by R. C. Murphy
Deryck couldn’t breathe.
He’d know that head of hair anywhere. Radiant red streaks playfully danced between strands of dark gold hair, bouncing with each step the woman took. Her body seemed to be different somehow, as though not properly fit to her clothing. Regardless, he knew who she was. His dream woman. The woman he shouldn’t have ever seen.
Acting on impulse, Deryck crossed the grass strip separating them and fell in behind the woman and her companion. Some miracle kept him from openly ogling the way her backside moved in the oversized knee-length skirt she wore. However, each time she laughed, he felt it in the marrow of his bones. The sensation was alien to him. No woman elicited that reaction from him before.
“Do they sell coffee in bathtub-sized cups here?” The woman asked.
Laughing, the redhead at her side said, “Not unless they added it since I came in yesterday. We’ll get you a couple extra shots to make up for lack of sleep.”
Warning bells went off in Deryck’s head as he followed them into another, extremely fragrant, building. If she didn’t sleep last night, then how did he connect with her in his dreams?
Shayla leaned over the counter and chewed on her bottom lip. Under the glass was a wonderland of fatty, delicious baked goods. She couldn’t decide between the cinnamon roll and the pumpkin scone. Both called to her with their deliciousness.
“Anytime this decade, Shayla. There’s a line behind us,” Kelly informed her.
“Okay, okay.” She tapped the counter. “I’ll have the pumpkin scone.” Shayla reached her hand back to Kelly. “Where’s the money everyone gave you?”
Cash exchanged hands. Shayla counted it and passed it to the young woman behind the counter.
Kelly grabbed her shoulder, damn near dislocating it. “Oh sweet baby Jesus.”
“Ease off, Kelly. What the hell is the matter? I got all of the orders right this time.”
Not amused in the least by Kelly’s sudden spazz-attack, she turned to glare at her friend . . . and promptly forgot how to speak. The man standing behind them in line could have stepped out of the pages of a magazine, or a history book. His classic, handsome face was pinched in concentration. His eyes fixed on hers. The man sized her up like she was a piece of steak and he’d been on a month-long hunger strike.
Uneasy with the amount of attention he gave her, Shayla spun back around. The barista held out the change from their order. Shayla grabbed for it and accidentally smacked the woman’s hand. Pennies and nickels clattered over the glass counter.
“I’m so sorry.” Shayla scooped up the change.
Head down, she shuffled down the counter to wait for the drinks to come out. If she didn’t seriously need the caffeine fix, she’d leave and let Kelly carry everyone else’s orders back to the office. Surely she could manage ten orders on her own.
“What is your problem?” Kelly shoved a small pastry bag in Shayla’s hands. “You forgot this.”
“Is the back of my skirt up or something? That guy won’t stop looking at me.”
They turned back toward the cash register. The man in question slid a sideways look their way, utterly oblivious to the young, perky thing trying to take his order. His eyes widened and shot back to the barista.
“Your order, sir?”
He paused. Dense black tattoos danced around his wrists as his fingertips tapped against the counter. “I’ll have whatever she ordered.”
The man pulled a huge wad of money out of the pocket of his jeans. He peeled off a few bills and stuffed two more in the tip jar beside the cash register. In the financial district only one type of person carried large amounts of cash on them at all times—drug dealers. Just her luck, this particular dealer happened to—maybe—like her.
Shayla turned her back on him. “We have got to get out of here.”
“You’re being ridiculous. Maybe he likes you. Would that really be so bad?” Kelly leaned against the pick-up counter.
Would it be bad if he liked her? No. Would it be a bad idea for her to shore up some semblance of self-confidence and go ask him out? Definitely. She’d just been over the whole dating thing with Faye. Shayla did not need another of her friends trying to catapult her back on the dating wagon. Especially not if they were asking her to hook up with some strange man at a coffee shop who could be a drug dealer.
“Order for Shayla,” the male barista called over the counter.
“Thank God.”
She grabbed the first fully loaded cardboard cup carrier and slid the second over to Kelly. Out of the corner of her eye, Shayla caught a large shape closing in fast. Shit, shit, shit.
“Do you need help with those?” The sound of his voice reached into her torso and curled around parts of her body she’d forgotten existed.
“Ah, no. Thank you.”
Shayla shot Kelly a warning look and headed for the door as quickly as possible without spilling the scalding hot coffee cups perched precariously in the carrier. Using her hip, she pushed the door open.
The man watched her the entire time.
She was real.
The thought pinged around Deryck’s skull until he wanted to shout it out loud. The woman he’d fallen for in his dreams wasn’t a fantasy. She possessed an actual body, and really breathed. And she smelled like heaven wrapped in a wet dream and dipped in the sweetest honey mead ever brewed. He wanted her. More than he’d wanted anything else in his life—aside from the satisfaction of kicking his father’s ass for dooming him to the life of a slave.
“Sir, don’t forget your drink,” a young man slid a cup across the counter.
Deryck shook his head at himself and took the drink. The hot liquid sloshed out of a small hole in the cover. It seared the back of his hand. Cursing, he changed hands, carefully watching the cup to ensure it didn’t attack him again. If the bad air in the human realm didn’t kill him, the beverages would. The sun didn’t burn as hot as the liquid in his cup.
Afraid he’d wasted too much time, Deryck hurried out of the building and followed the path back toward where he’d originally seen Shayla and her companion. Like a gift from above, he found them walking ahead of him. They awkwardly opened the door to another building and disappeared inside.
“I’m not losing you again,” he whispered.
Reaching for the door handle, Deryck went to follow his dream woman. His hand passed through the metal. The tattooed bands on his arms throbbed. Ink ran down to his fingertips and over the palm of his hand.
Deryck groaned. The world faded to black.
The sparse barracks he called home came into view. The hot cup in his hand morphed to a mug of bergamot-infused tea. Deryck attempted to transport himself back to Shayla. His powers flexed, but accomplished nothing more than forging the beginnings of a headache behind his right eye.
“Damn the gods.” Deryck pitched the mug of tea across the room. Shards of pale green ceramic showered the tile floor.
A male stepped into the barracks. Shrewd eyes studied the broken mug and rose to meet Deryck’s. His long brown hair was tied back with a braided leather thong; exposing a jaw line so strong it could break bricks. Or fists.
“Was the tea not to your taste, Deryck?”
Deryck snorted and shook his head. “The tea was fine. Everything else that has happened since I woke is questionable.”
The shards of ceramic and spilled tea vanished—the unseen butler at work again. Wolfrik walked across the room to face Deryck. His bare feet padded on the tiles. It’d be a frosty day in the Underworld before anyone made the man wear shoes. Wolfrik’s incubus bands peeked out from under the cuffs of his tan leather coat. The big man would have intimidated any other male. Deryck knew he’d never hurt him unless he was stupid enough to give the other man a reason.
“Problems with your last summons?” Wolfrik sat on the foot on Deryck’s bed.
Deryck couldn’t sit. He scrubbed his hands over his face and started pacing the floor in front of his bed. Everything that’d happened in the last
hour played on a constant loop in his head. The bright, shining star of the show was his first glimpse of Shayla, smiling and laughing with her friend. Gods, she stole his breath.
But why had he been summoned to the human realm?
He turned on his heel, ready to ask Wolfrik, but the question stuck on his tongue. Incubi were forbidden to enter the human realm. The punishment for dealing with humans anywhere but the Inbetween was severe.
Taking a breath, Deryck shook his head. “No, everything went fine. I’m just tired of being cooped up here.”
“You’ve never exactly been a social butterfly.”
“What socializing can a person do when everyone else around them talks about the very thing he hates?” Wolfrik, of all people, knew how much Deryck loathed being a slave. If it hadn’t been for the male encouraging him to find simple pleasures within their existence, he would have jumped off a cliff centuries before.
“I’ll leave you to your mood. When you’re done abusing poor coffee mugs, come find me.” Wolfrik let out a sharp breath and pulled up the sleeve of his coat. The band on his wrist expanded. “Or not. I’ll find you when I’m back.”
Wolfrik vanished—transported to the Inbetween to do his duty to their kind and screw the brains out of some random female.
Frustrated with the way his day had gone, Deryck lay down on his bed and willed his body to relax. He’d been wound tighter than a top since returning from the human realm. The muscles in his back ached from tension. His head still hurt from trying to transport back to Shayla.
Just thinking about her brought back snapshots of the dream he’d had. Deryck knew she wouldn’t be half as wild in reality.
“What the fuck am I thinking?” He pounded the back of his head against the mattress.
There was no way Deryck could have Shayla in his bed unless she summoned him. The idea of seeing her on the Inbetween made him see red. She didn’t belong in a place built to serve as a sex palace for his kind. Shayla deserved something soft, something normal. Something he could not provide, no matter how many sex-filled dreams he had of her.
The trip to the human realm had been a mistake—a hiccup in the universe. Deryck would never see Shayla again.
“Hey, Shayla, are you coming to happy hour? Thursday night is two-dollar margaritas.” Kelly smiled over the low wall sectioning Shayla’s workspace off from the others.
“I don’t know. I’ve got all of these reports to file and laundry to do.” And about a billion other things she could think of to avoid being drunk in public. If she started drinking, with the way her day had gone, she’d keep going until she ended up taking a strange man home or puking on someone’s shoes.
Kelly shook her head. “If you change your mind, meet us at Stone’s at six. You can’t hide in your house all the time. Please think about coming tonight.”
“Not making any promises, Kelly.”
“I bet you’d come if Mr. Dreamy from the coffee shop showed up.” Kelly laughed and took off in the direction of her office.
“You mean Mr. Drug Dealer?”
Around her, half a dozen heads popped up over the low cubicle walls. Shayla’s cheeks grew hot. “Don’t you guys have work to do?”
A couple laughs drifted over from her coworker’s desks. She was glad the walls gave her some privacy, but obviously not enough to have any sort of conversation with Kelly. Like Faye, the woman was fixated on rebuilding Shayla’s social life. That wasn’t happening. Not at all. Especially not with the guy from the coffee shop. He watched her like he knew her. It gave Shayla the creeps. No, she’d hang out with Faye and Kelly, but the second they started on the relationship train and husband hunting she was done.
Still didn’t mean she’d head to Stone’s and possibly drink five too many cheap margaritas.
Time ticked by. Shayla stayed at the office longer than she should have, taking care of anything and everything she could get her hands on that’d delay the inevitable. She didn’t want to go home, but she couldn’t go out and deal with being forced to make small talk with anyone possessing the right reproductive equipment.
The last piece of work zipped out of her email inbox to her boss and took all of her delay tactics with it. Quiet blanketed the office. Shayla welcomed it after being bombarded with noise and her own thoughts.
Grabbing her purse, she made her way out of her cubicle and paused at the window she’d first spotted the man in.
“Get a grip, Shayla.”
Downstairs, she climbed behind the wheel of her Mazda6. The engine kicked over and out of reflex, she checked the interior for spiders. The recall weeks after she’d bought her car made her paranoid. Years later, the impulse lingered. Shayla refused to die in a fiery crash because a nest of spiders decided to crawl over her lap while she was driving.
After she was assured no creepy-crawlies lurked in the car, Shayla pulled out of the parking garage. The car drove by memory toward her house, with a pit stop at her favorite deli to grab a huge salad. All the sweets from the night before triggered her guilt-o-meter. She’d be living on everything green for a week to make up for it.
“Bakery binge, sweetheart?” The elderly woman behind the counter asked. Mrs. Navarra saw through everyone’s emotional masks and called them out on it.
“Only a little one,” Shayla admitted and grabbed the plastic bag with her salad in it.
Mrs. Navarra shook her head and tsked. “I thought you were past those.”
“Sometimes bad memories sneak up out of the blue and force you to do stupid things, like eat twenty creampuffs while fantasizing about running away with an elf.”
The older woman arched a brow, but didn’t comment. Thank God. Shayla shouldered her way through the deli door and didn’t make eye contact with anyone or anything except the ground.
A warm, solid mass stopped her dead in her tracks as soon as she stepped outside.
“Excuse me,” a man said. He caught her by the shoulders before she bounced back into the glass door.
“I’m so sorry. I should have been watching where I was going.” Shayla shot the man an apologetic look.
He smiled and moved out of her way. “No harm done.”
“Sorry. Again. I’ll go now before I do anything else stupid.”
The man laughed. Shayla felt his eyes on her all the way to her car. Inside, she rested her forehead against the steering wheel. The universe was out to put her in the path of every handsome man living in the city. First coffee shop guy, now this. Maybe she should call in sick to life and hide in her bed for the rest of the week, just in case the universe decided to get cute and she ended up stumbling across a hot, naked man.
“I couldn’t get that lucky,” Shayla muttered and started the car.
She watched the road carefully. In the back of her mind, she knew if she didn’t pay attention, she’d end up running over someone. The trip home was hot-guy free. The only man she saw from the deli to her house was the elderly retired doctor who lived two houses down.
Shayla grabbed her guilt salad and made a dash for the front door. Safely inside, without bowling anyone over, she slid off her shoes. She shimmied out of her bra and didn’t drop her dinner when she pulled the bra out of the sleeve of her shirt—a talent she’d mastered ages ago. She dropped the salad off on the table inside the door. By the time she reached the kitchen to grab a fork and a glass of wine, she’d pulled her hair up into a sloppy ponytail and wiped off her lipstick.
She paused in the doorway to the living room. The case for the movie she’d watched the night before was on the coffee table, mocking her loneliness. A handful of crumpled pastry wrappers littered the side table beside an empty bottle of wine.
“I’m falling into a rut.”
Desperate for a change, she slid on a pair of old flip-flops and walked out onto the small patio in her backyard. Shayla sat at the two-person table. Birds chirped at her from the birdbath across the lawn. The neighbor’s cat eyeballed her food from the top of the tall cinderblock privacy fence
separating the houses in the neighborhood. Apparently he realized it wasn’t anything good and dropped down onto his owner’s side of the fence.
Shayla took inventory of her meager garden while she ate. The herbs she’d planted at the beginning of the summer were brown and crumbling. Tendrils of ivy snaked off the fences and threatened to devour the tiny cleared patch for vegetables and herbs. Not that it mattered. The tomatoes and peppers had keeled over as well. As her mother said, Shayla possessed a brown thumb. She couldn’t even keep silk plants from meeting an early demise.
More depressed than she’d been before going outside to eat, she gathered her leftovers and dropped them in the garbage. Shayla ducked into her bedroom to change into her comfortable plaid pajama pants and a tank top.
Finally feeling more like herself, she curled up on the couch with a book. She didn’t make it more than a paragraph in before her mind wandered. What would it be like to cuddle on the couch beside someone else while they both read? Automatically, Shayla’s mind inserted the man from the coffee shop into her little fantasy. He’d be reading a new crime thriller; she’d be nose-deep in a classic romance novel. At some point, he’d scoot closer and play with her hair.
“Yeah right, Shayla. A man like that wouldn’t touch you with a ten-foot pole and someone else’s hands.”
Hoping for a break from her own screwed up life, Shayla refocused on the novel lying across her thighs. Five pages in, she drifted off to sleep.
* * * * *
The library of the incubi compound was one of few safe havens Deryck had at his disposal. For the most part, the others didn’t bother with reading. They spent their time working out, comparing stories about their conquests, or on the Inbetween servicing females. That’d never been enough for Deryck. His mind needed to be engaged by something and sex, no matter how beautiful the female was, didn’t stimulate his mind.
Deryck picked up one of his favorite novels to reread and left for the relative quiet of the barracks. He crossed the threshold and was smacked in the hip with a rolled up paper.