A Demon in Waiting (Crimson Romance) (21 page)

He was right. She wouldn’t. Because regardless of everything, she loved the jerk, and she realized none of this mess was his fault. He was riding the rapids without a paddle to steer, too.

She sighed and leaned over to set her coffee cup on the porch floor, then laid her head on John’s lap.

“This is crazy.”

His fingers tickled her scalp as he smoothed her hair. “Yeah. I wonder what our kids’ll be like.”

“Don’t get ahead of yourself.”

“I’m broke. Can’t buy you a ring.”

“I haven’t even found an apartment yet.”

Pop!

Agatha appeared on the porch, smoothing her slacks and looking around. “No wonder it took Mark so long to track you. This place is warded like nothing I’ve ever seen. It’s like trying to get to a place that doesn’t exist on a map.”

Ariel raised a brow at her.

She sighed. “Sorry, honey. Look, I’m here to talk to John.”

John’s forehead furrowed. “Why me?”

“’Cause you’re a rogue now. Like me. There’s lots of us. We don’t get involved. We just … ” She made a waffling gesture with her hand. “ …
exist.
”

“I can’t
not
get involved if people I care about are in trouble.”

“And no one’s expecting you to sit idle if that’s the case. Just be careful. Supernatural types hold grudges. They have long memories.”

Momma appeared at the door. “That’s for damn sure.”

Agatha stuffed her hands into the pockets of her jacket and chewed her lip a moment. “I guess what I mean to say, John, is if you need someone to answer questions for you, I’ll be around. I can do that much.”

“Thanks,” he said. “But, what are you, exactly?”

Her cheek twitched.

Normally, Ariel wouldn’t have pressed, but she felt like if there were any time she needed information, that was one of them. “Please, Agatha.”

Agatha stared up at the porch ceiling and sighed. “There are a lot of things that exist that fall outside the definitions of Western religion. I’m one of them. Maybe one day I’ll explain. Over drinks or something.”

“I’d like that,” John said.

Ariel pinched his thigh.

“Sorry.
We’d
like that.”

Agatha nodded, then vanished.

Pop!
She was back again.

“Oh, forgot to tell you, Ariel. If you want to work at home for the next couple of weeks, I won’t judge you for it. You’ve probably guessed by now some of our clients aren’t human. News of this kerfuffle will probably get out fast and I don’t want people thinking I’ve got trouble on my payroll. I’d like to keep the drama down to a minimum so our board of directors doesn’t chew me out. They’re not in the loop.”

“Gotcha.”

And she was gone.

They waited for her to pop back in with “One more thing” but when that didn’t happen, Momma said, “Well, now that you know it all, Ariel, we can put our heads together and find your sister. I want both my babies.”

John gave Ariel a pat, urging her to sit up. He stood and loped to the door. “I’ll call Claude. See what he can shake out of his network. Maybe he has a crystal ball or something.”

Ariel followed. Momma looped her arm around her waist as they approached the threshold.

“I like him,” Ariel mused. “I think I’ll keep him.”

“Good. I think you should, too. I need someone to fix my water heater.”

Ariel groaned.

“I hope Social Security doesn’t catch wind of this. They might want me to go back to work.”

Gulielmus’s nostrils flared as he approached the dark, dank alleyway. Of all the places a cambion would tread, why that one? He could have at least rented a room for the night. But maybe he couldn’t make it that far.

Gulielmus sighed and knelt down beside the slumping form next to the dumpster. He nudged his shoulder, and when the drunk didn’t budge, he grabbed hold of his son’s hair and pulled him to standing.

Now
his eyes opened. “Wha da fug?” Charles mumbled, his eyes barely focusing on Gulielmus.

Gulielmus let go of him and turned his face away. The man’s breath could probably peel wallpaper. It was a wonder he was as productive he was.

No, there’s no wonder. He’s powerful. What a fucking waste.

Taking a step back, Gulielmus wiped his hands on his pants. “Let’s find you a room. Get you cleaned up.”

“Why?”

“You’ve got work to do. Got to pick up John’s slack.”

That seemed to sober him up real good. Charles’s blue eyes went wide and his jaw drooped.

“What do you mean, pick up his slack? He’d barely started. There is no slack.”

“Don’t you understand? He made a fool of me. What do you think my boss feels about that, huh? Like I can’t get my own kids in line?”

Charles’s expression was quite telling, so Gulielmus stabbed a finger at his chest to stave off whatever it was he was going to say. “Don’t even.”

Charles took a deep breath then let it out slowly. “You have other kids. Some you haven’t even brought online yet.”

“But they’re not like you and Claude. They don’t have juice of their own — only what they got from me. You’ve got to have something special to shine as an incubus.”

Charles looked doubtful. Gulielmus wrapped an arm around his shoulders and guided him toward the street.

“What sets you apart from John is that you’re ruthless. You’re not sentimental. You get the job done.”

Charles didn’t respond. He just walked, eyes trained straight ahead.

“Maybe it’s time you started building up a little workforce of your own. Pick a few women. Breeding stock, you know? Make sure they’re not too bright. That’ll bite you in the ass.”

Charles grunted as they crossed the street to the pay-by-hour motel.

“Let’s get you cleaned up. I’ve got three hours carved out just for you. We’ll talk about it.”

Holley Trent grew up in rural eastern North Carolina. She now lives in the not-so-wild West on the Colorado Front Range, but still sounds like a Southerner.

When she’s not writing or reading romance novels, she’s chasing kids, yelling at incontinent cats, or trying to match mated pairs of her husband’s multitude of gray socks. She’s never given a ride to a hitchhiker, but when she was young and adventurous, she did pick up a flirty guy in a parking lot. (He was harmless.)

Holley’s an active member of RWA’s Colorado Romance Writers and the CIM special interest chapter. She’s hard at work on stories for Charles and Claude.

See her complete backlist of paranormal and contemporary romances at her website,
http://www.holleytrent.com/blog
. Catch her tweeting random
bon mots
under the handle
@holleytrent
.

“Excuse me, ma’am.”

The small woman with skin the color of light burnt sugar didn’t hear Matt Vogel calling into the barn for her attention. She was too busy cutting a rug to the tune of music Matt couldn’t hear with her eyes closed. Well, he’d tried, so he ogled the lithe stranger’s undulating form, assessing her swells and curves through her fitted work clothes without guilt. From his vantage point, the woman was doing a pretty good job of partnering with that old rusty hoe she was holding, although he couldn’t tell whether she or the garden tool was the one leading. Matt leaned against the barn’s doorframe and crossed his arms over his broad chest. God, he’d never seen a woman like her before, and he was absolutely smitten at first sight.

She was agile as a cat burglar, lean with a narrow waist but bearing shapely hips that supported a firm round bottom that he watched with special interest. Matt thought he’d done pretty good in the past. He’d dated some of the most attractive women in Chowan County, but compared to his new neighbor’s remarkable beauty, they were downright plain.

Suddenly, she turned and shouted “Lipschitz!” and dropped into a deep lunge, her pose supported only by that lucky hoe. She said “Ow!” when her hip flexor gave a loud pop and opened her brown eyes to finally take note of the stranger in her outbuilding. She startled at the sight of Matt. He couldn’t blame her. There he was, this big, lumbering white guy trespassing on a rural property where a single woman lived all alone. Her hands slipped down the hoe’s handle, causing it to drop sideways on the floor. With that, she lost her balance and fell backward to the dirt floor on her bottom. The caramel skin between her high cheekbones and the v-neck of her tee shirt flushed to an unhealthy burgundy tone.

Matt walked over with one of his hands extended to help her up. “Sorry. I tried knocking at the house but … ” She held up her index finger to hush him, yanked the small headphones out of her ears by their cord, and shoved them down the collar of her shirt.

“I’m sorry, what?” she asked in a smooth, husky voice.

Matt opened his mouth to speak, but found himself gaping. He’d for some reason expected her to sound high-pitched and raspy judging by the way she shrieked “Lipschitz!” Instead, she sounded like the personification of sex and well-aged whiskey. He must have been staring, because she stood without the aid of his rough hand and waited in front of him with her hands on her hips and one elegant eyebrow raised. When he wasn’t forthcoming with words, or anything else for that matter, she said “Yoo hoo, ” and snapped her fingers in front of his face.

“Sorry, ma’am.” Matt dropped his hand back to his side and then quickly jammed both into the pockets of his faded blue jeans. “I knocked at the house and when no one answered, I walked back here since the door was open.”

She dusted her hands off on her yoga pants and straightened her colorful kerchief to tuck some hair escaping from the temples back up into the fabric. “Okay. You’ve found me. What can I do for you?”

Matt opened his mouth to explain, but she held up her index finger once again and said “Wait, let me guess.”

She paced around the broken tractor parts and empty steel oil drums, wringing her hands behind her back. “Well, you’re not dressed well enough to be a Jehovah’s Witness, and besides, they normally do their proselytizing in pairs.”

Matt looked down at his typical autumn Saturday attire of a long-sleeved ringer tee, jeans, and much-abused brown harness boots. It wasn’t fancy, but it was typical Matt.

She continued, “You’re obviously not the mailman.” She poked her head outside the barn door just to verify her hunch. “Unless you can strap bags of mail and parcels onto that motorcycle. I’m expecting a package, by the way.”

He shook his head “No.”

“Okay.” She resumed her pacing. “You’re obviously not the guy I’ve been waiting on for two weeks to install my satellite dish so I can have Internet, huh?”

Matt shook his head once more, his hair settling into his eyes in the process. He flicked it away with annoyance. At the moment, the ends reached mid-neck. He knew his grandmother would have a fit if she ever saw it. He never had enough motivation for a haircut.

“You don’t look like you need directions.”

“Nope.”

“Ah. Well, then you must be here to ask if you can hunt on my land.” She gave him what was obviously a disingenuous, practiced smile and propped her hoe against a rack containing various garden tools that were well past their prime.

Now it was Matt’s turn to raise an eyebrow. “Well, yeah.”

She sighed. “Well, you’re not the first.” She picked up a black yard waste bag and started tossing rusted bits of scrap metal and old yellowed newspapers into it. When it was half full of detritus she added, “And so you won’t be first I tell ‘no.’”

“No?” Matt asked with disbelief, taking a few automatic steps in her direction. “Why not? I’ve been hunting in those woods since I was old enough to hold a rifle.”

She put her hands on her hips and scowled at him. If she was trying to look ugly, she was failing miserably in Matt’s opinion. “Mr. — ”

“Vogel. Matt Vogel.”

“Mr. Vogel. I put that sign up at the road not because I’m being picky about who hunts here or because I want to keep all those goddamned deer for myself.” Matt cringed.

“I live in that house up there.” She pointed to the very obvious two-story farmhouse in the near distance for emphasis. “I moved here from a really shitty neighborhood in Baltimore where I had my front windows shot out not once, but twice. I wasn’t even who they were aiming at.” She stopped pointing and got up so close to Matt that their toes were nearly touching through their shoes. Matt sucked in some air. She smelled like hard work and something fruitier he couldn’t identify. She had a scent he wanted to roll around in. “I don’t want
anyone
on my property with a gun.”

Matt looked down into her piercing gaze and ground his teeth to fight off the smirk that was his longtime nervous tic. It wouldn’t do for her to think he was off his rocker during their first encounter. He didn’t even know her name and she’d lived on that property for several weeks.

“Mr. Vogel, did you hear anything I just said?”

Matt nodded slowly. “Yep. I heard you. No guns.”

“Good. I’m glad we understand each other.”

Oh, he understood her. “So, crossbows are okay? I’m not such a great shot with bow and arrow but my little sister has crackerjack aim.”

She just blinked those big brown eyes at him.

“Okay, so that’s ‘no,’ I’m guessin’.” He let a broad smile soften his face, hoping it’d put her at ease.

The very corners of her luscious lips twitched. That smile always worked on the ladies, but she was fighting hard. She squinted at him and crossed her arms over her chest. “You guess right.”

“Okay, Miss … well, you have me at the disadvantage here. I don’t even know your name.”

“Fredrickson.”

He waited for her to offer her first name, but when she just stood there glaring up at him with her lips pressed tightly together, he gave up on it. “Miss Fredrickson — ”

“Ms.”

Matt looked down at her ring finger and found it empty. “Okay. Ms. Fredrickson, our parcel of land abuts yours on the back border. We can try to stay on our side of the property line, but sometimes when you’re stalking a buck you lose track of where are. If you could just give us permission to hunt over here, we’ll try not to abuse it.”