Kiss of Surrender (22 page)

She blinked at him with incredulity. An angel? This seemingly lazy, no-motivation guy was an angel?

“His one brother has wings,” Zeb inserted.

Trond cast Zeb another scowl.

“One of the admirals?” she asked.

“Admirals?” Zeb scoffed.

“Never mind,” Trond said when she arched her brows yet again. “No, it’s a different brother, but even Vikar’s wings come and go.”

“How old are you, Trond?”

His face flushed and he said, “I died in the year 850, that would be one thousand, one hundred, sixty-three years ago. Add on the twenty-nine years I’d already lived, and you could say I’m one thousand, six hundred, and ninety-two years old.” When she frowned, he raised his chin in a so-sue-me! fashion.

“A mere youngster!” Zeb said. “I’ve been around more than two thousand years.”

Is it possible I’m dead, and this is Hell? No, I don’t feel dead.
“Is this like some kind of massive joke?”

“I wish!” he and Zeb said as one.

She noticed something else about the TV report. Not one single Navy SEAL or other military personnel who had been involved in the mission was being shown, which was as it should be. Anonymity was essential to the Silent Warriors. But, oh, Nicole was so proud to be a part of this elite group.

Something occurred to her then, something she should have thought of long before this. “We should call the command center and let them know we’re alive.” She almost giggled then when she realized she was the only one alive in this group.

“No can do,” Zeb said, licking the last of the cheesecake off his fork. “No cell phone reception here.”

“You have TV satellites that work, but no sat phones?” She raised her eyebrows skeptically. Her eyebrows were going to go into whiplash soon with all this sudden lifting.

“You could try.” He tossed her a phone that he pulled from the back pocket of his jeans.

No surprise that she didn’t even get a welcome screen.

She looked at Trond then, who didn’t bother to pretend surprise. With a clucking sound of disgust, she tapped the mic embedded between her thumb and forefinger three times, four times in a row, before speaking into her hand. She should have had a response in her ear buds. Nothing. Even after several tries. With disgust, she tossed the ear buds, as well as the specially designed contact lenses that had long passed their usefulness. “How about Internet?”

“I don’t have a computer,” Zeb said.

“Everybody has a computer,” she contended.

“Not much use for social networking where I come from.”

She was pretty sure that was a gurgle of mirth that came out of Trond’s mouth, but when she glanced his way, he just stared back at her innocently. Yeah, right, as innocent as a fox in a henhouse.

“Can’t you send mind messages or something to your brothers?” she asked Trond.

“Mind messages?” He laughed.

“Yeah. Telepathy or whatever you call it.”

“Let me see.” He closed his eyes and scrunched his nose. Then he opened his eyes. “Nope. No telepathy today.”

“My force shield is very strong,” Zeb explained.

She suspected they were both playing with her.

After the newscast and a quick cleanup of the kitchen, they were all tired and went to their separate bedrooms. Nicole had so many questions hammering her brain that she thought she’d never be able to sleep. Instead, she conked out within minutes and didn’t wake until a brilliant sunrise woke her the next morning.

When she walked out to the kitchen, Trond was already up and fiddling with the luxurious coffeemaker with all its bells and whistles, trying to figure out how it worked. She slapped his hands away and made quick work of getting it to percolate. Only then did she ask, “Where’s Zeb?”

His somber face told the story before he said, “Gone.”

Fear rippled over her skin for some reason. “Gone? Gone where?”

He pointed to a note on the counter, written in bold masculine script:

Trond and Nicole:

I had to leave in the middle of the night. Jasper is calling. I won’t return to Horror right away. Will go elsewhere to get him off your track. If I don’t return within five days, the shield around the bungalow will disappear and you’ll be free to leave. If I don’t return within five days, pray for me.

Zebulan

P.S. Take advantage of this time alone. You may never get another chance. Believe me. I know.

“Who exactly is this Jasper?” Nicole asked Trond.

“Zeb’s boss. King of the Lucipires. One of the fallen angels kicked out of heaven with Lucifer. Evil to the core.”

“What will happen to Zeb for having helped us?”

Trond kept his back to her and didn’t speak.

“Trond, answer me. What will his punishment be?”

Trond turned then, and the expression on his face scared her. He was being wracked by some internal pain. “Unspeakable.”

She leaned on the counter for support. “Tell me.”

“My brother Vikar was held by Jasper for a mere week. The things they did to him were so vile and agonizing I cannot speak of them. It took months for Vikar’s physical body to recover, and we vangels have a tremendous capacity to heal almost instantaneously. Zebulan, on the other hand, will probably suffer much, much more and for many, many years until he breaks, as he will surely do, eventually.”

Nicole walked over to Trond, shaking with shock. “You have to help him.”

“I wish I could, but I can’t.” He shook his head sorrowfully.

“Don’t you dare,” she sobbed, pounding her fists against his chest. “Don’t you dare say that you can’t help. That man gave himself up for us. I don’t understand half of this crap, but I do know, if there’s a God, He is merciful.” She hesitated before asking, “Have you met God?”

He shook his head. “No, we deal with someone else.”

“Who?” she jeered, still finding it hard to believe his story.

“St. Michael the Archangel.”

She almost laughed, until she saw how serious he was. “Ask him to help Zeb then.”

He groaned. “Mike . . . that’s what we call him . . . is, let’s just say, unbendable.”

“Everyone can bend,” she insisted. “Can you bear to hear another motivational quote?”

He crossed his eyes with frustration, which she would have thought was cute under other circumstances.

“Friends are God’s way of taking care of us. If Zeb’s action doesn’t exemplify the true meaning of friendship, I don’t know what does.”

“You don’t understand,” he said, holding her tight in his arms, despite her struggles to escape. “There is no reversing the penances handed down from on high.”

She looked up at him with tear-filled eyes, surprised to see that his eyes were wet with tears, too. “You have to at least try.”

He sighed and said, “I’ll try.”

Twenty

The lull before the storm . . .

C
ould a man die of horniness?

Better question. Could a dead man die
again
of horniness?

Ever since he’d read that P.S. on Zeb’s note, and understood perfectly what he’d been suggesting, Trond hadn’t been able to stop thinking about Nicole and what he’d like to do to her, or with her.

It was understandable, of course. Plant the idea of sex in a red-blooded man’s brain, even a dead one, and it was all he could think about. Like an erotic splinter.

Even worse, every time Nicole came within twenty feet of him, his cock went on hair trigger alert. He swore the fool organ had jackknifed at least twenty times in the past three hours.

“What’s wrong with you?” Nicole asked as she walked in off the deck and watched him rubbing an ice cube over his forehead. What he should have been doing was rubbing the ice cube someplace else, someplace that he was hiding behind the counter.

“Do you have to walk around half naked?” he grumbled.

“What?” She looked down at herself. The temperature was at least a hundred today and the humidity high; a storm was brewing. Thus she was bare-footed, wearing one of Zeb’s tank tops tied below her breasts, with a pair of his spandex shorts cut off mid-thigh which were too big in the waist, so they sat low on her hips. Then she looked back up at him. “You’re walking around shirtless. You’re more half naked than I am. Honestly! I repeat, what’s wrong with you?”

“I think Zeb must have sprayed the area with some kind of aphrodisiac before he left. I’m so turned on by you I can barely walk. How’s that for honesty?”

Instead of being shocked, or offended, she said, “Is that what it is? I wondered why those bumps on your shoulders turned me on.”

My shoulder bumps turn her on? Oh, that’s what a man wants to hear. Not!
Well, he could give her tit for tat. “Your toes turn me on.”

She curled her toes, as if to hide them.

“I never had a toe fetish before, but I think I do now.”

She gulped several times, and he could swear her nipples peaked beneath the thin fabric, though maybe that was wishful thinking.

“Have you contacted your, uh, mentor yet?” she asked suddenly, which was a hard-on buzzkill if he’d ever heard one.

“I’ve tried.” In fact, after examining the entire property this morning and determining that the shield was indeed as strong as kryptonite, he’d actually knelt and prayed to Mike on Zeb’s behalf. He’d gotten no response, but that wasn’t surprising. Mike rarely answered prayers instantaneously, if at all. And he solved problems in his own way and his own good time.

“Does that mean he won’t help?”

“He who?”

“St. Michael, or God, or all the legions of angels, or whoever your boss is.”

All of the above, sweetling. All of the above.
“Prayers are always answered, just not always in the way we want or expect.”

“Like that Garth Brooks song?”

“Huh?” What a country music singer had to do with God was beyond him. He shook his head to clear it. “We just have to keep praying, and wait.”

“We? You said ‘we.’ You don’t expect me to pray, too, do you?”

He shrugged. “It wouldn’t hurt.”

“I don’t even remember how.”

“No expertise needed. Just ‘Hey, God! Long time no talk! I need a little help here.’ Or something to that effect.”

She looked at him as if he’d lost his mind.

He had. That, and a few other things, like his self-control. Next, his fangs would be coming out to scare the hell out of her.

“I will say one thing, though, Nicole. We’re here because Mike wants us to be.”

“Huh?”

“His powers are greater than Jasper’s or anything Zeb might put in place. If Mike didn’t want us to be here, we wouldn’t be.”

“I don’t understand. Why would he do that?”

“Most of the things Mike makes us do rarely make sense. At first. In the end, sometimes his reasoning becomes clear. Sometimes not.”

She pushed past him into the kitchen and made a pitcher of lemonade with ice and fruit slices floating on top. Filling two glasses, she handed one to him and said, “Come on. Let’s go out on the deck and you can regale me with all your deep dark secrets.”

His you-know-what shot out, like the back end of a bird dog on point, not just at her mention of his dark secrets, which were darkly sexual, but at the appearance of her rear end as she walked before him. Up, down, up down, up, down. God bless spandex!
Is that a blasphemy?
He hoped not.

The sky was still a clear blue, and even though there were distant, dark clouds and an electricity in the air portending the coming storm, it was a beautiful tropical setting anyone would appreciate. The lush plants about the property with their fragrant flowers only added to the allure.

Sitting in side-by-side teak loungers, which Trond had deliberately placed under the porch overhang for shade, he told her stories about St. Michael the Archangel. First of all, how they called him Mike with irreverence, just to annoy the hoity-toity archangel. How Mike always called them Viking, with equal irreverence. Usually it was, “Can’t you do anything right, Viking?” or “Did you really think near-sex didn’t count as a sin, Viking?”

Then he told her how Mike had talked Harek into setting up an archangel website, still a work in progress, so that the celestial beings could get in tune with the twenty-first century. When some of the VIK had resisted, Mike had replied, “God doesn’t care if his followers come to him via a palm-waving crowd on a Jerusalem roadway, or via some palatial cathedral, or via the Internet superhighway. Just so they come.”

Nicole was wiping tears of laughter from her eyes when he told her about some of the jobs he’d had over the years, including his days as a gladiator fighting lions in the Colosseum. “You do not want to get up close and personal with lion breath,” he assured her.

Her eyes went wide with interest when he told her about the run-down, long-abandoned castle in Transylvania, Pennsylvania, built a hundred years ago by an eccentric lumber baron, that his brother Vikar had been sent to renovate, and was still renovating, and would be renovating for centuries to come. She giggled when he described the antics of the strange town that used vampirism as a tourist attraction. And he told her about the extended family of vangels, aside from his six brothers, hundreds of them, who inhabited the castle from time to time, including Lizzie Borden, their cook, and a witch who was always threatening to put a curse on the male vangels’ favorite body parts when they misbehaved, and even the young teenage vampire angel Armod, who fashioned himself a reincarnated Michael Jackson. “You do not want to see a vangel moonwalk,” Trond assured her.

When he took a break in his long-winded blathering, she smiled at him. “You really are one of those . . . things. Aren’t you?”

“If you mean a vangel, for my sins, yes, I am.”

Then, she homed in on the least important thing he had said, or maybe not so unimportant, “What is near-sex?”

“I’ll tell you later,” he choked out. He didn’t think Zeb’s thong—yes, he was wearing a new pair of Zeb’s thongs—could stand the strain. It was the only new underwear he could find in the drawers. It was either that or go commando, as many of the Navy SEALs did. He hoped his brothers never found out; he would never live it down.

“No, seriously, sex is sex, right?”

He rolled his eyes. “Let’s just say when you belong to a society that proclaims sex outside of marriage as a mortal sin, a man must be inventive. I have the distinction of being the master of near-sex.”

She smiled.

He loved when she smiled at him. She did it so rarely.

She tapped her forefinger on her closed lips as she pondered his words of nonwisdom.

He loved her lips, closed or otherwise. But the subject they were discussing was a dangerous one for him. A temptation.

“I imagine chastity itself would be a sort of punishment,” she continued. “For some people, anyhow.”

“Oh, it is. Believe you me, it is.”

“So, sex with penetration is a big sin, but near-sex isn’t?”

He almost swallowed the lemon in his glass at her explicit word and the image it brought forth.
Oh damn! Can I really engage in such graphic talk without giving her a demonstration? Down, boy, down!
He wasn’t about to look at his lap. He didn’t have to. “No, I didn’t say that near-sex is permitted. I’m just hoping the penance is not so great. Of course, I told my brother Vikar about near-sex, and his experiments landed him in a marriage for life.”

“Vangels can marry?”

“No. Vikar is the exception. Besides, there are too many complications.” Like the VIK staying the same age and his wife aging and eventually dying. Like vangels being unable to have children. Like centuries with the same partner, if they could both live the same life span, would be a penance in itself.

“And you can get off with near-sex?”

I should go take a cold shower. No, I can’t stand. Please, don’t let me disgrace myself like an untried, overeager boyling with his first tup. Think about something else. Stinky gammelost. Cold Norse winters. Fish guts.
When he was under control, he said in as calm a voice as possible, “Yes.”

Luckily she changed the subject. “Your family sounds wonderful . . . eerily weird, but wonderful. And the castle, I would love to see it sometime.”

“Maybe you can,” he offered before he had a chance to check himself, “
when
we get out of here.”

“I like your confidence.”

“Now, you tell me about yourself,” he said, “but hold that thought. I’ll be right back.” He went inside to Zeb’s fully-stocked fridge and came back with a plate of assorted cheeses, olives, a peeled and sectioned orange, several clumps of succulent red and green grapes, and crackers, placing it on a small table between them with little cocktail napkins that said a lot about Zeb. He also refilled their glasses of lemonade.

“This is nice,” she said. “If it weren’t for my worry over Zeb, and our failure to report back to headquarters, and my sister, I could almost relax and enjoy this brief respite. I can’t remember the last time I took a vacation.”

He wasn’t surprised. “I noticed you’re not jumping up and down with constant—”

“—peppiness?” she finished for him, repeating back his criticism of her in the past.

“Now tell me about your life. It can’t all have been bad.”

“It wasn’t.” She told him about her childhood when her paternal grandparents, immigrants from Greece, had been alive and lived down the street from them. Their Old World values had been implanted in her early and deeply and were what eventually had her joining the WEALS.

“Were you always so . . . peppy?” he teased.

“I was, actually, and I confess, I was even a high school cheerleader. I lost it for those few years with Billy.”

Trond teased her about her energetic attitude, but deep down he had to admit that inside his slothful, nonenergetic self was not peace and calm, but dead chaos. If a person didn’t care, he didn’t get hurt. Could it be that apathy was a defense mechanism? Could it be that subconsciously, all those years ago, that’s what he’d been doing? Seemed rather preposterous to him, but an interesting idea to ponder on a long, lonely night, which this was not.

“ . . . but I won’t apologize for my personality. Uh-uh!” Nicole had continued talking while his mind had wandered. “It’s too easy to be a pessimist and depressed. Even if I have to force myself to be bubbly with all my motivational tapes and stuff, I’d rather that than the opposite.”

He put up his hands in mock surrender. “Hey, your personality is growing on me.”

“Is it?” she asked, suddenly serious.

He reached over and linked one hand with hers. Their gazes held. “Yeah, it is.”

They both felt the erotic shock between their clasped hands.

“Do you think it’s some demon dust Zeb sprinkled around?” she asked huskily, puzzled by this strong attraction between them. “Oh, I admit, it was there before, but not so powerful, or compelling.”

“I hope this is Zeb’s doing,” he said, because if it wasn’t that, it was something more. Something bigger that he couldn’t begin to contemplate or handle.

Sweet surrender!  . . .

Nicole was strung tighter than a sexual Slinky, and she didn’t know how much longer she could hold the coils of her control together.

As they ate leftover paella and reheated bread for dinner, she watched Trond eat, fascinated by his lips.

When he steepled his fingers and pinioned her with his take-no-mercy eyes, she whispered, “Mercy!”

When he walked outside to check the shutters in preparation for the hurricane that was expected to sweep the Caribbean, according to the TV, which had just gone on the blink due to the storm, his wide shoulders, slim waist, and hard butt drew her eyes. In fact, the backs of his knees, of all things, attracted particular notice. And, yes, she was developing a toe thing, too.

He had pulled on a T-shirt with the message: “Heaven: The Best Gated Community Ever” on the front, and on the back, “Hell: The Worst Gated Community Ever.” You had to appreciate a man with a sense of humor, even it had been borrowed from Zeb.

He brushed past her to get a screwdriver from the kitchen utility drawer, and she barely stifled a groan at the sexual zing. How could she have such a powerful reaction to someone who was
dead
?

When he looked at her with his intense blue eyes, turning strangely, hue by hue, to a silvery grayish blue, she knew he shared her growing arousal.

She was even turned on by the slight presence of his fangs, a sign of the testosterone raging inside his body.

The question was: What would they do about it?

The answer came that evening when the lights went out, the candles were lit, and they drank not one, or two, but three glasses of Zeb’s fine red wine. The house shook, the shutters rattled, lightning struck, and it was nothing compared to the storm brewing between them.

She headed toward the closed glass doors to stare at the stormy sea, and he came up behind her.