Melt My Heart: A Valentine's Day Collection

by Rachel Cross

  “And what’s that, Noah Collins.” She said with a smile.

  “When our shift is over, will you have breakfast with me?”

  “Breakfast?”

  He smiled and placed a soft kiss on her lips. “And maybe…more?”

  The elevator whirred to life and Lisa knew she only had seconds to answer. “Yes. I would love to.”

  Noah smiled at her and moved away so that he stood next to her. As the doors slid open and the maintenance and security crew awaited them, Lisa knew that, against all odds and her misconceptions of Noah, Cupid hadn’t ignored her today. Cupid had fired its bow at the two of them, and it had landed truly.

  Who needed flower deliveries or Hugh Grant movies? She’d gotten the best present of all.

  About the Author

  Nicole is an Australian living in Houston. She writes contemporary romances and enjoys creating characters and situations unique to them. When she’s not writing romance, she is busy looking after her own personal hero, her husband, and two children. You can find out more about her at www.nicoleflockton.com.

  Check out Nicole’s Masquerade, Rescuing Dawn, and Seducing Phoebe.

  A Demoness Matched

  Holley Trent

  Chapter One

  “What’s wrong? Don’t I look okay?”

  Julia Tate met both of her half-brothers’ concerned gazes in turn, and patted down her hair. It felt as it should have—one long plait forming a coronet around her head, and a second one knotted into a bun at her neck. The same style she’d had since she was twelve and was told by one of her stepfather’s many wives that Julia was now a grown woman. Grown women kept their hair off their necks lest they scandalize someone’s husband.

  Julia smoothed her hands over her simple white blouse and down into the pockets of her ground-skimming prairie skirt. They were good clothes. Clean. What was so wrong with them that made them deserving of her brothers’ derision? Why, she’d seen a similar skirt in one of those glossy catalogues Claude had stuffed into his Jeep’s door pocket, and hers had only cost eight dollars to make.

  She didn’t understand why Claude had dog-eared those pages with the women’s underwear, though. It wasn’t like he had a girlfriend to shop for, or…

  Ugh. She narrowed her eyes at her two-hundred-and-fifteen-year-old half-demon brother.

  Claude shifted his weight onto the handle of his spade and blew out a breath. “Well…”

  “Doesn’t matter how you look,” Charles said. He bumped his half-brother’s shoulder with his elbow before closing the back door of the Jeep. Slinging the strap of Julia’s bag over his shoulder, he jerked a thumb toward Claude. “Really doesn’t matter, so ignore him.”

  Claude shrugged, and then pushed his spade into the hard clay ground. He and Charles had twelve mojo bags to bury—just three for each side of the ten-acre parcel they’d parked just down the road from. Technically, they’d have to trespass to install them, but they were incubi. Compared to some of their past transgressions, the sin would be a minor one. And being incubi, they knew exactly what sorts of monsters roamed the Earth … some of which were on the hunt for Julia.

  “Look, he’s going to love you because he can’t help it, and you him,” Charles said.

  Julia pulled her bottom lip between her teeth and worried it. Coming from anyone else, those words weight have been condescending and placating. Charles, however, was speaking the truth, as he knew it. Right after he’d snuck her out of the compound, he’d frozen up and was quiet for a long while as he stared out at nothing. When Claude had nudged him, Charles said, “She’s got a match, and he’s on some prime real estate. The Fates must like you, Julia. I’m never wrong.” Charles had told her he couldn’t even remember where he’d encountered the man, but for him, making matches was like playing a mental game of the card game Concentration. And he knew this stranger tucked back in a woods-shrouded Appalachian cabin would love Julia, because Charles was the closest thing to Cupid that a modern man could be. He descended from the erotes on his mother's side: Greek love gods.

  On his father’s side … well, he shared the same dark smudge in his family tree as Julia and Claude. Their father Gulielmus had once been an angel, but he’d joined The Fall because he would have preferred to worship women—at least certain parts of them—rather than the big guy upstairs. That hadn’t changed in tens of thousands of years. Now a powerful incubus and a high-ranking general in Team Hell’s army, Gulielmus outsourced all of his dirty work to his legion of children: cambions—half demon, half … well, whatever the heck they were. Gulielmus liked his ladies fancy: witches, like Claude’s maman; demigoddesses like Charles’s mother; and fae, if he could catch them. Julia’s simple mother was nothing compared to all that. Darla Tate was approximately one-drop angel, which made her just supernatural enough to set off Gulielmus’s radar. She’d already been “married” to a polygamist cult follower for several years when Gulielmus found her and made her his supernatural broodmare. Julia was child number two of their ongoing couplings, not that her human stepfather knew. He assumed all of Darla’s blond-haired, blue-eyed kids were his.

  Well. They weren’t.

  Darla abided by it because as long as she didn’t refuse Gulielmus, he wouldn’t drain her and taint her soul.

  Julia moved her hands from her pockets and pressed them over her unsettled stomach. “Explain to me what’s supposed to happen and what this man has to do with it.”

  They’d already explained it three times since they spirited her away from the cult compound. She just didn’t feel any better for it. Julia was in a damned-if-she-did, damned-if-she-didn’t type of situation. She’d been terrified to run, because she hadn’t known where to go. Who to ask for help.

  But if she’d stayed, she’d have to marry that geriatric windbag who’d earned her by doing some good deed or probably making a large donation to the “foundation.” And Gulielmus would have come to fetch her soon. Her full brother John had had been the last sex demon trainee, but he’d thumbed his nose at Gulielmus. With Claude’s help, he’d purged himself of everything that made him demonic. He couldn’t risk returning to the compound Gulielmus so often visited, but John had gotten a message to Julia. He’d said that she was next. It was her turn. Gulielmus would have marked her and brought her succubus powers online so she could do what she was conceived to do.

  Serve Hell.

  She’d wanted to escape the compound, but not to do that. So, she’d written to John asking him to find her help, and he’d sent the big brothers who were in the midst of a demonic defection of their own. They were already in hot water with Gulielmus, and if the demon found out they were helping yet another one of his children slip away, there would be Hell to pay—literally. Apparently, Gulielmus got performance reviews, and if his spawn embarrassed him, he’d get reamed out by his boss.

  Charles must have noticed her apprehension, because he pressed a hand onto her shaking shoulder and squeezed. “It’s all right, Julia. This isn’t just a coincidence. What’s happening now is because The Fates are scrambling to fix things for you, if you’ll let them.” He turned her around and pointed toward the driveway entrance. “This property is in a weird void, okay?”

  “It’s the elevation and latitude,” Claude said.

  “What he said. It’ll be damn near impossible for Pop to find you if you’re near the cabin.”

  “The mojo bags are part of the spell that’ll extend the protective barrier.” Claude tossed one into the air and caught it. “Don’t make the guy run you off before I get all the components in place. I don’t care if this guy’s the love of your life the way the Ivy League Incubus here claims, because if you leave his house before I finish doing my job, you’re going to get snatched. Papa is going to send his scouts out to hunt you the same way he does us when we fall off his telepathic grid.”

  “You’re exaggerating. Don’t scare her,” Charles said.

  Claude shrugged. “Fine.” He mumbled something in the French patois Juli
a had already become so familiar with after only a few days of knowing him. He walked toward the pink flag on a pine tree that marked the property line.

  Charles put his hand against her back and gave her a little nudge to start her walking. “The fact this guy is supposed to be yours makes this easier, okay? There aren’t so many people who’d take in one of Pop’s kids, even unmarked ones. Trouble tends to follow us. If he’d been any other man, we’d have to find someplace else to hide you. We looked. There’s nowhere else.”

  She swallowed, and straightened her spine. The least she could do was be brave, right? She didn’t have it as bad as Charles and Claude. They were marked, and Gulielmus could summon them or transport right to them depending on who was where. They placated him everyday. Made excuses. Told lies. They’d done good work for him for more than a century each, and had tainted the souls of innumerable women for Hell. But, recently, they’d quit. Gulielmus just didn’t know it yet.

  “Well, what’s his name, this love of my life and temporary warden?” she asked.

  Now, it was Charles’s turn to shrug. “Fuck if I know.”

  She stumbled, but his strong arm kept her upright.

  Great. “So, I can never leave?” she asked both brothers when she and Charles approached the driveway.

  She didn’t want to go from one jail straight to another. She’d left the compound because she didn’t want to be some old man’s fifth wife and mother to a brood of indistinct, glassy-eyed, towheaded children who looked exactly like her sisters’ kids and her cousins’ kids. She wanted to be some man’s one and only, and to have children because she was that in love—not because she had a quota to fill. Her quasi-cupid demon brother had sworn she could have that with this stranger he was hiding her with, but how could she?

  She was meant to be a succubus.

  Claude rested one of his large hands on her shoulder and gave it a squeeze. “Hey. You’ll be fine, chéri. The folks at the compound aren’t going to come this far chasing after you, so you’re safe on that front. Now, just worry about … the other thing. You just need to hide out for a little while. I’m working on some charms for you, but you’ve got to give me some time. Lost half of my stash when I exorcised John. It’s going to take a while to erect the protective wards, and I’m low on supplies. I don’t think twelve bags are going to be enough. Charles underestimated the acreage.”

  She sighed. “Right. Just a little while.”

  In the meantime, she needed for some guy to fall head over heels in love with her … or at least tolerate her enough to not punt her from his woo-woo magical property.

  “Guess I better get on with it and go meet him.”

  “You’re not marching to the gallows, Julia,” Charles said. “You’ll love him. I swear it.”

  Sighing, she took her bag from Charles and with a final wave, started up the wooded path. “You’ll love him. I swear it,” was exactly what her stepfather had said about that geriatric windbag she was supposed to be assigned to. She really hoped she wasn’t stepping out of the frying pan and into the fire.

  #

  Groupie, scouter, or proselytizer—it couldn’t be anyone else at Calvin Wolff’s front door. His driveway was barely visible from the road, and the house was so far beyond the entrance that most folks gave up and turned around before they got to the clearing.

  That’s exactly the way he wanted it.

  The reason he’d purchased these ten acres of prime Blue Ridge real estate was so that people would leave him the hell alone. Folks had to be really ambitious to track him down and make that pilgrimage up to the house.

  He knew what his autograph was worth. His agent reminded him of it all the time. He hadn’t given out too many of them in the five years he’d played professional baseball, and now that he was more or less retired, the drive to get a piece of him hadn’t diminished at all. He was too damned interesting.

  Most of the time, he just queued up the security camera, which fed right into a handy-dandy app on his iPad, screened his visitors, and didn’t bother answering the door.

  He expected he’d do the same this time.

  He zoomed repeatedly on the blonde creature on his doorstep.

  “What the hell?” He panned the side camera up, and then down. Her hairstyle would have been perfect for a cast member of Real Housewives on the Prairie. Pretty sure he’d seen Laura Ingalls Wilder wearing braids coiled around her head like that.

  He didn’t even look at her face, but angled the camera down to her plain white blouse—with feminine, rounded collars, naturally—and a floral-print skirt that practically touched the wooden slats of the porch floor.

  “What the fresh hell?” he repeated as she depressed the doorbell button again.

  This didn’t look like any baseball groupie he’d ever seen before, but hell—maybe they were resorting to new tactics now.

  Her shoulders slumped, and she dropped something from one.

  It was a bag of some sort.

  When she took a step back, she moved into the center camera’s range, and he finally cleared the focus on her face.

  “Goddamn.”

  He crossed his arms, leaned back in his leather desk chair, and whistled low.

  “What’s she selling? Tupperware? Bibles, probably.”

  He’d need a Bible to purge himself of the lascivious thoughts threading through his mind at the moment. Maybe they could play a little game. She could borrow his favorite sweatshirt and pretend to be Little Red Riding Hood. He could be the Big Bad Wolff, and when he caught her, she’d tell him all about his big things.

  The last time he’d seen a woman who looked like that was …

  Well, actually, he’d never seen a woman who looked like that. Before he’d entered his self-prescribed seclusion, the women he tended to consort with were the kinds who didn’t have tan lines, and not because they avoided the sun. This one had probably never seen the inside of a tanning bed, or much else for that matter. Those delicate lobes of hers weren’t even pierced. Her eyebrows had probably never seen a pair of tweezers, but she was pretty for it. The brows suited her large, thick-lashed eyes and balanced the luscious lips she kept pulling into her teeth’s clamp. He bet those lips were pink as dogwood flowers, but he couldn’t tell from the black and white image. He should have spent the extra money on the color cameras. She leaned forward and rang the bell once more.

  Persistent. They always were, though. They always thought if they’d done the work of finding the place, they’d give their best effort at getting inside, sometimes illegally. That’s why he kept a shotgun loaded and cocked behind his front door. Hadn’t had to use it yet, but he’d grown up in the sticks, so if he had to shoot, he knew how, and would. He had other ways of scaring people, though. He’d just prefer not resorting to them.

  She disappeared from the cameras’ views for a moment, and when she stood again, she had the bag strap on her shoulder and her face had taken on a pall of dejection.

  “It’s not that big of a deal, honey. It’s just a li’l ol’ autograph.”

  Worth at least five hundred bucks, depending on what he scribbled it on. He’d been asked to sign some pretty remarkable things, some of which couldn’t actually be commodified. That one time with the twins had been fun.

  The woman turned, walked to the steps, and sat, easing the bag onto her lap.

  She was going to wait it out.

  “Okay, definitely not a proselytizer.”

  She leaned her head against the stair rail as lightning flashed through the sky and rain began to patter against his tin roof.

  February rain. Cold and miserable.

  She must have certainly felt it, because she stood and backed toward the door, still clutching that bag against her chest.

  “Okay, probably not a groupie.”

  Groupies didn’t particularly like getting their hair wet.

  And why wasn’t she wearing a coat? With those thin clothes on, she’d catch her death from cold.

  “All
right. You win.” He put his iPad to sleep and rested it on his desk. For a moment, he just sat there. Thinking. Wondering.

  It occurred to him, suddenly, that maybe she was from the temp agency. The last time he’d talked to them, they hadn’t found him any new candidates for his live-in assistant position. He had specific needs, and they were tough to meet.

  Maybe they’d found someone, but judging from the sight of her, she didn’t look like she could operate a computer, much less make day-to-day decisions for him regarding his personal affairs. She was lovely, though.

  Hadn’t he asked for someone plain?

  Oh well. Might as well let her off the hook.

  Chapter Two

  Calvin stood and strode out of the office and through the den, pausing at the front door.

  He didn’t like dealing with strangers. There were too many unpredictable variables and he often had a difficult time reading social cues. He hadn’t always been that way. He used to be really damn charming, but then … things had happened.

  Allowing himself one bolstering breath, he unlocked the deadbolt and turned the knob.

  “Can I help you, honey?”

  She turned and opened her mouth to speak, but no words came out. She swallowed and shifted her weight, and her bright blue eyes went wide.

  Bright blue. Blue as the Caribbean he hadn’t seen in three years, and they made her face seem warm in spite of the fair hair. She was awe-inspiring. Standing in front of her, he felt the way he always did as a kid when looking at big Renaissance paintings of angels or spectacular stained glass. That smattering of freckles across her cheeks counterbalanced her ethereal looks with a touch of down-to-Earthiness. He ran his tongue over his dry lips and imagined being on the receiving end of an ice water IV, because every single one of his Y-chromosomes stood up to salute. He was so hot all of a sudden; she could probably touch him and leave a dent. She was a broiler, and he was a stick of store-brand margarine.