Tempt Me (17 page)

Because he was selfish. He’d wanted to stay connected to his family. Bethany and BD were that connection. He couldn’t let himself trust he could have his family back, but he didn’t want to be alone.

What was Emmanuel’s reason?

Gabriel rubbed the back of his neck with his palm, thinking of Angelique again. Speaking of hurting people . . . “What about the other thing?”

Bethany’s brow furrowed thoughtfully. “You called it soul sucking. Can you be a little more specific? Maybe something like that’s in here. How does Emmanuel know you can do that? Maybe if he described what he saw . . .”

Gabriel hesitated, and her blue eyes, so like Emmanuel’s, narrowed on him. “How does he know?” she repeated ominously.

“Angelique has a . . . bright soul.” Emmanuel had begun pacing. “I noticed it right away.” He avoided Gabriel’s eyes. “In certain situations, it dims around him. Goes into him. I didn’t notice until this morning that he could take too much.”

The condemnation Gabriel saw on Bethany’s face was no more than he deserved. “I didn’t know. God, do you think I would have—She said she was dizzy but I thought—”

BD tapped the table, drawing their attention. “I don’t like that phrase,
soul sucking
. I like the name you found. Obtenebration. It sounds omnipotent and menacing. Good name for a superpower.”

“We aren’t talking about superpowers, my love.” Bethany was gritting her teeth. “We’re talking about me putting Angelique in danger.” She sighed. “Because I’m an idiot. Because I hated everyone telling me to stay away from you and I thought—”

BD reached across the table and took her hand. “No one speaks about my wife that way. Especially now.”

Gabriel watched the silent communication between the couple. The love, so obvious even he could recognize it. BD looked at the spunky, bookish woman as though nothing else existed, and Bethany . . . She was looking at BD with an expression he’d thought Angelique had—

No. He wouldn’t torture himself.

“Why especially now?” Emmanuel was sitting across from him now, his attention riveted on Bethany.

She blushed. “That’s not important.” Her eyes widened, as though an idea had suddenly come to her. “Manuel, is it only with her? Have you seen him do that with anyone else?”

Gabriel looked on with interest, and Emmanuel shifted uncomfortably. “Not exactly,” he started. “I watched the darker energy gravitate toward him before he was entirely aware of it, and he usually had to find an outlet. Had to fight or . . . other things . . . to dissipate the darkness. This is the first time I’ve seen him interact with energy when he wasn’t . . . well, angry or drunk.”

Bethany tilted her head and hummed under her breath. BD laughed. “She’s so cute when she does that. It usually means she’s figured something out.” He lowered his voice conspiratorially. “I find it incredibly arousing. And I always love her ideas. Especially the ones I inspire.”

Gabriel shook his head. “What are you thinking?”

“In a way, he did inspire this,” Bethany said. “Babe, you told me once there’s a difference between spirit and spirits. Or spirit and souls. You said it was something Loas and a few other beings, like Emmanuel, could see occasionally, but something humans could only feel.”

BD lowered his long lashes, studying her through them. “Yes. Human beings have souls that come back again and again, but spirit is in and around all life, existing as energy.” His eyebrows lifted. “Or emotion.”

Bethany beamed at him as if he’d just discovered the cure for the common cold. “Exactly.”

Gabriel had a headache. “Can we go back to the role-playing game? That was less confusing.”

Bethany turned in her seat, too excited to be still at her discovery. “I don’t think anything like a
djab
is following you, Gabriel. I think, just like your sister can see souls—
ghosts
—you can see spirit. The energy or emotions that are around everyone.”

“That can’t be right.” He shook his head. “I see darkness. It’s sinister and contagious and ugly.”

“That’s where you are. Where you’ve been and where you’ve drawn your power.” BD’s voice was soothing, and Gabriel heard the truth in it. “You closed out everything else, and maybe when you did, you blocked your ability to see it.”

Were they saying that this was a gift he was born with? Like Michelle? If so, someone got turned around on their way to delivering it. “This is new. It only happened after I let that demon in.”

Emmanuel, who’d been silently listening, grimaced at his words. “You didn’t let it in, Gabriel. It took you. You didn’t know how to protect yourself from something like that. Nobody could have.”

“He’s right, Gabriel, and you know it.” Bethany laid her free hand on his arm. “And Michelle and your mother know it, too. The point is—”

“The point is you have a superpower, like her book says.” BD interrupted his wife and waggled his eyebrows playfully.

Gabriel pinched the bridge of his nose. The man was irritatingly cheerful. “An ability that I have no idea how to use or control, or what the point of it is? One that I’ve possibly blocked part of and that drives me around the bend?”

“Every hero has his issues.” Bethany laughed when he turned in her direction.

Emmanuel caught his eye. “I think BD just wants you to ask what
his
superpower used to be.”

Bethany and BD spoke in unison. “Still is.”

Lovely. The ex–sex Loa still had only one thing on his mind. “Can we focus on me for a few more minutes? What about Angelique?”

“You don’t have to worry about Angelique.” Bethany sounded certain.

“He doesn’t?”

“I don’t?”

She pushed the vampire book in his direction. “You’d have to understand women to know what I’m talking about, and you obviously still have some things to learn. Just read this. Maybe it will give you some ideas about your abilities. Emmanuel, I know you don’t want to show yourself, but can I speak with you alone?”

Emmanuel jerked in his seat, then got up to stand beside her. “Of course. I need to speak to you as well.”

Before she could disappear, Gabriel reached out to stop her. “Please, Bethany. I don’t want to hurt her.”

Her expression softened to one of compassion. “Then don’t. But I don’t think you’re taking anything from her that she isn’t willing to part with. If I did, I’d have Celestin come over and tackle you. You know that.”

He did. “Then . . . ?”

She shook her head. “It’s not my place to tell you. Just trust me. And trust yourself. If you don’t want to hurt her, you won’t.”

Emmanuel and Bethany left the room and Gabriel looked down at the book, but he didn’t see the writing. He let the relief wash over him. He hadn’t hurt her.

He
had
hurt her by being stupid and cruel, but that could be fixed. If he wanted it to be. He thought about how he’d felt waking up with her lying next to him. God, he wanted it to be.

“I’ve got an idea.”

Gabriel glanced at BD suspiciously. “Why do I have the feeling I should be nervous?”

BD held out his arms and shrugged carelessly, but there was something in his eyes that belied his body language. An intensity that made Gabriel focus. “Don’t listen, if you like,
mon ami
. But I think you came to me for a reason. And you were right, of course, because I think I am uniquely qualified to help.”

“This I have to hear.” Gabriel leaned back in the chair and crossed his arms.

“Simple.” BD was blunt. “You don’t care what I think. I’m a scoundrel with a second chance. An angel fallen from grace. A—”

Gabriel felt his head pounding again. “I get your point.”

But he wasn’t finished. “I’m not your childhood pal who married your sister, or your watchdog.” He gestured in the direction of Emmanuel. “Or your lover’s older brother, who is, as we all know, a saint among men.”

Gabriel felt his lips curving. It was impossible not to like this guy. “You said you could help?”

BD stood up, pushing his chair back. “I need to see what you do firsthand. We have to get you to a bar. Preferably a place with rowdy patrons and overly loud music.”

“That makes perfect sense.” Maybe he should read the vampire book.

BD leaned forward, his expression saying he wouldn’t take no for an answer. “Now that you know what it is you’re looking at, you have power. Power you could be more prone to use incorrectly if you don’t understand it. If we don’t understand it. Think of it as practice.”

It did make a twisted kind of sense. If he ever wanted to be out in the world again, to stop hiding, he’d have to learn how to control this—whatever it was.

“I’m in.”

The man’s smile was blinding, if tightly controlled. “Just what I wanted to hear. Wait here while I tell my wife where we’re going.”

Gabriel’s loud laughter followed his friend down the hall. “How far the mighty angel has fallen.”

BD’s answer came back without hesitation. “Ah, but it is worth it.”

“All the best adventures start with that sentence, my friend.” BD sent the bartender a smile of thanks and lifted the water he’d ordered to his lips.

Gabriel couldn’t get over it. Here he was beside one of the most infamous—previously immortal—rogues of the last century, watching him ignore all the women sidling closer to him, more interested in the band than his new fan club.

“Water, BD? I have to admit, you are shattering your image. With that Saints cap on, you look more like a soccer dad than the infamous Bone Daddy.”

BD grinned, his striking, amber eyes alight. “Truly? Thank you, Gabriel. You are a good friend.”

Gabriel hadn’t meant it as a compliment, but it was obvious that was how it was taken. There was no other explanation. Love apparently made men crazy. How else could he explain it? A Loa with power over men and women alike, a being that could live forever, happily domesticated. And Ben Adair, a man who had been relatively sane and successful, now thoroughly tamed by Gabriel’s sister. He didn’t know Celestin Rousseau as well, but it was clear that the tattooed, dreadlocked, previously possessed rebel had also fallen victim to the cult of happy wedlock.

He’d been at several of his father’s weddings. That was a man in love with love. But even as the bride of the moment walked up the aisle, his father had never seemed as content, as whole, as these men did to Gabriel.

He wondered if he had it in him to feel something that strongly, and an image of Angelique and her dimpled, saucy smile immediately filled his mind.

But could it last?

A nervous female voice shook him out of his reverie. “Can I please buy you a drink?”

He turned on his barstool to see a woman who could easily have graced an issue of
Playboy
staring hopefully at the man beside him. She was focused. And clearly willing. Gabriel may as well have been invisible, but he didn’t mind. He sipped his beer, waiting curiously for BD’s reaction.

The former kinky cupid set down his glass and stood. “You are too kind,
cher
.” He took her hand and kissed it with an old-world air that had Gabriel’s eyebrows rising to his hairline.

“You are also beautiful and desirable, and I can see you find me pleasing. Regretfully, I must refuse, since I am joyfully reveling in connubial bliss. However, I have no doubt that you will find the perfect man who will wish to bring you as much ecstasy as I could. Perhaps more. Nothing is impossible.”

Gabriel smiled sympathetically at the statuesque stunner’s confused expression. “He means he’s married. And trust me, I’ve met his wife; you should probably move on.”

She walked away, her shoulders slumped as if someone had kicked her favorite puppy. Several other women who’d heard the exchange followed morosely behind her.

He watched BD sit back down and shook his head. “No wonder Bethany doesn’t let you out much. Does this happen everywhere you go?”

“Most of the time.” BD shrugged one shoulder, unconcerned. “Bethany teases me about it now. Especially since a local cable channel offered me an insane amount of money to host a show teaching men how to attract the opposite sex.”

Somehow Gabriel wasn’t surprised. BD on television would be a ratings bonanza. Men would watch to be like him, women would watch, just as they were doing now in the bar, because it
was
him.

He’d never thought about what a Loa did when he was no longer a Loa. BD and Bethany had a nice home, and it was obvious they weren’t suffering. It was just as obvious that BD was far more interested in doing laundry and chasing his wife around the house than becoming a part of the working class.

Did Loas have retirement funds?

“I take it you turned them down?” he asked.

BD nodded. “There is no honest way to teach sexual attraction. In the end it’s there or it’s not. If a man cannot make his woman want him, isn’t willing to do anything to discover her wildest fantasies and spend a lifetime making them come true, then he doesn’t deserve her.”