Deals With Demons (9 page)

“Why did you leave?” Devlin asked softly.

Talia tensed, drawing away from him. “Don’t ask,” she said harshly. “Don’t ruin last night.”

“I have to,” he replied stubbornly.

She cringed as she saw his resolve, knowing he wouldn’t be easy to put off this time.

“I have been asking myself that question every day for the past six years. I need an answer, Tali. I need to understand what went wrong.”

With a sigh, Talia sat up, pulling the sheet up around herself. “Can’t we forget the past? Maybe we could…start over.” She made the offer tentatively. She didn’t want to lose him, even if it meant giving up her pride.

“To start fresh I need to understand why we crashed and burned the first time. I need to know what to avoid.”

She laughed harshly. “It’s not you who needs to avoid anything. It’s me. I’ll do better this time.”

“What do you mean?” he demanded.

Talia looked away from his too-perceptive gaze. “I won’t make the mistakes I made the first time.

Promise.”

“What mistakes?”

Am I really going to do this?
she wondered, panicked. Was she going to bare her heart to him and explain why she’d run the first time? He had a valid point. They needed everything in the open if they had any chance of navigating the turbulent waters of their relationship. And she wanted to. This time she was older and wiser. She wanted to fight for him instead of running the way she had when she was younger.

“All right,” she capitulated. “Fine. Let’s do this. I promise this time round I won’t be as foolish as I once was. I won’t look for more to our relationship than there is. I’ll accept what we have and enjoy it while it lasts.”

“What do you mean, more than there is?” he asked carefully.

She kept her gaze firmly on her painted red toenails. “I won’t hope for you to love me the way I did when I was younger. Maybe I was rash to act the way I did,” she acknowledged for the first time. “But when I woke up that morning and went to get a change of clothes your women were waiting for me. They

49

had the decency to explain what the rose on my neck meant, and after learning I was such a thorough disappointment to you I couldn’t bear to stay. The pride of the young and stupid.”

Unable to stay beside him any longer, Talia threw herself from the bed, dragging the sheet with her.

“I’m taking a shower,” she said, her back to him.

“Wait.” It was only one word but Talia felt the dark rage in it.

Stunned, she turned around to see Devlin in all his demonic glory. Very rarely had she seen this side of Devlin and now he’d changed twice in one night. His other self only showed through in the face of a rage so consuming he lost all control.

Slowly, she backed away, treating him the way she would a wild animal.

“I said wait,” he snarled, watching her with black eyes.

She froze.

“What did the women tell you?”

“What?” She frowned. Of all the things to be angry at, she hadn’t expected it to be her words about her rivals.

“Tell me exactly what they said.”

Talia swallowed, recalling what had happened six years ago. “Merilyn pulled me into her room where the others were waiting. You had quite the harem.” She couldn’t keep the bitterness from her voice. “They tried to welcome me into their ranks. They gave me tips on how to hold your interest and told me I could expect to be invited to your bed once every ten days or so until you grew bored with me.” She hadn’t meant to say that. Her bitterness and hurt were too obvious. Conjuring the memory had torn her heart again, ripping into the wound she’d thought long since healed. Talia drew a shuddering breath, trying to get it together. She had to deal with this logically, be detached. Just pretend it was someone else’s humiliation.

“They were playing with my hair when they saw the rose,” she said in a cool voice. “The room was silent until Merilyn was finally kind enough to tell me what it meant.”

“What did she say?” he demanded darkly.

Talia didn’t want to remember this part. It had hurt unlike anything she’d ever experienced before or since. “She told me,” she said, trying desperately to remain aloof, “the mark was a sign you’d fed on me, which I acknowledged. Those women looked at me as if I were the most pitiable creature they’d ever seen.

I noticed no one else had the same mark and I asked why. Merilyn told me you’d never fed on them. They weren’t your meals.” Talia cringed as she said the hated word. “She told me you only needed to feed on blood when the…” She laughed bitterly, revisiting the painful memories of her younger self. “When the sex was so unsatisfying you had to sate yourself with food instead. The fact that no other woman in that room had the mark meant I was the only one clumsy enough in bed to reduce you to feeding.”

“Finish it,” Devlin said harshly when she stopped talking.

50

Finally, she looked back at him, knowing she couldn’t hide the heartbreak in her eyes. “Being with you was the best night of my life,” she said, not caring how trite it sounded. “And to learn you valued me about as much as you did a cheeseburger broke my heart. I knew I wasn’t the type of woman you usually liked, but I thought you’d be a little patient with me. Teach me what I didn’t know. To be written off so fast by the man who was my whole world…” She cleared her throat, touching the rose out of habit for strength.

“I decided I would not let you cast me out. I would go of my own will. I packed my bags and left before I could humiliate myself any further in your eyes.”

She looked anywhere but at him, aware that she had finally done the very thing she’d left to avoid.

“I really need that shower,” she whispered, turning.

Devlin bounded from the bed, ignoring the fact he was naked, and grabbed her arm. He spun her around to face him.

“I never fed from those women because I never lost my control so completely the way I did with you.

I couldn’t hold anything back when I was in your arms. You reduced me to my absolute weakest and loved me anyways.”

Talia blinked in surprise. She looked up at him hesitantly, feeling as if one wrong word would shatter her.

“And even if I had fed from one of them out of boredom, they would not wear the rose,” he told her.

“Why?”

“Because that mark is reserved solely for my wife.”

Talia jerked back hard enough to hit the wall with a solid bang.

“The night we met,” he told her quietly, “I woke knowing someone important to me was in danger. I rushed into the night, following the faint screams in my mind for help. It was you, Talia, reaching out to your mate. I understood what was happening as I searched for you. After all my years of being alone, I’d finally found the woman destined solely for me. But when I entered the alley all I saw was a frightened little girl.”

He snorted in black amusement. “You can imagine my horror when I realised the woman I’d been waiting centuries for was not a woman at all. She was a child and she was terrified of my race. But nothing changed the fact that I needed to protect you. I did the only thing I could. I took you with me and waited five painful years for you to grow up.”

“That can’t be true,” she breathed. “You never even looked at me lustfully until I asked you to.”

“The day of your nineteenth birthday I told Merilyn and the others I would never touch them again,”

he said, denying her words. “I gave them a week to vacate the mansion. You were old enough to take your place by my side and I was determined to seduce you there. There would be no other woman for me but you. Then you wished for me on your birthday.” His soft smile was heartbreaking. “I told you, Talia, to be careful of your wish. It was impossible to let you go after hearing those words.”

51

“But the women said—”

“I had discarded them for a naïve, innocent girl. They lied to you for revenge. My night with you was absolutely perfect, Tali. There was nothing dissatisfying about you. I slept so long the next day because you completely exhausted me.” He smiled wryly. “But when I woke I discovered the woman I loved more than life had fled from me. Merilyn told me she found you in tears. She said you’d been terrified by me and feared returning to my bed. She told me to give you space, you’d come back when you were ready.”

“So all this time…”

“I thought my mate feared my touch,” he said, finishing her thought. “I thought I’d… hurt you in some terrible way. And as the years passed my fears only grew. I had no idea how to make it up to you.”

“Hurt me?” She snorted. “What we just did should prove I’ve never feared you that way. Hell, losing your virginity is supposed to suck and instead it was the most mind-blowing experience of my life. Well,”

she amended, “it was up until last night anyways.”

He pulled her roughly into his arms. “You never feared me,” he breathed like a prayer.

“And you never used me.” She still couldn’t believe it. “Dev, so many years.”

He closed his eyes in pain. “If I had come after you, tried to talk to you, we could have cleared up all these misunderstandings. We could have been together.”

“Damn pride,” she agreed. “Being mortal around you will suck enough without wasting six of my good years.”

Devlin eased her back slightly. “Tali, when demons mate it’s not for a smattering of years. It’s forever.”

“But I’m not immortal.”

He bent down and trailed his lips over the rose. “You could be. I started our union six years ago. All you have to do is complete the ritual and our life forces will be bound together. You will live as long as I do.”

She sucked in a sharp breath. “What do I have to do?”

“Do you remember how I gave you the rose?”

“You bit me while we were…in the throes, so to speak.”

“Exactly. You have to do the same. Our mingled blood seals the contract. The same mark will appear on my throat. Once bound, it is unbreakable.”

“Demon magic,” she breathed.

He nodded sharply.

She looked up at him, considering what he’d told her seriously. Was she ready for forever with this man? Reaching up, she traced her fingers over his face. Who was she kidding? She’d been ready since she was fourteen. She’d spent six years trying to hate him and failed miserably. Her life was incomplete 52

without him by her side. In a choice between a single lifetime and an eternity with his love, she knew what she’d pick.

“Well,” she said, rising to her tiptoes to kiss his lips. “If we need to be in the throes maybe we should move back to the bed.”

A fierce joy more powerful than anything she’d ever seen washed over his face.

“I love you,” he told her before he kissed her with burning passion.

“God, me too,” she said when she was able. She smiled up at him. “I’ll make you a new bargain, demon. I’ll give you the rose if you’ll promise to love only me for eternity.”

Devlin grinned as he waltzed her backwards towards the bed.

“Deal.”

53

About the Author

To learn more about please vis
it www.victoriadavies.ca.
Send an email to Victoria at

[email protected]
or join her Yahoo! group to join in the fun with other readers at

http://ca.groups.yahoo.com/group/victoriadaviesgroup/

To save her life, he must break a covenant—and lose his heart.

My Avenging Angel

© 2010 Madelyn Ford

An
Angels and Demons
Story

It’s Victoria Bloom’s twenty-fifth birthday. But is she out celebrating? Oh, no. She’s in a stuffy old attic with the Three Stooges—a.k.a. her so-called spirit guides. There’s a demon who wants her dead, the same one that killed her mother two decades ago. No worries, say the Stooges. All she has to do is summon an angel. What could go wrong?

Well, plenty when you summon the wrong angel. The next thing Tory knows, she’s got one very bad-ass, pissed-off and sexy Archangel on her hands.

Michael, mighty warrior, leader of an elite team of demon killers, is shaking in his heavenly combat boots. Not because he finds all humans distasteful. But because he’d rather face Lucifer himself than the woman his soul has just recognized as his mate. Binding himself to a mortal, one who will eventually die, is the one path he’s sworn never to follow.

It’s too late now; his fate is sealed. With one touch, she becomes as necessary to him as the air he breathes. He will move heaven and earth to protect her—but against a demon as powerful as Asmodeus, heaven and earth may not be enough…

Warning: This book contains one bad-ass Archangel with a fiery, um, sword, a witch who blows things up, one nasty demon who is trying to kill them both, and ghosts who make interfering their mission.

Steamy sex is had, even with the voyeur ghosts—though Tory is still blushing.

Enjoy the following excerpt for
My Avenging Angel: Asmodeus stared down at the sniveling, postulating human, a sneer lifting the corner of his lips. He’d been ripped from his dimension, brought to this godforsaken plain known as Earth and he wasn’t happy about it. In fact, if it hadn’t been for the protection spell the man had woven into the circle surrounding him, Asmodeus would have killed the weakling for his audacity.

“Why have you summoned me, human?” he demanded, taking a step forward to test the barrier. He was delighted to find a slight weakness in his invisible cage. He could work with that.

“I ask your help, my lord,” came the timid reply.

Folding his arms across his wide chest, Asmodeus watched as the man remained on his knees, head bowed to his chin, and found the action mildly mollifying. He might just hear the human out before he killed him.

“You called me forth to ask my help?”