How to Lose a Demon in 10 Days (3 page)

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Authors: Saranna DeWylde

BOOK: How to Lose a Demon in 10 Days
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He shook his head. “You won’t go to Hell, silly witch. Not unless this becomes a habit, you know—the summoning.” He pressed a kiss to the corner of her mouth, his tongue darting out across the edge of her lip. “You have righteousness in your heart, do you not?”
“The road to Hell is paved with good intentions,” she mumbled.
He filled his hand with her breast through the thin material of her nightgown. His tongue pushed past her lips, invading her very senses as if she already belonged to him. “Ah, like honey,” he said.
She supposed it would have been fitting if he tasted like sulfur. It would be just what she deserved, but he didn’t. He tasted like innocence, like childhood summers hiding in tall grasses after the rains, and there was something else that Grace just couldn’t put her finger on—an intangible that made the feeling of innocence seem all the more real. Which, of course, it couldn’t be. He was a demon, after all.
Grace pushed him away.
“Look here.” He made a frustrated sound. “I don’t usually put forth this much effort, but I like you.” Her vision of Caspian shimmered before her eyes and his features softened. His generous mouth, the hard planes of his angular jaw, everything became smoother. Those beautiful hands became even more slender, feminine. In fact, his deliciously broad chest was now—
It was
wrong
. That was the only description she could manage. Grace was watching it happen right before her eyes, yet somehow it was still amazingly unreal. Unnatural. Caspian was becoming a woman.
“No, no. Stop that! What are you doing?” Grace sounded to herself much like one of those yipping, little ankle-biter dogs. If Caspian didn’t knock off this stunt directly, she was probably going to start bouncing around like one as well.
“I figured,” he/she began in a sultry voice, “that my shape must be the problem. I’ve never had a non-virgin be as reluctant as your most desirable self. . . .”
His features realigned and he was again devastatingly handsome and male, the bastard. As a woman he’d been beautiful. It was unfair. Was it too much to hope for that the creature had known a day of ugly, ever?
Well, of course, there was the fact that he lived in Hell. That had to suck.
With that thought in mind, she sucked in a deep gulp of air and walked with stiff shoulders into Caspian’s arms, which were really quite nice, if she were honest. And unfortunately, she was. She was always honest. That was how her dear sweet granny Seraphim had raised her. There were some people who believed that her granny wasn’t really dead, that she was the Baba Yaga herself—an immortal witch more powerful than any who’d ever walked the earth. But that was crap. Grace had sobbed at her funeral and watched as the last bit of dirt had covered her coffin and taken Seraphim away from her forever.
She mentally sighed.
Oh, Gran.
Grace missed her so much.
“Okay, chickadee. I need you to not be thinking about your grandmother while I’m plowing your field, if you know what I mean.”
“Get out of my head!” Grace demanded. “We didn’t agree on any Vulcan Mind Meld, buddy.”
“I can’t help it. You think loud. Not to mention you weren’t forthcoming with pertinent information—like your name. That’s what you get when you leave a demon to his own devices,
Grace
.” He tested her name on his tongue, a first bite of the myriad confections he’d stolen from her mind.
“Oh, so it couldn’t be that you’re just nosy? Rude?” She shrugged her shoulders beneath the heat of his palms. When she got no response, she continued. “Uncouth? Pretentious? Invas—”
If he hadn’t kissed her then, she would have continued to spew insults, so perhaps it was self-preservation on his part. Though, he’d already said that he wanted her. But . . . how many lips had his touched? How many places had he put the tongue that was now stroking her bottom lip, for that matter? The thought made her stomach a little queasy. Maybe more than just a little.
Those elegantly strong hands splayed across her waist and pulled her hard against him. His defined body was taut, his skin hot and seeming to beg for her touch . . . To Grace’s chagrin, all of the thoughts in her head seemed to leak out of her ear and onto the floor. Ah, well, she had always been a fool for broad shoulders, and who could blame her? She sighed into his mouth and realized she might as well just enjoy herself. It’s not like
this
was a sin. Nowhere in the Book did it say, “Thou Shalt Not Shag Angels, Be They Fallen or Otherwise.”
She tangled his hair in her fist and, while it was like silk, what gave her the most pleasure wasn’t the texture but knowing his coiffure wasn’t perfect anymore. She grinned as her hands slid down to his shoulders, and she found her fingers sliding beneath his greatcoat and pushing it off.
“That’s much better,” he said.
“Shut up, or this isn’t going to work.” She was still fighting the brocade and velvet of his coat.
“Oh, it will work. I promise you that.”
Grace snorted again. “Yes, yes, great demon prince. I’m sure
it
works fine. I meant ‘it’ as in the sex. Not your cock.”
Caspian gasped. “Such perversion from that seemingly sweet mouth. Do it again.”
“What? Belittle your cock?”
“Don’t be deliberately obtuse.” He sighed. “You know what I mean.”
“The deal was for skin, not for 1-900-Gracie Talks Nasty.”
Caspian was kissing the corner of her mouth. “So,
does
Gracie talk nasty? Hmm?” He accented this last with a swipe of his tongue across her lip.
“Only to curse you back to—”
That was enough of that, or so Caspian must have decided. The teasing swipe of his tongue became another full-on military campaign, another invasion. Grace wasn’t complaining, though, even if she could do so with him ravaging her mouth in such a way. She melted against him, knowing that it had to be an illusion—the way that she fit perfectly against him, the way the curve of his shoulder was just right for her cheek, the way that her hands already seemed to know him. He was a demon, after all.
She kissed him back, using her tongue like a weapon, capturing and invading him just as he’d done to her. Of course, he liked it. It was obvious. What demon wouldn’t? Hell, what
male
wouldn’t?
Grace ran her tongue and mouth along the hard angle of his jaw, the corded column of his throat, the deliciously sculpted outline of his pectorals, down farther still to that valley of sin itself, that road to Hell—or to Heaven, as the case was turning out—those hard, hard abdominals. She found herself on her knees, prostrate before his maleness. Caspian didn’t take it as his due, however. He watched her with glittering eyes, no expectation there, only desire. Only unbridled lust. He didn’t thread his fingers through her hair only to get at the back of her neck and push her lips toward his cock. He waited to see what she would do next.
Because he didn’t ask, didn’t demand, didn’t expect, Grace found that she wanted to taste him, wanted to bring him pleasure. She’d given over to this illusion. It wasn’t the mortal and the demon having sex here, or even Grace and the harbinger of Michael’s destruction. This was just a man and woman coming together for a moment of ecstasy.
She freed his cock from his breeches and drew her thumb across its velvet head, pearly fluid welling at her touch. Grace’s lips were whisper close to the tip, her tongue darting out to follow her thumb. He tasted of salt and sweet, and she swirled her tongue across the swollen flesh, down to the base, then back up again before she took him fully in her mouth, her talented tongue working his need.
A sound began low in his throat, almost like a growl. “Grace.”
She dug her fingers into his hips, pulling him forward, and opened her eyes to glance up and meet his gaze. Hellfire burned in those depths, and when she flicked her tongue, it blazed brighter. Closing her fingers around his member, she drew back to talk, stroking up and down to keep her momentum.
“Yes?” She raised an eyebrow.
“Enough.” Magick crackled in the air.
Suddenly Grace found herself on her back, naked and splayed for his pleasure. Caspian covered her with his body, his weight pressing her down into the mattress, his mouth hot on her throat, his hands on her breasts, her hips, sliding between her thighs. She allowed him to anchor her hands above her head with one hand, but locked her legs around his waist. This wasn’t right. Not yet.
“No,” she said sweetly.
“What?” Caspian sounded disbelieving of what he’d heard. “What do you mean, ‘no’?”
“I mean: on your back, demon.”
Looking intrigued, he shifted his weight and rolled so that she was sitting astride him.
“I’m going to finish what I started,” Grace explained. But she wouldn’t deny him what he wanted. She swung her long legs across him and worked her hips up his torso to press herself against his lips as she took his cock in her mouth.
C
HAPTER
T
HREE
Goings and Comings
C
aspian was afraid that he was going to embarrass himself. He hadn’t had a woman in years, and he couldn’t remember the last time any was so aggressive. He wanted to come, but he also wanted this to last forever, the delicious sensation of her mouth bobbing up and down on his rod. He had visions of spraying her face with his seed and watching that hot little tongue lap it up, or maybe to finish on those glorious tits . . .
His cock surged, but he held on to his control. Barely.
While tempted to just lie back and enjoy her ministrations, he refused to be outdone. He kept saying it over and over: He was a showman. So he grinned and pressed his face into her slit, his tongue sliding the length of it. Those sweet lips parted. His tongue forked and split, curling both around her clit and thrusting deep into her slick passage.
She cried out, pausing in her task to mash herself down hard on his face. Caspian reacted with pleasure, thrusting harder and then replacing his tongue with his fingers. Then he licked her from slit to arse.
Grace paused in her writhing, as if startled, but she didn’t tell him to stop; nor did she stop what she was doing to him. In fact, she took him fully into her mouth, deep-throating his cock. It broke his control, and he was suddenly surging inside her mouth. But he wanted her to come as well, wanted her screaming his name—
He slipped his tongue back inside her, half of his oral member working her clit and the other driving past the rosebud ring of muscles several inches above. She was sweet and hot, her cries spurring him onward, and she was sitting upright now, her thighs braced on either side of his face, grinding against his mouth, begging him for more, for release.
Caspian slipped another finger inside her, and then she was screaming as her orgasm hit and pleading for him to stop, but her hips were still thrusting her forward against him. She dug her fingers into his hair to tug his head away from her clit, but he was latched on like a familiar seeking a teat. He would not let go. Caspian could sense there was another peak building inside her and he wanted to shove her off it with extreme prejudice.
Her screams hit an impossibly high pitch and he kept them there, playing her like a finely tuned instrument, and only when it sounded as if she were dying did he allow her bliss to ebb. There was evidence of her pleasure all over his face, and he licked his lips as he allowed her to crawl off him. She collapsed boneless and sated, curled against him, spasms still shaking her body. After a few moments, he spoke, though the sound was muffled. “You know, it’s a good thing I don’t need to breathe. Death by pussy is not one of my goals, even if it is a pussy as glorious as yours.”
Grace crawled around to lay her head in the crook of his arm. “I thought most men wanted to die fucking.”
“I can’t die,” he pointed out. No, he couldn’t die, but he could wish he was dead. He shuddered, thinking back to that ill-fated affair with Lilith.
“Well, in that case.” She moved like she was going to straddle him again. Caspian laughed and moved his hands to her hips to help out, licking his lips with a forked and primed tongue. He felt her slit spasm and clench against his thigh just from watching him, and she bit her bottom lip.
“Okay, you win. For now.” She settled back down, clearly ready for a nap.
“You haven’t fulfilled your end of the contract yet. This wasn’t the big show, you know. Just foreplay.”
“Oh, yeah?” Grace sounded intrigued, interested even, but it was clear she was spent.
“Yeah. But, it’s a good down payment.”
She burrowed closer, her eyes closing. “I should think so.”
“So, we can begin plotting your revenge,” he pointed out.
She yawned. “Later, I think. Sleep now. This has waited four years; I suppose it can wait one more night.”
Caspian smirked. He’d enjoy taking advantage of this whole revenge plot. Just like he’d told her earlier, men hated to see their women, exes or not, with someone else. And if Grace wasn’t completely over her relationship with her evil ex, she would be by the time he was done with her. Everyone knew the fastest way to get over one man was to get under another—or a Crown Prince of Hell like himself.
 
By morning he was having second thoughts. Grace had been sleeping for some time, but he, Caspian, great Crown Prince of Hell, next in line for the great Throne of the Damned, was having chest pain. A heart attack. That’s the only thing it could be. He’d stayed all night and fucked the woman every which way from Sunday and she’d still been ready for more. If he could die, he might be worried.
Okay, so he
was
worried. This pain in his chest, he didn’t like it. There was a nagging in the back of his head that told him this wasn’t a physical malady; it was because he actually liked this woman. Wasn’t that just a rancid bitch?
Sure, Caspian had always been a lover of women. He loved how they looked, how they smelled, how they tasted; he loved the little sounds they made when he was riding them like horses at the track. He even liked to listen to them talk, liked the sound of their voices. And it was all women, really. Thick ones, thin ones, large breasts, small breasts, she of the childbearing hips and backyard, and those less gifted. Short hair, long hair, blue eyes, brown eyes . . . Earth was a smorgasbord to him. So much so, that he had never really paid attention enough to his lovers to know if he liked them as people. But, he liked
Grace
.
Caspian cringed as the pain in his chest doubled. It was sharp like a pinch from a clamp on his nipple, twisting because he liked her.
Damn! Again, he had to stop thinking about her. Especially as a person. Too bad he’d let her talk him into a contract, because he would leave her high and dry if he could get away with it. For his own protection, of course. He’d never broken a deal before. For a demon, he was reliable. While some of his cronies thought it was terrible, having a reputation as being dependable, he’d found it good for business. It meant more summonings, which meant more corruption ultimately spread around. Sure, most of it was bitch work, but it kept him in the Big Boss’s good graces—which was important to everyone who didn’t fancy roasting on a spit.
Grace rolled over and laid her head on his chest. From her light snore, he could tell that she was still asleep.
Sleep. That was something Caspian loved about being topside. Only when he was corporeal did he get to sleep and eat corn dogs. And chocolate. Oh, by the Adversary, did he ever love chocolate. And Warcraft. The game was a personal triumph for the Big Boss, originally designed for demon R and R. He played every chance he got. If he’d been a mortal man, Caspian knew he would have started out handsome but ended up a sloppy fatso living in his mom’s basement and subsisting on corn dogs and Milky Way bars, jacking off to cybersex on one screen while gaming on another. With that thought, he looked at Grace. Once again, he was very interested in her naked breasts, in the curve of her bottom lip and—
An eye cracked open. “You’ll just have to wait. My snatch is not a Bag of Holding. Nothing else will fit today. I am not a demon; therefore, I have no regenerative powers. I’ve had a baby, so I don’t think it’s going to just snap back into place. Sorry.”
She didn’t sound the least bit sorry, but Caspian found he couldn’t be miffed with her when she curled into him like that. But, again with the nipple-twisting pain. Was she a virus only a demon could catch? That had to be it.
Wait, what did she mean by “baby”? There was no baby smell to the house, no maternal scent to her.
“Is
that
why you want to get Michael Grigorovich?” he asked.
“Yeah. Why do you care?”
“I don’t,” he said. But he felt a cold chill up his spine and wasn’t sure of the reason. Whatever it was, he didn’t like it. “I just need to know what I’m dealing with. To be effective.”
Grace opened her eyes and propped herself up on her elbow. “He stole my child from me. I know that the parental bond probably doesn’t mean much to a demon, but I want my son. He doesn’t even know what I look like. Michael took him from me as soon as he was born. It’s been four years. I just lost my last court appeal—and all without ever getting a physical hearing.”
Caspian felt another tightening in his chest. “How did he get away with that?”
“Money. Power. Connections. All things that he’s gotten from trafficking with demons.”
“Who am I up against? You should have told me this at the summoning. This information was not figured into the contract.” Caspian felt a faint glimmer of hope that he’d be able to get out of the deal by exploiting a loophole. Then, no more torture.
“I knew you would try to find a way out of this.”
The look on her face would have broken his heart if he’d had one. Not to mention that damnable pain in his chest doubled down again with the cold chill on his back. He thought for a moment the sensation might be guilt, but how could that happen? Guilt wasn’t possible for a demon. “Damn it, who is it? Which demon did he make his deal with?”
“Ethelred.”
“Oh.” Caspian laughed. “For a minute there I thought this was going to be a challenge. If it had been Lilith or maybe, say, someone closer in line for the throne, that might have been a problem.”
“That’s why I summoned you specifically. I want my son back.”
“I can do that,” Caspian said.
“I want to be safe from Michael.”
“I can do that, too.”
He would have provided her safety regardless. The thought of someone hurting Grace did not sit well with him. Not that he cared to examine the thought at any length. Neither did he care to examine the hellfire that raged within him when he thought of Grace afraid. Or what this Michael person had done to her. Caspian was a demon. He shouldn’t be having feelings, of hellfire or otherwise.
A damnable voice in the back of his head reminded him that he’d once been human. Yeah, a long time ago and even, yes, in a land far away, he’d been mortal. Once. But he was too far gone for that now. This was his fate, his destiny. His mother had not been of virgin flesh when she’d made her deal, so Caspian was always meant for this. Unlike those who were fully human, he’d been denied free will. Caspian had always known demonhood lay at the end of any path he chose in life. He’d been born of demon flesh, so what other option was there?
He realized suddenly the enormity of what he’d done with Grace. They could possibly have a child. Before he’d touched her, this sort of thing hadn’t mattered: Demon spawn didn’t much concern him, other than the Big Boss’s reaction. Not until now had he cared about the rest. Not until this woman. She made him feel all sorts of things he didn’t want to face.
It was all by virtue of her body, he supposed. Which was a laugh. It was like he was a virgin who’d fallen in love with the first girl that would fuck him. Now he was wrapped around her little finger, the Poindexter slavering after the cheerleader for a peek up her skirt. This was no longer a simple business transaction. Because he
liked
her. He might have spawn with her, and worse, he was worried about that fact. Sure, he’d tagged other pieces more than once, but he never planned it, never thought of tomorrow, and never worried about consequences. This was unacceptable!
He suddenly doubled over in pain, though a low growl was the only sign he gave of his distress. “Consider your part paid in full,” he ground out. “I will fulfill my end.” He had to get away from her. The very breath in her body made him ache somehow, and he’d had enough.
He dematerialized.

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