Jennifer Armentrout - Bitter Sweet Love

One side of his lips curved. “I could get used to... this every morning.”

I sucked in a breath when his lashes flicked up. Yanking up the cover, I glared at him. “Keep dreaming, bud.”

He chuckled as he stretched out, resting his cheek on his fist. “Do you have studies this morning?”

“No. I’ve finished. I’m done.” All the Wardens were homeschooled and, as with humans, most of us completed our studies around age eighteen. We were provided with a lot of book smarts, but many of us, especially the females, had no real sense of the world. I peeked up at him. “Why?”

“Good. We can start on those conditions you mentioned now.”

“Now?” Stretching up, I looked at the alarm clock. “It’s not even seven!”

He grinned. “You have a lot of conditions and I’m not wasting a moment.”

Well, I’d kind of brought that on myself.

“And I also have a condition,” he added.

“What?” I sat up, eyes narrowing. “You can’t do that now. We already agreed—”

“We didn’t sign a binding contract, Jas,” he said dryly as he pushed up. As big as he was, he took over the whole bed.

“What is your condition?”

My insides coiled tight at the slow smile that crept over his face. “That we complete each of your conditions with a kiss.”

I gaped at him. “Seriously?”

“Seriously,” he murmured. “You’re getting something out of this, so should I.”

“Well, that’s real nice to hear.”

He shrugged large shoulders.

“My company should be enough,” I shot back.

“Your company is, but take it or leave it, Jas. You want to do these things and I want you. And you want to play this game, so I’m going to play.”

The stubbornness he’d displayed as a boy when he wanted something hadn’t changed. Usually it had been reserved for arguments over video games or wanting to hunt before he was old enough, but never had it been about me.

My heart pounded in my chest as I stared at him. I had the sinking sensation that somehow the conditions I’d established last night had played right into what he wanted―and now he had the upper hand.

You’d think a Warden, with his ability to phase and turn his skin into granite and rapidly heal, wouldn’t be petrified of being inside a car.

But Dez looked as if he was going to be sick.

Both hands were planted on the dashboard as he stared out the windshield of the SUV. “Right! Turn the steering wheel right!”

I turned right and the car jerked to the side, tires uneven on the shoulder, jolting us. “Sorry.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t have taken the SUV,” he grumbled.

I giggled.

For six hours, we’d been in and out of the car and switching seats as Dez attempted to impart his driver’s education skills to me. We’d started in front of the manor, easing the SUV around the cul-de-sac and up and down the long driveway. It drew a lot of attention from the males and even more jests at Dez’s expense. He’d taken it in good stride and had been laughing up until the moment he’d deemed I was ready to take the SUV out on one of the many back roads that weren’t heavily traveled. We’d eaten a quick lunch and then hit the roads, and that’s when the real fun began.

Driving wasn’t so hard, I realized.

I straightened the wheel and smiled as he eased back in the seat, his legs stretched out, pushing against an imaginary brake. “It’s not that bad.”

He slid me a sideways glance. “You might want to ease off the gas pedal.”

My gaze dipped to the speedometer. Pushing sixty-five, I gripped the steering wheel as my smile spread to epic proportions. Trees blurred on either side of the narrow roads as I pressed down on the pedal, hitting seventy.

Dez braced a hand on the car door. “Remember, hands at the nine and three o’clock position.”

“I thought it was ten and two o’clock?”

“No.” He sucked in a breath. “Curve. Curve coming up. Slow down. Curve!”

I readjusted my hands and lessened the pressure on the gas, but my heart jumped in my chest as the SUV hugged the centerline. With the window down, wind blew through my hair and over my skin. “It’s like flying.”

“Except we’re in a several-ton death trap,” he muttered.

Laughing, I gunned it on the straightaway and giddiness swept through me. Driving for many Wardens wasn’t a big deal, not after they got their license and it became a method of getting from point A to point B, but there was something liberating in the tires eating away at the miles, in traveling almost as fast as we could fly. I was getting away from the house. I was escaping.

“You’re really enjoying this, aren’t you?”

I nodded. “It’s so... well, you’ll probably think it’s stupid.”

“I won’t. Tell me.”

“It’s freeing and it’s... normal and strange somehow.” I struggled to find the right words as we crested a hill. “Danika is the only girl close to my age and she’s always busy trailing after the guys, so she’s never been interested in this kind of thing or really anything I’m interested in.”

“She’s still trying to learn how to fight?” Amusement colored his tone.

My sister wanted to fight demons. That was never going to happen, but she’d manage to convince the males to train her for self-protection. “Yeah, and while that’s fun and passes the time, I like to...”

“Get out?”

I nodded again, silent as I remembered the past three years of being alone in so many ways. Dez had been my buddy, my partner in doing things I shouldn’t be doing, and when he left, a lot of things became impossible.

Dez shifted in the seat, his large body crammed into the spacious SUV. Seconds ticked by before he spoke. “Why didn’t you ask anyone else to teach you?”

“I did, but none of them had the patience or thought it was a good idea.” The constant irritation of being caged stoked to life like a fire. “They think that if we do this, then we’ll just run amok and get ourselves in trouble. That demons will find us and—”

“Demons will find you, Jasmine. They sense us just like we sense them. It isn’t safe for you to be out here without one of us.”

“I’m not weak.” I cut him a sharp look.

“I’m not saying that. You’ve never been weak. Not once.” His sincerity rang true. “But if you were ever to run into an Upper Level demon, you would not get away.”

I bit my lip. There were many types of demons. Most common were Fiends. They looked human and they were into general mayhem, breaking things down, starting fires, manipulating the emotions of large crowds. I’d heard they could be ferocious when cornered. Then there were Posers. They too looked human, but only for a short while, and they had one hell of an appetite, including the rare cannibalistic tendency. When they bit a human, things went downhill fast—like turning-into-a-zombie fast. There were dozens more, but most dangerous of all were the Upper Level ones—the princes and dukes of Hell—the very kind that had killed my mother and wiped out Dez’s clan. They were rare, but their threat was very real.

Suddenly, some of the fun was sucked right out of this experience.

“I’m sorry.”

His apology caught me off guard and I wanted to not be affected by it, but my chest spasmed.

“When I left, I knew it would impact you, but I didn’t realize all that it would change,” he continued quietly. “I didn’t think that you’d be alone, stuck there.”

“Stuck” was an accurate description. “Well, I guess in reality, you really didn’t owe me anything, right? You didn’t accept my father’s offer and you—”

“I did owe you.” His eyes flashed teal. “If it hadn’t been for you, well, God only knows what would’ve become of me. You helped me move on, for the most part. And you...” He trailed off, staring out the passenger window. “Anyway, I’m glad you’re enjoying this.”