How to Love a Blue Demon (36 page)

“Do you want to go home?” he asked one day out of the blue.

They were eating breakfast in his suite, and he calmly picked up his cup as she gaped at him.

“What?”

“You’ve been thinking of home a lot. And of people who live there.”

Ah. She knew what this was about. He’d picked up on her thoughts of Natty.

“It’s just music,” she said now. “I want him because I need him to make a better show. It’s tough doing everything on my own.”

H
e’d given her the best equipment, conjured from his memory of the times he’d gone into studios with her, but it was practically impossible to run the machines and play her guitar, and as helpful as they all were, the demons around her were rhythm challenged, thus not of much help. After awhile she gave up and just plugged her guitar into her amp and played with it alone.

“Don’t tell me that you want him.”

Cass shifted uncomfortably. She’d never heard that tone before. It was quiet, but angry, and she began to laugh.

He
set his cup down with a glare, and she laughed even harder.

“Are we fighting?” She picked up a
ghyan
, Cyani’s version of a scone and took a healthy bite. “’Cause if you do want to fight, we could do it naked. Make things interesting?”

The corner of his mouth quirked and he harrumphed irritably.

Cass bit the inside of her lip to keep from laughing. These flashes of jealousy were ridiculous. She regretted him picking up on her thoughts of another man, but for her Natty was about work and business and nothing more. And even those thoughts were fleeting. If her head wasn’t full of all the strange and wonderful new things she was absorbing on the star, it was filled to the brim with Eyoen.

She could no longer picture her life without him. Lee, who she thought of from time to time, increasingly faded into the background, a fact Eyoen knew and fully approved of. He
had no interest in sharing her, not even with memories of the dead.

On the star
he would allow no man to touch her. Not even casually, not even a handshake. In preparation for the arena show she was doing she’d arranged to bring in outside help from other musically inclined places in the galaxy – she still couldn’t believe she actually said things like that let alone heard them come from others mouths – and he’d insisted on being present when she interviewed musicians. Every time she had to give him the stink eye and literally elbow him aside to obey the niceties.

“I do not approve of this American custom,”
Eyoen groused. “It is not seemly for a mated woman to engage with males this way. They’re not from Cyanus; Goddess knows what they’re thinking!”

“You sound like
a demon from the Victorian era,” she told him. “And there ain’t shit you can do about it anyway.”

Of course this wasn’t techni
cally true, but Eyoen settled for pouting and glaring at his imagined rivals until none would have dared step out of line. Cass rolled her eyes, but she voluntarily curtailed masculine contact to appease him, and was rewarded with his sweet smiles and approving touches.

Cass h
ad become quite a prize. She’d acquired her own social secretary to handle the deluge of invitations that came in for her. She tried to respond to the letters herself, but when her hand began to cramp she gave up. Once things settled down, she noticed something else; all of the men she encountered aside from Eyoen’s brothers remained on the fringes of whatever crowd she was in, staring.

She smiled at a few and was taken aback when they immediately dropped their eyes or turned away
without speaking.

“That was rude,” she muttered.
Eventually she stopped smiling because it was embarrassing when she was ignored. Yet she wasn’t being ignored. They stared and so did she, but no one said anything. Until she got used to it, it was quite eerie.

“No man, or woman for that matter, will come forward to speak to you wi
thout an introduction from his Highness,” Rierdane explained.

“Oh! So this is a royal thing?”

“No, not really. They wouldn’t come forward even if he was a commoner. It’s not done to speak to someone else’s wife or mother or sister.”

“Even if she speaks first?”

“I’m afraid not, miss.”

O
kay. Cass thought that was sexist, but she wasn’t about to start bra burning on an alien planet. Her unofficial motto while she was visiting was, when in Rome. It was one reason she hadn’t balked at wearing the local garb.

In any event, she was wrong
. It wasn’t sexism, but a rather rigid, decidedly old fashioned form of politesse.

“Male demons
are a horny bunch,” Rierdane continued. “Women must be protected, lest someone get carried away and behave offensively.”

It was the ironic how reticent everyone was of female sensibilities when all the women were swanning around in see through togas. When she
said as much to Eyoen he just laughed.

“I suppose yo
u are right, my dear. I hadn’t thought of that. Perhaps one is necessary because of the other.”

The dress, which went to the ankle and left both arms bare was actually one
long, clever swathe of fabric that could be draped over the body myriad ways. It covered everything, and thanks to clay breasts cups that could be molded and reused each day – and had the added bonus of making the skin silky smooth and sensitively soft – and needed no straps, her modesty was preserved.

Despite missing pants
with a longing that was surprisingly acute, Cass was having more fun than she’d ever had in her entire life. Eyoen made her happy just by breathing. Here in his home, he’d revealed a swagger so appealing, she frequently asked him to shroud them in magic so she could kiss and touch him without being seen. He grinned and obliged, thrilled and eager to feed her need for him.

Cass was happy to be fed. Eyoen had been sexy even housed in Lee’s
body. In his right skin he was so beautiful he’d had more than one offer to model on Earth. He’d been curious about the process, interested in the experience, and the money – he was very interested in making money, a trait Cass now realized as typical of Cyani demons whose first and last thoughts often revolved around trade – but he did not like the idea that he’d be bound by appointments. He couldn’t fathom being held up for hours with photographers and the like, unable to leave when he chose. Cass told him he had an entrepreneurial spirit when he declined in favor of focusing on getting his spa off the ground.

O
n Cyanus his innate masculinity seemed to swell like a dry sponge in a water bucket. Everything about him screamed: I am a powerful man. It was more than the set of his broad shoulders, or the proud, straight line of his back. It was more even than the way his big feet stood braced firmly on the ground, the way he crossed his arms while talking or nodding at someone who was talking to him. He was magnificent.

He grabbed her
by the back of the neck a few times when she veered off in the wrong direction and rerouted her. She’d seen fathers do the same thing to their little blue offspring in the market. Once he’d swooped her into his arms to walk over a muddy patch of gravel in the road. When they walked back across that same patch a few hours later, it had been repaired. When she pointed it out he casually said that he’d had someone take care of it.

She couldn’t resist him.
He was stunning. He thought nothing of tossing her over his shoulder or slapping her ass, resting his palm there as he walked along with her peering curiously at things even upside down. Thankfully, Eyoen saved most of his dominance for the bedroom. Otherwise Cass figured they’d probably exist in one of his magic bubbles. But inside his suite he had no boundaries, and she wanted none.

The lovemaking
remained incredible. Cass had already written a song about it for her next album. She was even thinking of releasing it as the first single. She often had feelings like this about her work, a knowing that had yet to fail her. She knew the public would love the song. It was dripping with sex, and she might even fuel the flames by having Eyoen be the romantic lead in the video.

A
ll Cass knew was she was sprung. Maybe it was the careless way he’d kiss her breathless as they walked along, not caring that people stared avidly. Maybe it was the way he touched her, Cass couldn’t put a finger on it, but he was now a part of her. She woke smiling knowing his face would be there on the pillow beside her. She went to sleep smiling, not just because of sundry orgasms but because he was holding her close. Every single day he showed her again and again that he loved her.

And he r
arely said it. He might throw out the occasional, “my dear, I do adore you,” and kiss her soundly, but he didn’t need to. It was obvious. Even if she didn’t know, if he didn’t make it cellophane clear, she could read his love for her in other’s faces.

S
ometimes she had to fight down an irrational fear that something was coming to uproot everything. Like a pessimist who doesn’t trust when everything is going well, she began to feel as though she too was rubbing her chest to soothe an imaginary wound.

Still, she was having the time of her life.
Eyoen would mention somewhere or something that he wanted her to see, and once she agreed, poof, they’d be there. He showed her things so beautiful she lamented that she had no camera. But the King would not allow any pictures because nothing she shot existed to anyone she might show back on Earth. Thus, she was having Eyoen’s baby sister paint her something to take home. She was fabulously talented.

T
he painting would be a memento, and it would give Priti and Boyd and Lucky and Tommy some reference point for her ‘vacation.’ She wasn’t sure she’d be coming back, and she was trying hard to remember everything she touched. She pressed flowers into a book of the region the King gave her. Beautiful blooms in vibrant colors unlike anything found on Earth, but first she scattered the flowers over Eyoen’s naked body. The redolent blooms left their scent behind, and she took great pleasure in skimming her nose over those places, and tracing their shapes on his flesh with one long finger.

He took her to forests where the trees had electric blue trunks and black metallic leaves with pale or
ange flowers. They ate neon pink fruit plucked from rose red vines.
Jyut
tasted like a cross between a lemon and a cherry, but there was no bitterness only an explosion of sweet and the sensation of fading warmth on the tongue.

Eyoen teased her warningly that if she ate too many she would become pregnant. It was the fruit Cyani women ate to aid fertility. Her answer was to pack her cheeks to bulging and spend the next 10 minutes chewing the mouthful down before she pulled him down on top of her and with a wordless suggestion prompted him to nail her enthusiastically into the soft, fragrant brown and
gold grass.

Eyoen told her the grass was wonderful food for their cattle, a placid animal that was the size of at least two cows. And that it also was the most prominent ingredient in the bricks they used to create the buildings, after the cows got through with it.

Cass had wrinkled her nose. “Why don’t they stink?”

He laughed. “There are a few other ingredients, my dear.”

There was no one to see except the
Yenta,
little birds that looked like puff balls with tails that flew in formation over their heads.

“How do they do that,” she wondered. “I see birds do it at home, but there’s always one or two stragglers, outliers who don’t go completely with the flow. These birds are perfect.”

“It might be my mother’s influence.”

“Huh?”

He gestured to the top of the next hill. They were lying at the bottom of one gentle slope, surrounded by the faint scent of chocolate that came from the grass.

Now, she tried
to burrow into the grass to hide. “Did she see us?” she cried as his mother raised her hand at his wordless greeting.

Eyoen manfully controlled his
laughter. “No. Do you think I would allow my mother to watch us make love?”

“Well, what’s she doing here?”

“She swears that this one flower that she likes to make perfume from only grows where I am, or where I’ve been so she finds me to look for the flower.”

“That’s kinda stalkery.”

He laughed. “I suppose so, but she keeps her distance and never interferes, no matter what she sees.”

Cass’ mouth fell open. “Has she seen you fucking?”

Eyoen laughed. “I hope not. But you have to understand, my mother, women on Cyanus period, they’re not shocked by sex. A mother who walked in on a son mid bout likely would laugh and bring refreshments. It’s just our culture and the way women are perceived and valued.”

“That’s cool and creepy all at the same time.”

Eyoen nodded and grinned. “She makes an absolute fortune from that perfume.”

“It’s all about commerce
.”

“Yes, very much so. We’re a star filled with salesmen.”

“Only not the smarmy, slick, asshole version. You guys seem to focus intently on value.”