, and not lesser than. Lilith had gotten tired of their banal monogamous sex life, and had run away from the Garden of Eden to seek a more exciting time among the demons.

  Lilith was not afraid to do what she wanted, to fuck whom she wanted.

  Lilith was known to attack men in their dreams.

  What would Lilith do now? Luciana wondered.

  Undoubtedly, Lilith would end Brandon. Swiftly, and without regret. She would reach under the bed, to where Luciana always kept a little bit of cyanide stored, for just such occasions. When a man was either asleep or nearly asleep beneath the silk coverlet of her sumptuous bed.

  And she would inject that poison into him.

  Even if he did not die, Lilith would have kept him captive until she could solve the problem with finality. Until she hit upon whatever she needed, until she found a way to do away with him permanently.

  That was what Lilith would do.

  But Luciana was not Lilith. Even after all the deaths she had caused, over hundreds of years, she still felt remorse.

  Here in her bed, Brandon’s big body rested beside her. Moonlight splayed over him, and in the dim light he looked almost like a young god sent down from the heavens.

  And yet, there was something so earthly about him, something so very nearly human.

  He was not the brute she had thought him to be the first time she had seen him.

  What is wrong with me? she thought, furious at her own reasoning.

  She reached under the bed, her fingers just brushing the plastic tube of the syringe tucked there.

  And at that moment, he pulled her toward him.

  “That was intense,” he said, burying his face in her hair. “It was mind-blowing.”

  “Mmm, yes,” she said, making a few vague sounds of agreement, trying to mask her ambivalence, thinking about making a second grab for the cyanide. “Like the fireworks all over again.”

  He sat up, his gray eyes illuminated to silver in the moonlight. “You didn’t come.”

  If she had not, it had not been his fault.

  In her experience, sex ranged from slightly uncomfortable to sometimes painful. With Brandon, she had hoped it might be different. The fact that it wasn’t was disappointing, but no great surprise.

  “Of course I did,” she said quickly. “You’re a phenomenal lover.”

  “That’s not the issue,” he said, something like anger edging his voice. “Don’t lie.”

  She shrugged, rolling over to reach under the bed once again.

  He stopped her, with a strange urgency in his voice. “Why did you fake it?”

  Because I always do.

  “Whether I did isn’t important, so I don’t know why you’re harping on it.” She sighed. “It was very pleasurable, mio caro.”

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean? There are two of us in this bed. Sex is about connection. If you didn’t enjoy yourself…”

  “I enjoyed myself very much, amore mio. Thank you.”

  What about the cyanide? she wondered. She lay quietly on her side for a moment, still facing away from him. If she just reached a little farther, she could grab the syringe, and…

  “You know what they say,” he said, interrupting her thought. “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.”

  She frowned. “That really isn’t necessary.”

  “Necessary? Not so long ago, you were the one talking about pleasure and letting go. Maybe you’re the one who’s all talk, after all.”

  “I might not be able to—”

  “Shh,” he whispered into her ear from behind, flicking the lobe with his tongue. He sucked the delicate little bud of flesh, tugging it as she felt the heat of his mouth, the gentle nip of his teeth. Felt the exhalation of his breath in her ear. She shivered, and he murmured, “Whether you come or not, there’s so much pleasure we could discover in each other.”

  As lightly as if he were running a feather along her skin, he trailed his fingertip all the way from her earlobe down the long column of her neck. Along the sweep of her collarbone and down the center of her chest. Then he traced the outline of her breast, until all of her was shivering in anticipation. By the time his fingertip neared the nipple, she was aching for his touch, straining toward the promise of that caress.

  She dared not move, lying still on the bed, not wanting to give him any sign that his tactics were working.

  His fingers stroked the underside of her breast, playing there. Squeezing a little, ever so gently. His hot breath fanned down her neck, seemed to skim along every nerve ending in her body, to set every cell of her quivering.

  Don’t move, she told herself. He mustn’t win.

  Her mouth went dry and her lips parted. She heard her own breath quicken, ran her tongue along her lips to moisten them. Sank her teeth into her bottom lip to keep herself from making a sound that might betray her. Squeezed her eyes shut, but that only intensified the pleasure he was teasing out of her. A melting sensation tingled through her, radiating out from the place his fingers were stroking. From the nipple he was now touching. Which hardened at his touch.

  Her body was a traitor, responding to enticement by an enemy.

  But her mind was still free.

  She bit harder on her lip. Even that did not stop the tiny sound of pleasure in the back of her throat, a sound so quiet it was not even a moan. Yet more genuine and more telling than any of the loud exclamations of faked pleasure she had manufactured just moments ago.

  He whispered in her ear. “See what I mean?”

  She heard the smugness in his voice and shook her head. She sat up blinking, breathing hard. I must get away. It is imperative that I get away.

  “Oh, I know you see,” he murmured, pulling her back into his arms. He reached to pull the tangle of her hair free from her neck so he could kiss her there, running his lips along the sensitive flesh where her pulse beat its quickened cadence. “You know exactly what I mean.”

  His hands roamed the curves and valleys of her body, seeking, exploring. His lips followed, his mouth hungry to explore. His tongue flitted over one nipple, then the other. She bit her lips again—both of them this time—to keep from arching into the sensation.

  He eased her back on the bed. She reached out desperately, gripping the silk sheet to pull herself out of the breaking storm. Instead, that hand seemed to anchor her, gripping to hold her in the middle of that maelstrom, waves of pleasure washing over her, threatening to drown her.

 
Reaching down, he stroked her belly, teasing. He shifted his own body, kissing her stomach in the wake of his fingers. All the way down to the most sensitive place of her, a place he had already been. But this time he lingered, stroking the closed lips of her sex before he coaxed her legs open. With his fingers and tongue, he stroked lightly, ever so lightly, so that she finally let herself go.

  When she realized she was writhing on the bed, she sighed out her defeat.

  He raised his head and she saw his gray eyes shining with satisfied victory. “Do you still want me to stop?”

  “I want you to…” she began, gasping a little. The syringe of poison had slipped out of her thoughts completely.

  She lost the ability to think entirely when he dipped his head again, returning his attention to her, plunging a finger into her darkness. She tensed around him, her body on the brink of climax as it had never been before.

  He was on top of her then, entering her as she climbed toward her peak. He inched into her slowly again, as hard as he had been the first time. But now he kept his finger on her clit, continuing to stimulate as he pushed into her, each stroke seeming to stretch into an eternity of pleasure.

  She was full of him, matching his rhythm, caught in his silver-gray gaze as he watched her face, his attention unwavering for even a moment.

  He was a man utterly set on his task. A man deep in the eye of the storm, unfazed by the tempest he had unleashed in her body. A tempest he was intent on mastering.

  A sheen of sweat covered his massive, tattooed body, muscles flexing as he moved in her, working her with an expertise that was sinfully divine.

  She came then, the waves of her orgasm washing over her, ravished by the wild bliss he had orchestrated inside her. Pounding over the rock-hardness of him.

  He had always appeared as an enemy to her. That was what she knew of him: that he was a Guardian. But in the ecstasy of her orgasm, she saw him for the first time. Saw him for what he really was. Saw into his soul and saw the flare of brilliant light there that could only be one thing.

  Divine.

  In that moment, he thrust deep inside her. As she looked into his eyes, she knew that he was with her in that place of untamed rapture she had never known existed.