Jenna Black: The Devil's Due

Unlike Dominic, Brian’s kitchen skills were mostly limited to simple fare such as hamburgers or spaghetti with jarred sauce. I guess he’d decided that wasn’t good enough for tonight. There’s a good Italian restaurant approximately every ten yards in Philadelphia, and Brian had ordered takeout from one of them. The fact that the food was still piping hot told me he wasn’t surprised by how late I’d shown up.

Tension sizzled and sparked between us. I fidgeted nervously as Brian laid the food on the table. I saw we’d be eating off paper plates, and wondered if he was just trying to be as informal as possible in a vain attempt to make me comfortable, or if he was afraid of what I’d do if he put breakables in front of me.

By the time we sat down to eat, my stomach was tied in such knots I didn’t know how I’d be able to force any food down. Brian had said little, but I was very much aware of how closely he was watching me. I cut off a hunk of eggplant parmigiana, but the idea of putting it in my mouth made me want to puke.

I must have been wearing my emotions on my face—not unusual for me—because Brian pushed his own food aside and reached across the table to grab my hand.

“My bad,” he said softly. “I should have known we needed to clear the air between us before we ate.”

I let out a whoosh of air, wishing my tension would flow out with it, then slumped in my chair. Gently, I extricated my hand from Brian’s grip and pushed my own plate aside. I couldn’t meet his whisky-brown eyes, afraid of what I’d see in them.

“We can try,” I said. “But you know I suck at this.”

I could almost feel his frown, even though I still hadn’t found the courage to look at him. “What exactly is ‘this’?”

I squirmed. “Talking.”

“Ah. Yes, I know.”

That made me wince, and I finally looked up. “You didn’t have to agree that easily,” I grumbled.

One corner of his mouth was turned up in wry amusement. “You wouldn’t have liked a lie any better.”

“Silence is always nice.”

“Yeah, that was working really well for us.”

Never argue with a lawyer. It’s a losing proposition. “What do you expect me to say, Brian? That I’m okay with you helping Lugh kill my father? Well I’m not, and you know it.”

Brian leaned forward, propping his elbows on the table and fixing me with an intense look. “You’re right, I do. But if I had it all to do over again, I’d do the same thing. If we’d let that demon go back to the Demon Realm knowing what he knew, you’d be dead by now. I’d rather have you hating my guts than dead.”

I rolled my eyes. “I don’t hate your guts,” I said, though I knew he’d just basically manipulated me into saying it.

He shrugged. “Maybe not, but at the moment, you dislike them intensely.”

Even in my muddled state of mind, I couldn’t possibly imagine disliking Brian. I might be disillusioned, and I might have made assumptions about him that turned out to be incorrect, but whatever his faults, he was a truly nice guy. At least, I was pretty sure he was. Had I been putting him on a pedestal all this time, seeing only what I wanted to see?

I grabbed the paper napkin I’d laid over my lap and began calmly tearing it into shreds. “The man I thought I knew would never have been party to murder. You wouldn’t even lie to the police to give me an alibi when they hauled me in for illegal exorcism.”

He let out a long-suffering sigh. “I didn’t lie because I could have been caught in it and that would have made you look guilty. Look, I don’t like what I did. Just thinking about it makes me sick to my stomach. But I love you. I’ve always loved you. How could I let you throw your life away like that?”

Of course, he was right. Der Jäger, the demon who’d possessed my father, had had to die. Not just for my safety, but for Lugh’s. If Lugh died and Dougal took the throne, he’d do his best to make the human race into slaves. There had been far too much at risk to let Der Jäger live. In a way, Brian had even done me a favor, helping Lugh take over so that I didn’t have to be directly responsible for my father’s death. Logic told me I couldn’t hold any of this against Brian. Now, if only emotions were logical. .

I pinched the bridge of my nose, feeling a non-Lugh-induced headache coming on. The napkin lay on the table in front of me in neat, thin strips. I fought the compulsion to start tearing at those strips. I had to swallow past a painful lump in my throat before I could speak.

“I know all that, okay? I understand why you did it, and I know you were right, but I still can’t seem to swallow it.” I’m just not as nice as Brian. I hold grudges and nurse my anger like a well-loved baby. Why a man like him loved someone like me was beyond my comprehension.

Brian’s chair scraped back from the table, the sound making me wince. Was he about to wise up and wash his hands of me? The thought made my stomach clench with dread.

I must have looked as anguished as I felt. Brian flashed me a comforting half-smile, then came around the table to stand behind my chair. When I tried to get up, his hands came down firmly on my shoulders and held me in place. I felt the warmth of his breath on my neck as he bent to whisper in my ear.

“Maybe we need to do something other than talk to break the tension,” he said. He nipped my earlobe gently, just in case I was too clueless to get the hint.

I tried to form a coherent protest. Surely we shouldn’t even be thinking about sex when there were so many issues between us. I even got a husky, grunting sound out of my mouth that was probably the start of a word. Then his hands slid from my shoulders to my breasts, and the protest died in my throat.

“There’s always more than one way to attack a problem,” Brian said in a smug whisper as my nipples beaded under his hands.

I didn’t mean to do it, but my back arched with the pleasure of his touch. My mind was pretty sure this was a bad idea, but my body didn’t give a damn. I tried once more to get up, figuring it was time to take this party to the bedroom, but Brian’s hands tightened on my breasts, holding me in place. It was an odd feeling, being held down by my breasts, but trying to get up would hurt if he didn’t let go, and it seemed he wasn’t planning to.

Against all logic, moisture pooled between my legs. I tried to say something, anything, but my throat was too tight, my breaths too shallow.

When he sensed my capitulation, Brian eased his grip, kneading a breast with one hand as his other hand wandered lower to pull my T-shirt up. I hadn’t figured on getting undressed in front of him tonight, so I was wearing a utilitarian tan bra rather than one of my sexy numbers. Brian didn’t seem to mind. He nibbled on my earlobe, his tongue occasionally flicking to the shell of my ear as his hands slipped under the bra to cup my breasts.

I moaned and pushed myself into his hands, my skin alive with his touch. The damn bra fastened in the back—another sign that I hadn’t been expecting to get any tonight—but instead of bothering to open it, Brian just shoved the cups upward. I’m not exactly flat-chested, so the underwire was painfully tight as he forced it over the fullest part of my chest. I opened my mouth to complain, but then my breasts popped free of the constriction and his hands were back where I wanted them and I forgot what I was going to complain about.

Brian had always been a fantastic lover, and we had so much physical chemistry he could soak my panties with a single smoldering look, but tonight he was. . different. His fingers played with my nipples, plucking and pinching, creating a sensation just on the cusp between pain and pleasure.

Then suddenly, he wrapped one arm around me right beneath my breasts, hauling me to my feet as he kicked the chair out from between us. I gasped as the chair flew across the dining room floor and hit the wall with a bang. Brian buried his face against the side of my neck, his tongue tracing the vein there as he held me tightly against him and ground his erection into my butt.