He seemed so sad, so defeated somehow. Even though I thought he was crazy, I still wanted to soothe him.
Chavez thought my glasses were sexy, my dumpiness cute, my penchant for reading on a Friday night attractive. No wonder I wanted to keep him around forever.
Which only made me as nuts as he was. But I was starting to wonder if that wasn’t the case.
“You want some coffee?” I blurted.
“Yeah.” He slipped out the doors and into the night.
Quickly I threw on my sweats, grabbed my glasses, and hurried through the darkened apartment. In the kitchen I reached for the light switch, and someone grabbed my hand.
I drew a deep breath to shriek, and another hand slapped over my mouth. This was happening to me with far too much regularity lately.
“Did you think I’d let you go?”
The voice wasn’t Eric’s. Come to think of it, the guy was too tall to be Eric. His body was pressed to the length of mine and then some.
Whoever he was, he really, really liked me.
I tried to speak, but he tightened his hold, pulling my neck backward until I thought he might break it. I went silent; I had no choice.
“You’re mine now. I need what only you can give.”
He kissed my neck, scraped the throbbing vein with his teeth. A weird lethargy came over me. My blood seemed to thicken and slow; my pulse beat in my ears as if I’d been running for miles, or making love for a long time.
I was suddenly free—to scream, to fight, to escape. I did none of those things. Instead, I turned around and flicked on the lights.
As I’d suspected, the man in my kitchen wasn’t Eric. I’d never seen him before. Taller, broader, his hair was dark blond, his eyes brown.
He shrugged out of his shirt. The garment slid down his arms and spilled onto the floor.
His skin was glaring white, like marble, the muscles shifting and bunching as he moved. I was seized with a sudden urge to lick every one of them as he rose above me, came into me, took me over and over, until I—
I shook my head, hard, tempted to slam it against the countertop until I found myself again.
“Wh-who are you?” I asked.
“You know.”
His fingers slid down his chest, caressing himself, lowering to the zipper that bulged over an erection my mouth went dry at the notion of seeing.
The sound of the zipper being opened made me start so violently my skin tingled.
“You’ll die willingly in my arms,” he whispered. “They always do.”
As if from a long way off, I heard his words, puzzled over them, discarded any unease. The sex would be amazing. I’d come screaming. I’d beg him to do me again, and he would. He’d keep at it until I was—
Chavez loomed behind him. His presence brought me back to myself, so when he snapped, “Get down!” I did, hitting the floor just as a sheet of flame streaked from his hand.
I cried out as the strange man in my kitchen, the one I’d been willing to screw seven ways from Sunday, became a burning ball of fire.
My smoke detector went off; the sprinklers rained water on us all. The man, whose name I didn’t know, stopped burning. There wasn’t a mark on him.
He stared at Chavez. “You again.”
“Me always.”
The stranger turned to me.
“We aren’t finished,” he said.
And then he disappeared.
5
“Y ou believe me now?” Chavez asked as we dripped all over the carpet from the kitchen into the living room.
He’d turned off the alarm, which had shut down the sprinklers, while I called security and lied. “I burned some toast.”
No one asked why I was making toast at 3 A.M. One of the perks of living in a building like this—money not only got you attention, it got you left alone.
“The guy disappeared.” My voice sounded as dazed as I felt. “Poof.”
Chavez gave me a slight push, and I collapsed onto the couch. Water darkened his hair, ran down his cheekbones, dotted his eyelashes. “Towels?”
“Hall closet.”
He retrieved a stack, divided them, and sat in a chair as he began to dry his hair.
“That wasn’t Eric,” I said.
“No.”
“He also wasn’t human.”
“No. Shape-shifter most likely.”
I tried not to gape, but failed.
“Like a werewolf?”
“In a way. Demons shift into different people. Werewolves change from a man, or a woman, into a wolf, then back again.”
“You say that as if they exist.”
He lifted a brow.
I lifted my hand. “I don’t want to know.”
Chavez went silent for a moment, then said slowly, “Why did he come back?”
“I’m irresistible?”
“Sure, but…” He trailed off.