The Taking (27 page)
Authors: Erin McCarthy
When he came back, Regan was glaring at him. “What exactly are we doing here?”
“What do you mean?” he said, even as he knew exactly what she meant.
“You’re packing to stay with me overnight, probably more than one night, and yet you’re acting like you’re irritated to even be in my presence. This isn’t going to work. I don’t have to put up with this.”
She stood up, her shiny black purse clanking against her leg, as she readied to brush past him indignantly.
Felix sighed. “Regan, don’t go. I’m sorry. I’m not irritated to be around you, I just...”
“You just what?”
Maybe he should just tell her the truth. Tell her who and what he was. Maybe that was the only way to save them both from pain. Just open his mouth and explain that he was over one hundred and fifty years old, enslaved to a demon in exchange for his worthless life. Let her know that she was possibly in danger from the ghost of Camille and that her ex-husband had sent her chocolates filled with a special little semen surprise.
Then she would conclude he was insane, walk out, and they would never see each other again.
But he couldn’t do it.
Because Regan was vulnerable without him watching her back. She was involved in a world she knew nothing about, and Felix had no idea what her role was meant to be yet. He would never forgive himself if something happened to her.
And because he couldn’t deny himself her. He just couldn’t. It had been too long since he had felt the soft touch of a woman, since he had allowed himself to lie next to someone, to talk about himself. The loneliness was an ache he had managed to ignore until Regan had forced him to feel the bleed of the open wound being alone had sliced in his life.
“I don’t know how to do this,” he told her honestly.
“Do what?”
“This!” He pointed to her and to himself and back to her. “Have a relationship. I haven’t had one in a hundred years and I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing.”
She relaxed a little, her shoulders dropping. “A hundred years?” She smiled. “Wow, you’re older than I thought”
If she only knew.
It was clearly a teasing joke, but it struck a nerve with Felix. “I’m being serious, Regan.”
“Okay. Fine. I’m being serious too. So you’re uncomfortable. I am too. But being belligerent and aloof isn’t going to help us figure out how to deal with our feelings and each other.”
Rational and beautiful. If she told him she cooked, he was lost. Hell, he was already lost and he knew it.
“That’s true. I can’t argue with that”
“Let’s not argue at all:”
Argue was definitely not what he wanted to be doing. “I have a better idea of how to put my tongue to use.”
Her eyes darkened. “Show me.”
Avoiding difficult conversations with sex. He was good at that.
“Sit down.” He stepped forward so that she automatically moved back.
He didn’t kiss her. He didn’t touch her. He just stalked until she hit the edge of his bed and sat down, her shiny proper purse still hooked over her arm. Felix pushed up her white skirt, exposing her pale, firm thighs.
Regan gasped, but she didn’t stop him.
Yanking on her knees, he dragged her to the very edge of the bed and went under her skirt, snapping the string of her white panties so he could pull them to the side. He had to taste her, had to sink his tongue inside her and feel how wet she was for him.
When he flicked over her, he got his answer. She was damp and ready already, a juicy treat just for him. He could hear her ragged breathing, feel her fingers digging into his shoulders.
He licked and sucked with urgent, intense strokes, needing to express his overwhelming and chaotic feelings for her, wanting her to understand that he couldn’t control this, what they were doing, where they were going. Her hands shifted to his chest, pressing against him like she couldn’t take it, like she wanted him to retreat.
Felix pushed against her resistance and bit her clitoris. Regan came hard, with a beautiful loud cry that echoed in his dingy apartment, her thighs trembling.
Her hand closed around his necklace, and as her body rocked and her muscles contracted, she yanked and broke the chain.
The cross his mother had given him tumbled down to the floor as her perfect little purse knocked him in the side of the head.
Chapter Fourteen
They went to dinner. Had a normal conversation about her job, the fund-raiser, his love of jazz. They walked to a bar on Frenchman to listen to some live music. Then back to her house where they watched an action flick on DVR. Like two normal people dating. It was so ordinary it was unnerving.
When he took her bare feet and started massaging them, Regan was pretty damn sure she’d fallen down the rabbit hole.
But she also figured she might as well enjoy it while she was in the hallucination.
Not that it was
exactly
normal. She’d never had sex with a man the way she did with Felix, raw and intense and shattering. And insatiable. She wanted him again, more, all of him.
exactly
normal. She’d never had sex with a man the way she did with Felix, raw and intense and shattering. And insatiable. She wanted him again, more, all of him.
It was scary and exhilarating, and she didn’t want him to leave, at the same time she had no idea what to really do with him in her house.
“God, that feels good,” she said, twisting on the couch so her legs stretched out fully. “Thank you.”
“You have very cute toes.” He rubbed each one thoroughly then gave her pinky toe a kiss.
Now she was really in a parallel universe. One where she had a gorgeous man who wined and dined her and made love to her in her beautiful house, who didn’t care one iota about her money, and who made her forget all about her lack of sleep.
“So tell me about the sleepwalking. Do you remember it?”
Or not.
Regan sighed. “No, I don’t remember it. I just keep waking up in a different bedroom. It doesn’t seem dangerous. Just annoying.”
He stopped rubbing her feet. “Which room?”
“The front one. It’s totally empty. I don’t have any furniture for it yet, so I wake up on the floor.” She realized she could make a plea for a backrub too. “It’s killing my back.”
“Do you want me to rub that?”
Score. “Oh, you don’t have to.”
“I don’t mind. Lay down on your stomach.”
By the time Felix had rubbed every inch of her body and slid into her from behind, tripping off a catastrophic orgasm, Regan was positive she would sleep so solidly she wouldn’t move all night.
But the next morning she woke to Felix gently shaking her awake in the same front room.
“We need to talk about this,” he said, once she had rubbed the sleep from her eyes and sat up.
“I don’t want to talk about it”
What was there to say? People sleepwalked. Just because she had suddenly started meant nothing.
But she knew that it did.
She just didn’t want to face whatever it was.
“What do you want for breakfast?” she asked as she stood up and tried to discreetly stretch her stiff muscles.
Felix let the subject of sleepwalking drop. “I don’t know. We could just go to the coffee shop.”
“I was going to make you breakfast. Are you a bacon-and-eggs kind of guy?”
Felix, who was bare-chested in his boxers, just stared at her. “What do you mean ... you’re going to actually cook for me?”
He looked so shocked she laughed. “Yes. I can cook, you know.” And she needed to buy him a new chain for his cross necklace as soon as possible. She felt guilty for breaking it during sex, and his chest looked so bare without it.
“Yeah, but...” Felix shook his head, then he smiled at her, a smile so open and honest and happy she felt a river of emotion swell up inside her. “I would love bacon and eggs. If you don’t mind. If it’s not too much trouble.”
“Of course not.” Regan moved into his arms and rested her head on his shoulder. “I want to do something for you for a change. I want to ...” She hesitated, unsure how to convey what she was feeling.
“You want to what?”
Regan looked into his eyes. “I want to be there for you. I want to be with you. Maybe I shouldn’t say that, maybe it’s too soon.”
But he shook his head. “It’s not too soon. It’s what I want, too. And maybe this is going to sound weird, but thank you.”
Tilting her head, Regan studied him. “For what?”
“For being you. For being willing to put up with me.” Felix brushed a kiss over her lips. “For actually liking me.”
“Of course I like you,” she said, returning his kiss with one of her own. His lips were warm, his eyes still sleepy. “I like you a lot.”
“And I guess I can’t ask for anything more than that.”
On her lunch break, after picking up a new chain for Felix’s necklace, Regan ran over to the public library, determined to do some more research on Camille. There was something about the girl ... something about her losing her family in Regan’s house, that had her curious to find out what had happened to her. Regan could ask Felix, since he’d done research on the house, but then she would be forced to confront both of their fears over her sleepwalking.
She had never sleepwalked in her entire life, and that she was doing it now felt somehow connected to the spirit of the dead girl. It felt like Camille wanted to tell her something, that she wanted her death known, grieved. Maybe it was as simple as that. The girl who had died after her entire family had probably had no one to genuinely grieve for her, and maybe if Regan gave her that, she would pass on to the other side, or whatever it was spirits did.
And Regan could reclaim her house and her sleep.
A quick search of death records online showed that Camille Comeaux had died in October of 1878, a mere four months after her family had died in the yellow fever epidemic.
Frowning, Regan shifted in the hard chair, the hush of the library settling around her. She had to find out how Camille died. It was possible she had died of disease as well, either the same one as her family, or something else. Prior to antibiotics, death was common from illnesses that were easily cured in the modern era of medicine.
But something told her Camille hadn’t died a natural death.
Searching the newspaper archives with the dates a few days after the one on Camille’s death certificate, Regan found confirmation of her fears immediately.
HEIRESS DIES BY OWN HAND!
Camille Comeaux, the youngest daughter of Francois Comeaux, who perished in our city’s latest battle against the dreaded yellow fever along with his wife and four daughters, has joined her family in death. Her broken and bloodied body was found in the courtyard of her home, where she landed after jumping from the balcony above, her goal to take her own life sadly successful. Witnesses report Miss Comeaux leapt to her death as nature intended her, with a snake around her neck. Gossips foreshadowed an unfortunate ending for this grief-stricken girl, as her behavior had been suspect in prior months, with whispers of the consumption of spirits and wearing white while in deep mourning. A once great family comes to an unceremonious and inglorious end with her untimely demise.
Regan shivered as she stared at the computer screen. Suicide. Off the Juliet balcony Regan had once found so charming. The very balcony she herself had been sitting on in her sleep like it was a sofa at noon.
It was too coincidental to be random. It was too bizarre to believe it could be anything but.
And a snake around her neck?
Jesus. Regan grabbed her purse and ran to the ladies’ room, afraid she was going to throw up. Careening into a stall, she knelt on the cold tile floor and breathed in and out, determined to swallow her nausea. It didn’t make sense. None of it made any sense.
The urge to vomit quieted, but Regan’s mind didn’t.
It was insane. All of it.
Or was she the insane one?
Her phone rang in her purse, startling her into jerking back away from the toilet. Fumbling to get it out, she prayed it was Felix. He would be calm. Nothing freaked him out. He would talk her off the ledge.
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