Necromancing Nim (41 page)

Or not. He started moving, and I stopped thinking. There was no room in my head for sadness or regret or second thoughts or anything that required higher-level thinking. His cock flipped the Off switch to my brain.

Nestled together like this, my head fit neatly under his chin. He caressed my forehead with his lips as he rocked into me. One hand cupped my breast while other hand slid down between us, touching right…there…and it was all over.

A hand stroked into my hair as I toppled over the edge, shaking apart against Colin’s wide chest. It wasn’t until I puffed out a final breath, my body winding down, that I managed to do the math.

Hand on tit, hand on clit, hand on hair—that was three hands. I could still feel all three of them.

“Um…Colin?” I ventured.

He was in no position to answer my question, his face writhing through a series of some of the most ridiculous O-faces I’d ever seen. I waited. Whatever was going on as far as hands in contact with my body, it didn’t strike me as an emergency worthy of interrupting his orgasm. I’d seen him in a wide range of cranky, but I couldn’t even imagine what that particular shade of Colin would look like.

Finally he let out a gasp and his head sagged.

“Colin?” I ventured again. The hand in my hair had tightened. It hurt a little, but not too badly.

“Yes?” He didn’t open his eyes.

“You didn’t grow an extra hand, did you?”

At that, his eyes popped open. “What?”

“Three hands,” I told him. “One down there, one over there and one in my hair.”

He shifted. His fingers slid out from between my legs—that hand was definitely attached to Colin. So was the one on my breast. It was the hand in my hair…

And I smelled it. That soft note of sandalwood, the faint smell of starched cotton.

“Oh my God,” I breathed. “Sebastian?”

The hand in my hair jerked back as if startled, and I heard a voice, quiet but unmistakable. And English. “Oh God. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”

And then, as if someone had flipped a switch, the smell disappeared. I gaped at Colin, then sat up, pushing him back so I could look around the room.

“You heard that, right?” I demanded. His eyes were wide, and he swallowed hard as his eyes met mine.

“What was that?” I sounded shrill and freaked out. Which was accurate.

Colin shook his head. “We need to read more of that damn book.”

Epilogue

I moved in with Colin three days later. It isn’t a big deal, since Gwen can keep track of the house. I think she has one of her flight attendant friends sharing space with her now.

Amazingly, Gwen hasn’t even bothered to rib me about sleeping with the boss, which makes me wonder if she’s been possessed by some kind of demon. Nothing seems too fantastic as to be impossible these days. Not after I’ve been smacked upside the head with tangible evidence that vampires can become zombies, and that my asshole vampire boss is capable of love.

Well, maybe it’s not love. Or maybe it is. It doesn’t really matter right now—it’s what we both need. Companionship and healing and somebody in the house who’s willing to put up with you even when you’re the bitchiest person imaginable. I’m talking about Colin here of course. We fit, somehow, Colin and I. He’s a pain in the ass, and I’m a pain in the ass, but when we’re pains in the ass together, it just works.

Nobody at the office seems to notice that he’s slightly less assholish to me, or that we drive home together sometimes. Or that sometimes he locks the door when we have meetings. Or maybe they’re just afraid of getting fired if they mention the noises going on during those meetings. After all, those noises are hard to miss. We’re loud. Okay, I’m loud. Can you blame me? He likes to bite.

I have a new office at work. It has a big desk and there’s actually enough room for me to roll my chair back and put my feet on it. It’s right next to Colin’s —he might have fired somebody to open it up for me. I don’t actually know.

I have a big desk so I can spread out all the papers and notes from the translations we brought back from Illinois. Colin does the translations, and I read through them, trying to make connections. We translated all the bits that related to destroying the stone, but we stopped there. We should have kept going.

I keep seeing him out of the corner of my eye, tall and rangy and disappearing when I look right at him. I smell him in the bedroom or on the porch, that scent of sandalwood and soft cotton wafting on the evening breeze. And sometimes he touches me, and it’s enough to drive me back to the books, to the work of translation.

We can do this. I know we can. It’s just a matter of putting all the right pieces together.

About the Author

Katriena Knights wrote her first poem when she was three years old and had to dictate it to her mother under the bathroom door (her timing has never been very good). Now she’s the author of several paranormal and contemporary romances. She grew up in a miniscule town in Illinois and now lives in a miniscule town in Colorado with her two children, her goofy dog, two ferrets and a weird little gerbil. Visit her website at
www.katrienaknights.com
, or at her blog at
katrienaknights.blogspot.com
.

Look for these titles by Katriena Knights

Now Available:

Starchild

Earthchild

Where There’s a Will

Dealing with David

It’s tough to win the game of love if you don’t understand the rules.

Dealing with David

© 2012 Katriena Knights

Though Tony Mullin agreed to put on a medieval costume, complete with pointy hat, for her best friend’s marriage vow renewal, another round of wedding bells will never be in her own future. Been there, done that, still sifting through the ashes of broken dreams.

Yet she can’t take her eyes off the Armani-clad mystery man among the guests—and no one’s more surprised to learn it’s David Peterson, the erstwhile nerd who mooned over her in high school. He not only grew up to be a hunk, but a rich one as well. Pity she’s sworn off men.

Last David knew, sweet, artistic Tony married the high school quarterback. He made his fortune developing video games, but the torch he carried for her still smolders. His surprise that she’s ditched the jock quickly turns to determination to win her heart at last…though she seems just as determined to play keep-away.

David didn’t become successful by giving up easily. A freak snowstorm plays into his strategy, but debugging a few gigabytes of computer code seems easier than figuring out how to win this wary woman’s love.

Warning: Contains strange Colorado weather patterns and video game heroines with breasts that could put your eye out.

Enjoy the following excerpt for
Dealing with David:

A soft murmur of music drifted down the hallway. David’s bedroom door was partly open, and a light burned beyond it. Tony padded to the door and peered around it.

Yet another computer occupied a desk in a corner of the bedroom. David sat in front of it, his back to the door. Hesitantly, she knocked.

He turned to face her. He wore glasses now, lightweight wire frames with thin lenses. They made him look bookish but not at all unattractive. Tony became suddenly, acutely aware of where she was and tried very hard not to look at the bed.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Nothing really.” His quilt was maroon and black, she noticed, a geometric pattern that complemented the one in the guest room. “I just can’t sleep.”

David grinned and reached over to pull some paper out of the printer tray. His sweatshirt rode up when he bent over, and Tony had a hard time convincing herself she shouldn’t look at his bare skin. The shirt settled back into place as he straightened.

“Here you go,” he said, handing her the paper and a pen.

Tony shook her head, not willing to admit he’d given her exactly what she needed. But she’d always sketched when she was nervous, even in high school. He’d kidded her about it more than once.

She should just leave now, she thought, but before she could stop herself, she said, “Do you, um…wear contacts now, or did you have Lasik?”

He smiled. “Lasik. I only wear glasses now at night, when my eyes are tired, or when I’ve been on the computer a long time. It was totally worth it.”

“I’ll bet. So what are you working on? Another game?”

He rolled his chair to one side so she could see the screen. Crudely rendered stick figures stood posed in battle in front of a background of color blocks.

“
Dark Princes III
,” he said. “It’s a really early version. We still don’t have the artwork hashed out, so we’re just blocking out some of the major action sequences. Rich and I wrote up the plot along with one of our other programmers. The other programmer wasn’t happy about the predominately male characters in the first two games, so we took her advice, and now
Dark Princes III
is about Prince Aelfwyn’s sister Aethelfried.”

“Well, that’s a nice change of pace, anyway. Those adventure games always seem so sexist.” Belatedly, Tony noticed her clipped tone.

David only grinned. “Touché. Actually, I’d always intended to move into some more gender-flexible games, but the
Dark Princes
plot didn’t lend itself too well to that, and games with male leads are proven to sell better.”

“Why is that?” asked Tony.

“Supposedly women don’t have a problem playing games where they’re presenting themselves as a male character, but men aren’t so happy pretending they’re a female character. A few games have bucked the standard, but with
Dark Princes
being a new franchise, I decided to play it safe.”

“I see.” Tony paused, evaluating her tone. Had she sounded too snippy? “I guess video games are a man’s world too.” Just like everything else. Yeah, that had sounded a little snippy. She needed to work on that.

David didn’t seem offended. He turned back toward the computer and touched a button. The stick figures came to life, moving into confrontation. “The world is what you make of it.”

Maybe for you.
Tony managed to quash that thought before she voiced it aloud. Some people turned everything they touched to gold. Others turned it to mud.

She started to back out of the room, then paused, watching the little stick figures bash each other with stick-figure swords. Their movements were jerky, unrefined, but even at this stage, she could tell the choreography of the battle had been carefully thought out. They just needed clothes. And skin and muscles and, well, faces would be good too. Pictures started to form in her mind of what they might look like, pictures that made the tips of her fingers long to hold a pencil, to work it all out where she could see it.

“What got you interested in this line of work?” she heard herself asking.

He glanced back over his shoulder. “I spent a lot of time in front of video game consoles in high school and college. It seemed like a natural progression.”

“I guess you always were good at math.”
Lame, Tony.
She really didn’t know what developing computer games involved, though, other than the obvious programming skills.

He chuckled. Even her lamest lameness didn’t seem to faze him much. “I am that. And I can barf up C++ code with both hands tied behind my back, typing with my nose.”

It was an interesting image on numerous levels. “I’d like to see that.”

“I bet you would.” He swiveled his chair so that he faced her more directly. Her eyes caught on the line of his throat, the curve of it as it disappeared behind his collar. His heartbeat pulsed in the groove along the side of his neck, and there was a small spot just under his chin where he hadn’t shaved quite cleanly. “Anyway, I studied computer science in college, where I met Rich, and we decided to take the jump and start marketing our own games.”

“Rich programs too?”

“Yeah, and he has a better eye for art than I do, so he recruited our initial graphic artists. Now we have a department for that, and he runs it. Good artists are hard to find.” His gaze seemed to narrow on her little, as if he were trying to tell her something. She didn’t know what that might be. She certainly didn’t know anything about art for computer games. Sure, she knew her way around Photoshop, but she was going to be an accountant, so it wasn’t really relevant knowledge. Uncomfortable under his attention, she lifted the hand that held the paper.

“Thanks for the paper.”

“Any time.” His smile was warm. She wanted to get away—wanted to move closer. She could almost feel his touch again, the casual, not-quite-accidental tracery of his fingers against her thigh. God, she really needed to get out of here. His gaze weighed heavy on her as she turned and headed back to the guest room.

The bed had grown chilly in her absence, and it took a few minutes for Tony’s body heat to soak the sheets again. With the pile of paper propped in her lap—not exactly steady but steady enough for her use—she began to sketch.

She started doodling; then that mysterious something took over, and she found the lines shaping a horse, a woman on its back, dressed in war gear. She slid out of the warm bed to kneel next to the nightstand, spreading papers out under the light of the lamp. With the wider, harder surface, the picture became more intricate until she had produced something that looked more like a professionally finished product than a doodle.