Psychic for Hire Series Box Set

by Hermione Stark

  Chapter 16

  XANDER

  The next morning, Xander awakes with a raging hangover. He recalls blearily that he drank enough last night to fell a dozen horses. More, in fact, than he has drunk before in a single night in this life. He takes a long chug of water from the bottle on his bedside table and the headache subsides swiftly. His metabolism is so fast that he is surprised to have woken up with a headache at all.

  His movement has made the girl in his bed stir a little in her sleep. She is behind him, one of her thighs flung over his hip. He can tell from the feel of her that she is not his fiancée. Caroline won’t be impressed about the girl, but neither can she complain. She knew the deal when she agreed to marry him. But complain she will, if her recent mood is anything to go by.

  It was Caroline who’d wanted this week-long engagement party. She’d been planning it for months, and he had been happy to go along with it. Too many humans still thought of otherkind as demons, and Xander had considered the party an opportunity for the British royal family, the press, and Caroline’s adoring public to get accustomed to the idea of their favorite princess marrying someone like him. But last night, being here surrounded by all of her friends, and on full display as Caro’s prize, it had hit him how incredibly bored he was. How boring the whole damn marriage was going to be.

  And yet the marriage is necessary, and he is determined to go ahead with it. But first he has to get through this week ahead of sheer torture, hopefully with no more death threats.

  Xander turns around in the bed to take the girl in his arms. He kisses her neck until she begins to wake. He hadn’t planned on straying this week, but last night had changed that. Better this girl in his bed than the other one, the one with hair like moonlight whose name he does not yet know. The girl he had seen the moment she walked into the terrace, flirting with Freddie, an imbecile friend of Caro’s.

  Xander had thought he had outgrown the dangerous charms of romance and desire by now. But that girl… just looking at her had made him feel that haunted prickle of longing, something he had not felt in a long time. There was something different about her that intrigues him enough to have gotten under his skin.

  Last night he had followed the girl into the garden, knowing full well that he would regret it. The damn girl had resisted his advances. So now here he is, in bed with some other succubus, trying to forget her. A girl like her is dangerous. A tempting distraction that might make him lose his control. He cannot let her ruin his plans. He needs what Caroline’s power and royal status can bring him. And Caroline must never see the darkness inside him. That would ruin everything.

  The girl lying in his bed wakes, and murmurs a sweet nothing to him. She bears no resemblance to the ethereal waif of yesterday or to cool blond Caroline either. This girl is a warm bouncy brunette, whose name he has forgotten and has no need to remember. They are not in her room or his, but in an off-limits guest room in a private part of the castle. More to keep others from finding out, rather than Caroline.

  The girl works her magic, her touch causing a delicious languid sensation to spread through his limbs. For a second Xander loses track of his thoughts. But only a second.

  Caro won’t care about this one. She hasn’t complained so long as he hasn’t shown too much interest in any one particular girl. Caro is still keeping him at arm’s length, as if she thought taking him into her bed would make him grow tired of her too quickly. He senses she wants to reel him in like a prize, despite knowing that he is not marrying her for her body or for love. That’s why he likes princesses. They’re pragmatic as well as passionate.

  The succubus’s hands play over his skin, drawing out his energy. He lets her feed on it a little. He knows that is the bargain he’s struck for taking a succubus into his bed. She needs it, and he doesn’t mind the sensation. To some it is like a narcotic, but not to him. Not anymore.

  When they are finished, he heads to the bathroom. The girl pouts as he leaves, but doesn’t complain. She knows this was nothing more than physical.

  He finishes showering quickly, and slings a towel around his hips. When he strolls back into the bedroom, thinking how best to dispatch the succubus, he finds the bed is empty. She has already gone.

  The sight of the sealed envelope on the bedside table brings him to a sudden halt. For a moment he thinks it is another threat, and wonders how the hell they got in here, a room no one knows he is in. But then he notices that this particular envelope is lying on a small silver tray. Ever since his engagement his valet has taken to delivering his messages on a tray.

  Xander rolls his eyes. No doubt it was his valet’s icy demeanor that had speedily dispatched the girl. Feeling amused, he tears open the missive. It is a note from Caro inviting him to breakfast in her private parlor.

  Xander frowns. She usually takes breakfast in her bed. This invitation cannot mean anything good. He decides not to keep her waiting. It is the least he can do for his bride-to-be.

  Dressing quickly, he heads over to Caro’s suite, wondering what mischief she is going to present him with. Perhaps she is finally about to explode at him about his lovers. His lip quirks at the thought. An angry Caro could be interesting. He’s had girlfriends in the past who’ve threatened to kill him if he ever left them. Empty threats that had bored him. But in Caro’s case he suspects she is perfectly capable of it. Or of trying anyway. Xander grins. Plenty of people would happily see him dead. He doesn’t want to add his future bride to that list.

  His grin fades when he arrives to Caro’s suite and finds one of the people who would happily see him dead at Caro’s breakfast table. Caro rises up gracefully when she sees Xander.

  “Darling,” she says, throwing her arms around his neck and planting a quick peck on his lips. There is a mischievous and smug look in her eyes. Caro knows full well he is furious, and she is delighting in this moment. “Look who’s accepted my invitation to our party!” she trills.

  The object of her delight stays sprawled on his chair and does not rise to greet Xander. Nor does Xander want him to. He is effortlessly handsome, dark haired and dark eyed in stark contrast to Caro’s cool blondness. They look good together. They had looked good together all those years ago when Xander had first met them, back when they had been inseparable.

  “Storm,” Xander grinds out between gritted teeth.

  “Daxx,” says Constantine Storm, offering Xander a cool smile. “Still alive and kicking after all these years. Who would have thought it?”

  Chapter 17

  DIANA

  A sound wakes me. I sit up in bed immediately, feeling awful, my head pounding. It is not long before I remember why. I dreamt the nightmare again. I am sick to death of it. Xander being shot, the blood-soaked bed and the discarded knife. Was he stabbed then shot? Was someone else stabbed? It is unclear. And it had been muddled with my dream of a stranger arriving – my Hunter – with wild black hair and impenetrable eyes, bringing with him the smell of blood and applesmoke.

  I lay in bed trying to pick the two dreams apart, to separate the good one from the bad. Snatches keep playing in my head. Crimson dripping from white sheets. The gleaming knife on the floor. Me dancing with my Hunter, whirling around a ballroom to music and… and … Something on the wall. Something gruesome.

  For a moment I see a flash of it. Something dripping with blood.

  I jerk upright in bed. I find that I am gasping, my body drenched in sweat. What was it? Something horrendous on the cream colored wall. My mind reaches for it, trying to puzzle it out, but as soon as I get near it, my mind shies away. It is something I have seen before, but what?

  It is no good. No matter how I try to retrieve the memory, it will not come. And I feel so drained. My dreams of my Hunter had felt before like a lovely escape from reality, but now it is tainted by the nightmare. It is soiled.

  I feel miserable, and the last thing I feel like is getting out of bed. My eyes are gritty like I have not slept at all. And yet I can’t stay here all day.

/>   As I push aside my bedclothes, a knock on my door makes me stiffen. I go still, hoping whoever is outside will go away. Last night Freddie and I had danced and drank until my head had spun. And when the party ended he had merrily escorted me to my room. Outside my door he had lowered his head to kiss me. That had brought me crashing back to my senses.

  Drinking a few glasses of unexpectedly strong punch to ease my nerves after the argument with Caroline had clearly made me drop my guard. Maybe it hadn't been the best idea to spend the whole evening with Freddie even though, at the time, it had seemed safer than spending it with strangers. Freddie had been good company, but despite what Princess Caroline had said, no way was I going to let him into my room.

  I’d pushed him away and made a joke about moving too fast. He had looked disappointed. He had looked around pointedly at the other succubae who were unashamedly leading men back into their rooms, some of them with more than just one man. Some of them getting steamy in the hallway before they’d even reached their rooms.

  It had taken a lot of persuading to get a drunken Freddie to leave. He had been most persistent. But in the end he had settled for a hug and told me that I had to have breakfast with him tomorrow.

  And now tomorrow has arrived, and someone is knocking loudly on my door. An insistent knock. I ignore it determinedly.

  “Diana!” calls Lila’s voice. “Wakey wakey! I know you’re in there!”

  Relieved, I hurry to the door. I am worried Freddie might arrive at any moment and try to follow her in. At some point I am going to have to tell him that I don’t like him that way, and I am not looking forward to it.

  As soon as I open the door, she waggles her eyebrows suggestively. “Somebody’s had a fun night!” she exclaims. “I knew you’d need a lie-in after last night’s action.”

  I drag her into the room, urging her to be quiet as she loudly tells me about her exploits last night with no less than three men. I gape at her. She’d made it clear that she was an extrovert and she wasn’t shy about partying or the fact that she was a succubus, but three is more than I thought one woman could handle.

  She laughs at the look on my face. “Three is a magic number,” she says.

  “It might be magic for you, but I’m struggling with one.”

  She tucks her arm into mine and leads me back to my bed. She throws herself down on it. I sit down beside her. This is new to me. I have never had a friend before.

  She raises her eyebrows. “So…? Tell me about you and Freddie.”

  When I shrug, she slaps me lightly on the arm. “No secrets!” she insists. “I told you all about mine. Now you have to tell me about yours.”

  “There’s nothing to tell.”

  “So you two didn’t…?” She looks meaningfully at my mattress.

  “No we didn’t!” I tell her, outraged.

  She sighs exaggeratedly. “You’re such an innocent. Have you never had the urge?”

  I blush in embarrassment. No I haven’t. Which probably makes me seem immature to someone with her experience, even though she seems only a couple of years older than me at most. I shrug, as if it doesn’t mean much to me.

  “I’ve never met anyone I liked enough before.”

  Her eyes widen. “You’re not a virgin?” she squeals.

  I scowl. A virgin and glad. Plenty of things have nearly happened to me these last few years that I’ve been lucky to have escaped. I think she sees the look on my face, because she stops giggling abruptly.

  “What about the Hunger?” She asks. “How do you control that?”

  “What hunger?”

  “The Hunger. The urge to feed on human energy?”

  “Oh, that. I don’t have that.”

  She whistles. “Wow. You really are a late bloomer. I had mine when I was thirteen. I thought I was going crazy.”

  I decide there is no harm in letting her believe I am a succubus. She is being so nice and I don’t want her to go yet. “What did you do?” I ask.

  She shrugs. A shutter seems to come over her eyes as if what she is about to tell me is private and she would prefer to keep it to herself.

  “I was lucky. I had someone to guide me. He showed me what to do. He helped me to control myself.”

  “And if he hadn’t? What would have happened?”

  She shrugs. “I probably would have ended up killing someone. Kid or not, they’d have put me away for life. Nobody cares about our kind.”

  I don’t know what to say. It sounds like she didn’t have it so good growing up either. Suddenly I am grateful I didn’t have the Hunger to deal with on top of everything else. Plenty of times I had wished the Coltons dead, but I would never have wanted to accidentally kill them. The thought makes me shudder.

  She rolls onto her side to face me. “You really should give Freddie a chance. He seems experienced and it might be a nice start for you.”

  It is all I can do not to gape at her, so I look away. Her suggestion repulses me. I don’t want to have ‘a nice start’. I want to be in love, or intoxicated by desire at the very least. I want love to be as magical as it was in my dreams.

  “I’m serious,” she says, and then more tentatively, “I saw the princess with you yesterday.”

  “What?” I say, startled.

  “I saw you go out into the rose garden,” she admits. “And then Xander Daxx himself followed you out there. And then Princess Caroline followed him.”

  “It was nothing,” I tell her.

  I don’t want to talk about it. I’ve already spent all of yesterday evening worrying about the princess’s threats, and this morning I just want a break from it.

  “No secrets, remember?” Lila chides me. “I saw you run off and the princess going after you, so I followed her.”

  I flush in embarrassment. “You saw it all then?”

  She nods. “She had no right to slap you like that.”

  I am mortified that she witnessed my humiliation. “She’s paying for us to be here,” I mutter. “It’s like she thinks she owns us.”

  “She’s paying for our services,” Lila says hotly. “Not for the right to hit you! If anyone had hit me, I would have taught them a lesson.”

  “How?” I ask.

  She gives me a little smile. “You’ll learn soon, when you get the Hunger. The things we can do teach people not to mess with us.”

  “But that’s illegal!”

  Lila shrugs. “Is it?”

  “You couldn’t. Not the princess. She’s got guards. She’s powerful.”

  Lila smirks. “I bet I could make her want me. Make her yearn to be with me. I could get her all alone and then…”

  She sees the look on my face and then she laughs, and shakes the thought away.

  “She had a point though,” she says. “We are here to do a job. You don’t want Xander Daxx anyway. That would be asking for trouble.”

  “Nothing even happened between us. I don’t like him that way!”

  She gives me an unconvinced look. “Trust me, honey, he’s a badboy. You really should steer clear.”

  “I thought he was one of the good guys.”

  “Men like that never are. You’ve got to stick to the men who are available. Have a little fun. We’re here to party!”

  “It’s not fun for me,” I murmur.

  “If you can’t let loose, then you’d better go home,” says Lila. “You’re too soft. You won’t be able to cope with the trouble the princess will make for you. I’ve heard things about her.”

  “I can’t go home,” I tell Lila in a dull voice. And then, without meaning to, I find myself telling her everything about what my life has been like. When I finish she is quiet, and I am glad. I had almost expected her to say something in outrage against the Coltons, but hearing her say it would have made it more real, and all I want now is to have left that life behind. To be here, and not think about my past.

  “Wow,” she says quietly after a while. “You had a lucky escape. I can see now why you don’t trust men.
One day, you’ll find the right one, and it’ll be amazing.”

  “Yeah, sure,” I mutter.

  “Don’t worry.” She puts her hand over mine and squeezes it comfortingly. “You’re definitely going to meet him soon. I just know it.”

  Chapter 18

  DIANA

  Lila and I decide to go down to breakfast together. It turns out that she has a competitive streak. She is determined that the two of us, me a pale blond and her a fiery redhead, are going to be the two most gorgeous girls at the breakfast buffet.

  While I shower, she stays in the bathroom styling her hair into curls and telling me about everything that happened to her the previous evening, including details that shock me, and make me feel embarrassed for being such a prude. She doesn’t notice as she is texting on her phone at the same time, no doubt telling some of the other girls her news as well. I feel kinda lucky she chose to come see me.