Enslaved (The Inbetween Novels) (6 page)

“Sorry. Again. I’ll go now before I do anything else stupid.”

The man laughed. Shayla felt his eyes on her all the way to her car. Inside, she rested her forehead against the steering wheel. The universe was out to put her in the path of every handsome man living in the city.
First coffee shop guy, now this.
Maybe she should call in sick to life and hide in her bed for the rest of the week, just in case the universe decided to get cute and she ended up stumbling across a hot, naked man.

“I couldn’t get that lucky,” Shayla muttered and started the car.

She watched the road carefully. In the back of her mind, she knew if she didn’t pay attention, she’d end up running over someone. The trip home was hot-guy free. The only man she saw from the deli to her house was the elderly retired doctor who lived two houses down.

Shayla grabbed her guilt salad and made a dash for the front door. Safely inside, without bowling anyone over, she slid off her shoes. She shimmied out of her bra and didn’t drop her dinner when she pulled the bra out of the sleeve of her shirt—a talent she’d mastered ages ago. She dropped the salad off on the table inside the door. By the time she reached the kitchen to grab a fork and a glass of wine, she’d pulled her hair up into a sloppy ponytail and wiped off her lipstick.

She paused in the doorway to the living room. The case for the movie she’d watched the night before was on the coffee table, mocking her loneliness. A handful of crumpled pastry wrappers littered the side table beside an empty bottle of wine.

“I’m falling into a rut.”

Desperate for a change, she slid on a pair of old flip-flops and walked out onto the small patio in her backyard. Shayla sat at the two-person table. Birds chirped at her from the birdbath across the lawn. The neighbor’s cat eyeballed her food from the top of the tall cinderblock privacy fence separating the houses in the neighborhood. Apparently he realized it wasn’t anything good and dropped down onto his owner’s side of the fence.

Shayla took inventory of her meager garden while she ate. The herbs she’d planted at the beginning of the summer were brown and crumbling. Tendrils of ivy snaked off the fences and threatened to devour the tiny cleared patch for vegetables and herbs. Not that it mattered. The tomatoes and peppers had keeled over as well. As her mother said, Shayla possessed a brown thumb. She couldn’t even keep silk plants from meeting an early demise.

More depressed than she’d been before going outside to eat, she gathered her leftovers and dropped them in the garbage. Shayla ducked into her bedroom to change into her comfortable plaid pajama pants and a tank top.

Finally feeling more like herself, she curled up on the couch with a book. She didn’t make it more than a paragraph in before her mind wandered. What would it be like to cuddle on the couch beside someone else while they both read? Automatically, Shayla’s mind inserted the man from the coffee shop into her little fantasy. He’d be reading a new crime thriller; she’d be nose-deep in a classic romance novel. At some point, he’d scoot closer and play with her hair.

“Yeah right, Shayla. A man like that wouldn’t touch you with a ten-foot pole and someone else’s hands.”

Hoping for a break from her own screwed up life, Shayla refocused on the novel lying across her thighs. Five pages in, she drifted off to sleep.

* * * * *

The library of the incubi compound was one of few safe havens Deryck had at his disposal. For the most part, the others didn’t bother with reading. They spent their time working out, comparing stories about their conquests, or on the Inbetween servicing females. That’d never been enough for Deryck. His mind needed to be engaged by something and sex, no matter how beautiful the female was, didn’t stimulate his mind.

Deryck picked up one of his favorite novels to reread and left for the relative quiet of the barracks. He crossed the threshold and was smacked in the hip with a rolled up paper.

Confused, he looked down at the offending paper where it’d fallen on a patch of greenish-brown grass.
Who the hell put grass in the barracks?

A sparrow swooped down and landed beside the paper. It pecked at the grass. Deryck watched it pull up a wriggling earthworm with a strange feeling of detachment. Perhaps he’d fallen asleep while reading in the library. It was the only explanation he could think of.

“Sorry, mister,” a boy called from a distance away.

Startled, Deryck looked up at the boy. He rode a bicycle down a narrow street. The sun peeked above the roofs of a row of nice, neat homes lining the street. Each house looked nearly identical to its neighbor, save a few details like paint color and the style of vehicle parked before them.

Birds chattered back and forth to each other from the dew-covered lawns. An old orange cat watched half-heartedly from the front stoop of the house directly across the street from where Deryck stood. Its tail swished back and forth, Deryck couldn’t help but think of an excited dog greeting its owner.
Strange feline.

The front door of the house next to the cat’s swung open. A woman, wrapped in a brightly colored robe, stumbled outside. She covered her eyes from the rising sun and bent down to grab the rolled up paper sitting on the path to her door. Strands of fiery gold hair fell down to block her face from view, but didn’t stop Deryck’s heartbeat from speeding up.

He’d found her again.

Sunlight shined through the thin robe concealing her. Deryck got a good look at the well-built body underneath, even though it was all in shadow. Pressure behind the fly of his pants grew until he was forced to turn away from Shayla and adjust himself.

Deryck froze with his hand on his groin. If he had indeed found the woman from his dreams in her realm, the human realm, then he shouldn’t have a physical reaction to her presence. He looked down at his pants in confusion. The bulge behind the denim pants was unmistakable. And impossible. Incubi were only aroused at the command of the women who summoned them to the Inbetween.

“It is a week for impossible things,” he whispered and eased the pressure off his hard-on.

“Good morning,” Shayla called across the street.

Panic set it. What if he got caught outside of her home, would the gods punish both of them?

Deryck turned back to steal one more glimpse of the woman he wished he could call his own.

Recognition flared in her eyes. “Are you stalking me?”

Afraid he’d do her more harm, Deryck flexed his powers and transported himself back to the barracks. He stripped on his way through the door, his mind set on the coldest shower he could withstand to conceal the painful erection he bore from just a few moments gazing at her.

You can’t go back to her.
The truth of it hurt more than anything else.

Blink. Blink. Blink.

The cursor on Shayla’s work computer taunted her. She’d been staring at the same report for over an hour and hadn’t made any progress. Not one damn word. Her boss had already emailed three times asking for it. She kept ignoring them, hoping he’d think her email wasn’t working again. That’d be easier to explain than what actually occupied her mind at the moment.

She glanced toward the windows again--still no impossibly hot stalker guy. Shayla’s first instinct after seeing him outside her house had been to call the cops. Only, she couldn’t prove he’d been there. She didn’t know his name. Hell, she started to doubt he even existed, except when she arrived at the office, Kelly teased her about sneaking off with the guy instead of going to happy hour the night before.
So much for living in denial.

There wasn’t any way to explain how he’d found her house. Likewise, she couldn’t figure out how two hundred plus pounds of drop-dead-gorgeous disappeared into thin air.

“Maybe he’s training for the Olympics.” Shayla leaned her cheek on her hand and stared at the blinking cursor on her computer screen some more.

“Who’s in the Olympics?” Kelly peered over the cubicle wall beside Shayla’s chair.

“No one. I’m just talking to myself. This report is killing me.”

Kelly winked. “Take a break. We’ll go get some coffee.”

No way could she show her face at Sweet Bean again. What if Mr. Creeper was waiting for her? She couldn’t face him. Not after the weirdness in front of her house, which she wasn’t entirely certain happened. She hadn’t had any coffee before going to get the paper. Maybe her brain played tricks on her. Nevertheless, she played it safe and handed Kelly a handful of cash.

“I really need to finish this before Joel blows a gasket.”

Kelly leaned down to look at the blank document. “Good luck. I’ll have them put an extra shot of espresso or three in your mocha.”

“You’re the best,” Shayla called after Kelly’s retreating back.

She rolled her chair over to the window and craned her neck to watch Kelly leave the office. No one harassed her or followed her down the sidewalk to the coffee shop. There was no sign of Mr. Creeper. For the first time since she left the house, Shayla took a deep, calming breath.

“This is by far the stupidest thing you’ve done since drawing your first breath three-thousand years ago.”

Deryck stood by himself against a pale blue wall and looked out over a labyrinth of short, black walls. A mass of humans moved through the passages or sat hunkered down in one of the many alcoves formed by the walls. It looked like a horizontal ant farm occupied by overworked humans. No one smiled. When they approached the alcoves, he could almost see the will to live drain from their souls.

Did Shayla feel the same way each time she entered the building? He hoped not.

The bouquet of flowers in his hand gave off a pungent scent that wrinkled his nose. Deryck picked them from the garden at the compound while Garik wasn’t looking. If the male caught him taking flowers from his garden, he’d give him high holy hell until he confessed to the transgression and explained why he took a sudden interest in flower arrangements. Deryck examined the delicate petals on the small purple wax flowers, or at least that’s what he thought they were called. He usually zoned out on the rare occasion Garik opened up to discuss his garden.

Taking a steadying breath, Deryck eased into the busy office. He said a silent prayer that Shayla would like the flowers. The females he serviced on the Inbetween always imagined beds covered in rose petals; obviously they enjoyed them on some level. What if she didn’t? He’d feel like an ass.

Deryck spotted Shayla at her desk. Her back was to him, but it didn’t stop his body from reacting like she stood before him as she had the last time he saw her days before on the front lawn of her house in her robe.

She wore her hair piled neatly on top of her head. He had no problem imagining how soft the skin on the back of her neck would be if he leaned in and kissed it. Or how her hair smelled—far sweeter than the flowers in his hand.

As though she sensed him, Shayla turned around and met his gaze. Her green eyes went wide. A hand shot up to cover her throat. She bounded out of her chair and backed away from him.