by Holley Trent
“Just give me a moment,” he whispered.
“Claude …”
Vaguely, he registered Clarissa and Sweetie passing them and their footsteps echoing up the wood stairs, but he didn’t greet them.
He burrowed his fingers into the back of Gail’s hair and brought her face to his, claiming her reluctant lips and teasing their seam with the tip of his tongue until she opened up.
Sighing, she tilted up her chin and parted her lips, melting into his embrace.
There you are.
When kissing her, it was so easy to forget what he’d set out to do. The longer their lips mingled and her hands found purchase inside the back of his waistband, the more he wanted to take off his clothes and let her feel all of him. But then that nagging, spiraling darkness rose up in him. It was the power he couldn’t get rid of, but that he’d been in masterful control of for two hundred years. He’d learned that balance between witch and incubus as a young man of eighteen. He’d never had to live with one part without the other.
He didn’t like this feeling, being just incubus. The power was there—that destructive, soul-tainting power that seduced so many of his weaker siblings. He could wield it and have her at her feet, at his mercy. He could drain her life force and get a temporary fix, more power. More energy.
But those were fleeting things, just like his caffeine and nicotine hits.
Permanency was more important, and this warm, responsive woman in his arms wasn’t meant to be a fix. She was his balm.
“I need it back,” he whispered.
“What?” She moaned dreamily, slipping her hands farther into his boxers and setting her short nails against his flesh.
He loosed his fingers from her hair and grabbed her wrists, stilling her hands just for the moment. He couldn’t concentrate when she was stoking him ever closer to that dark place. He wanted to ravish her and make her scream out his name, but what he wanted wasn’t what either of them needed at the moment.
“My magic, chéri. I’m going to draw it back. Just relax, don’t fight it. It’ll only take a moment.”
Her deep, throaty chuckle made the front of her body shudder against his, jostling his cock into erection.
Hissing, he took a tiny half step away from her and freed her hands. “Why is that funny?”
“Mmm, everything you say sounds sexual. Just relax, don’t fight it. Oh, the things you could be doing to me while saying those words. I think we should go do them, actually.”
What the hell was wrong with her?
“Fuck.” Grinding his palms against his eyelids, he groaned and took another step back. Being a witch, she shouldn’t have been so susceptible to his demon allure. Most supernatural types, even mostly human ones like witches, had a bit of built-in defense against each other’s magic. Claude was powerful enough he could override most people’s natural defenses if he tried. Right now, he wasn’t trying and still, she was getting bulldozed.
He suspected it was because she was getting the full bore—not incubus magic tempered by witch magic, but all of his demonic allure at once.
“Pay attention, chéri,” he said, capturing the space between them. He pushed her arms behind her back and gripped both wrists in one hand while pressing his other hand against the bottom of her neck.
“Kinky.” She chuckled again. “Are you into bondage?”
“If you want it, you’ll get it and more. Later.” He pressed his lips to hers and closed his eyes. Mentally sifting through her essence, he compartmentalized what was hers and what belonged to him. What was his, he nudged free from her and drew back to himself. His magic soothed him, calmed his frayed demonic edges, and put the lid back on Pandora’s box. He rarely let his monster out to play, and felt a reassuring calm when he was contained again.
Releasing her wrists, he deepened his kiss, skimming his thumbs along her jaw as she pawed his ass, insinuating his erection against her belly, as if pleading for it.
With his control back as it should be and his power flooding back into his cells, both his rationality and forethought returned. But the lust didn’t go away.
She’d started it, and maybe he should deny her until after they’d taken care of business.
“Fuck.” He grabbed her wrists yet again when she’d sneakily worked her hands around to the front of his sweatpants and put a vise grip on his cock.
“You don’t know what you’re doing to me.” She pushed up onto tiptoes and nipped his bottom lip between her teeth. She drew it out and let it snap back in.
“What do you want?”
She needed to say it. She had to bring the part of her brain back online that governed rational thought. He needed her consent, because she wasn’t just some woman he needed to fill one of his father’s aggressive quotas. She was a treasure.
“I—” She loosened her hold on him and pulled her hands away, but not far. She held his waistband in her grip as her forehead furrowed and face scrunched with her confusion.
“I don’t know. I—” She swallowed, and turned her gaze up to him. “I feel crazed, Claude. Help me. Please.”
Was this a normal thing? He didn’t know. He’d never tried to free a woman from the effects of the seductive incubus magic before. He’d done what he had to, and left them. He’d never had to talk a woman out of it before, so he didn’t know what she was feeling. Aroused? Well, obviously. He could smell it. Her skin was hot with passion, and every thready breath she took was a little plaintive cry for release.
Maybe it’d be best if they stayed away from each other until he figured this out, but that’d have to start after she got her fix.
“Are you sure?”
She grabbed his hand and pulled him, leading him to the path that wound past the side of the house and beyond the lit way to the barn Clarissa used to store tools and chicken feed.
It was so dark in there, he could barely see her clawing at the catch of her jeans and heeling off her sneakers.
He’d had sex in a lot of places in two hundred and fifteen years, but to the best of his memory, this was the first time he’d done it in a barn.
He suspected he’d be experiencing a lot of firsts with her.
As she pulled him closer, grabbing his waistband and nudging it down, he cleared his throat.
“No pockets, chéri. Even if I had them, I likely wouldn’t be carrying condoms.”
She pushed his pants down to his knees and squeezed his cock so hard he whimpered. “Don’t worry about it. Get on your knees and fuck me.”
Her brazen demand compelled him like no magic ever had.
He pulled her down with him to the hard-packed dirt floor and pressed her chest to the ground. She let out a little contented sigh, likely already drifting into a euphoric headspace he wouldn’t allow her to indulge in just yet. Easing behind her, he grabbed her by the waist and gave her one hard yank toward him, jostling her back to the here and now.
“You asked for it, so pay attention.”
“Don’t phone it in, then.”
“You’ll get it for that.” He pushed himself into her in one slow, but continuous thrust, gritting his teeth against the agonizing friction and kneading his fingertips into the flesh of her hips.
In to the hilt, he’d barely gotten himself settled when she clenched around him and tried to pull away. Fuck, it’d been so long since he’d foregone condom use. He’d forgotten what it felt like to have skin against skin. She felt amazing, and he didn’t think he was going to last.
That couldn’t keep happening. He was a goddamned incubus. He’d endured all-night orgies in the past, so outlasting her imminent orgasm should have been a piece of cake. It wouldn’t be, and unfortunately, there was no magic for that.
He pulled her back hard, and grabbed the base of her ponytail. Yanking it, he said, “You dropped the reins. You left them for me to pick up, and I get to crack the whip.”
She sighed, but stopped her squirming.
He released her ponytail and slid his hand down her back,
letting it rest at the base of her spine as he resumed his thrusts.
He tried to think vanilla thoughts as her breathing sped. He thought of holding hands and chaste picnics and watching PG-13 movies in theaters.
“Claude …” she said on a labored exhale.
And he thought of blindfolds and gags and paddles. God, he wanted to play. When was the last time he’d gotten to play? Back when he lived in Austin, maybe. There’d been a club—“Fuck.”
“Please do. Don’t hold back.”
Right. Don’t hold back. They were in a fucking barn where the hard floor tortured his knees and he couldn’t see a damned thing beyond her curvy outlines. This was so wrong. They were fucking like desperate teenagers afraid of getting caught, and the truth was, even if they had gotten caught, neither of them would care, probably. Maybe that would add to the exhilaration.
As if they needed more of that.
He renewed his grip on her hips and increased the length of his strokes, the force of his thrust, until she called out each time the fronts of his thighs hit the backs of hers.
And suddenly, he was back in New Orleans in Laurette’s bed, and she had her legs wrapped around his waist and clawed at his back. That was the roughest she’d get with him. She was so sweet, afraid to hurt him because she didn’t know what he was.
“No,” he ground out, shaking his head heart and reorienting himself in the present. No, not the same. Laurette and Gail may have been the same soul, but Gail didn’t have Laurette’s memories, nor did he want her to because having the good ones meant having all the bad ones, too. She was a different woman, shaped by the modern era and molded to be his true mate.
She was so much better for him than she had been.
And that was why everything was harder. He couldn’t love one without letting go of the other.
“Claude!”
“Go ahead,” he said through gritted teeth. Fuck, go ahead.
As she shuddered and moaned, he barely managed to pull out of her before he came. He hadn’t pulled out since 1963—the last time he’d gone bareback. The last thing he needed was to spawn an outstanding disappointment of Ross’s caliber.
Dammit. Ross. Claude scrambled to his feet and pulled up his sweatpants. He knocked the dirt off his hands and reached down for Gail. He helped her up, smoothing hands over her blindly in the dark as she straightened her clothes and stepped into her sneakers.
They said nothing for a seemingly endless moment, and then they both spoke at once.
“Let’s not talk about what just happened,” she said as he said, “We need to talk about this.”
Another long silence.
He let her have the stage, should she want it.
Finally, she found his left hand and squeezed it. “I don’t know what came over me. It just seemed necessary we … do that. It’s been bubbling inside me since we met, but then back in the bar, it really came to a head. I was staring at your father and—”
“He came on to you?” As if Claude needed another reason to kill him.
“No. Proximity seemed to be enough.”
“Do you feel the same way around my brothers?”
When she didn’t answer immediately, he pulled her toward the sliver of light afforded by the slightly open barn door and pulled her outside.
“Do you?” He pulled her along, barely registering his bare feet hitting the ground.
“I don’t know. I haven’t been around them much.”
“Let’s keep it that way.”
“I didn’t take you for the jealous type.”
“When it comes to my brothers, I’m not. They wouldn’t touch you, but if you get frisky whenever you’re around incubi and can’t think straight, it may be best for you to avoid them.” He slid the deck door of Clarissa’s house open and pulled Gail into the kitchen.
“I don’t understand.”
“Neither do I.”
Clarissa and Sweetie were at the large kitchen table, sipping coffee, along with Marion and Ariel.
Good. He had some time to think without his brothers in close proximity. Three a.m. or not, they were all up and making plans.
Sweetie cleared her throat and pantomimed knocking something out of her hair. Then she repeated the action with her shirt.
Gail’s cheeks glowed bright red as she patted her mussed hair and knocked what dirt she could off her formerly white top. “God,” she muttered.
He wanted to reassure her, but what could he possibly say to assuage her from what she was likely feeling? Tell her that nobody knew?
Everybody knew. If they didn’t, they hadn’t been around the Morton complex long enough.
“Claude, you must have switched cigarette brands. Your reek is different,” Clarissa said, crinkling her nose.
He was surprised she hadn’t said anything when she walked by earlier. It wasn’t enough for her that he smoked outside. Usually, she wouldn’t let him in if the smoke got into his clothes. “Temporary switch. Someone gave me a couple of packs out of his carton. Are you going to put me out?”
She sighed. “Not tonight. You know the rules. They’re the same ones Ariel had when she smoked. Don’t bring that stink into my house. I’ve got heirloom furniture and shit.”
Ariel made a muffled, croaking noise, and her watery eyes, flattened lips, and red cheeks said what she couldn’t say about what she thought of her grandmother’s furniture.
“Where are John and Charles?” Claude asked, hoping to distract Clarissa from the stink-eye she was casting at Ariel.
“Getting dressed. What’s-his-name called while you were—”
Gail groaned and moved toward the coffeemaker. She slid the half-full carafe off the warmer and poured a cup. Poor thing.
Clarissa didn’t need to spell it out. He knew what he’d been doing better than she did.
“Jason, you mean?”
“Yes. Where’d he come from, anyway? I thought you and the boys made a list of all the surviving kids of Gulielmus and rounded up all the non-hostile ones last year.”
He shrugged. “We did. There’s no way to keep track of the ones who haven’t been marked yet, though, unless there’s word of mouth. Word of mouth is dangerous in this climate, especially since we seem to have someone on the inside passing information on to Ross.”
“You don’t really think it’s someone here, do you?” Marion twisted her wedding rings around and around which should have indicated nervousness, but her furrowed forehead and the steely glint in her eyes suggested otherwise. She was probably itching for a fight—ready for all this shit to be done so she could live a sort of normal life without having to constantly watch her back when she was on the road.
“In this community, you mean? No, but I do think information got gathered by someone who’d been here—perhaps a contractor—or pieced together by an outsider too curious about the goings-on here. Sixty people live here, and if someone had asked each of them one seemingly benign question, that person would have been privy to a lot of information and we might not have had our red flags going off about it. There’s nothing inherently suspicious about someone you recognize asking you one or two questions.”
“Or maybe there’s a scenario we haven’t considered. Perhaps Ross was never working alone in the first place. Not even last year when the boys locked him up.”
Clarissa plopped her fists onto her hips. “Huh. How about that? You’ve got the Morton cynicism, that’s for sure.”
Marion rolled her eyes at the ceiling. “That, and an overprotective husband,” she said in a mumble.
Before she’d gotten hooked up with Charles, she was a long-haul trucker. He’d tried to keep her from going back to her former occupation because, really, they didn’t need the money, but she’d been born with the spirit of travel. She picked up a load every now and then, but Charles had pretty strict rules about which trips she was allowed to take. She could only take Ruby on trips shorter than two days, and she always had to have a co-driver. Usually, it was him. No one w
ould go near Marion when Charles was around. But when Charles wasn’t available, her father Sylvester went, or rarely, Sweetie.
Marion had had a couple of close calls with Team Hell’s bounty hunters in the past year, and she’d proven time and time again she was capable of better-than-basic self-defense. Her exceptional intuitiveness was the deadliest weapon in her arsenal. No one ever got the drop on her, just like no one ever sneaked up on her grandmother.
Claude looked from Marion, who sat with fingers knit, grinding her teeth—to Clarissa, who had her hands jammed into the pockets of her windbreaker, pacing behind Sweetie’s chair.
Restless.
His books said that was typical of elves. He was damned sure that was what they were now that he’d learned of what Papa had called Clarissa. He’d always spoken of elves in disparaging terms, and “hobbit” was just the newest slur. Papa would have known what she was because he’d been around long enough to see entire races rise and fall. He knew all the hallmarks.
Claude rubbed his hand idly against the scruff on his chin as footsteps on the deck stairs sounded behind him.
Gail moved to his side, warming her hands around a coffee mug, and whispered, “It’s your brothers. Should I go?”
He hated making her feel aberrant, like she’d done something wrong, when she hadn’t. She couldn’t help her reaction any more than he could help feeling something was off about it. He’d been around too long to take things at face value.
“No,” he said. “Just stay near me. My energy should be a buffer.”
“So I’ll only get turned on by one of you instead of all three.”
Put like that, it didn’t sound like a winning option.
“I’ll do my best not to turn you on, but I don’t think you’ll have a problem. I think it was just the fact you were around a full-blooded incubus and then came home to me while my magic was off.”
“This is a conversation I never thought I’d be having.”
“Nor me.”
“I took Ruby to your parents’, Marion,” Charles said. He made a cautious arc the long way around Gail and Claude and grabbed a coffee mug from the drying rack.