Lover At Last(148)

“So what do you do for a living?”

“This and that.”

“In what field?”

Ordinarily, she got pissed quick when people became nosy. But his affect was calm and easy, so this was just date conversation.

“I guess you could call it criminal justice.”

“Oh, you’re into the law.”

“I’m very familiar with it, yes.”

“That’s cool.” Mark cleared his throat. “So…you look really good.”

“Thanks. I think it’s my trainer.”

“Oh, somehow I think you’d be doing fine without me.”

As they fell into an uncomplicated back-and-forth, she actually started to relax—and then their dinners arrived and they got another round of beer. It was so…normal being in the bar, doing the one-on-one thing, getting to know somebody else.

The exact opposite of what she’d played witness to the night before.

Sola shivered as images came back to her…the candlelight, that black-haired man looming over the half-naked woman like he was going to devour her, the two of them unleashed and uninhibited….Then those glittering eyes looking up and meeting her own through the glass as if he’d known all along that she was watching.

“You okay?”

Sola forced herself to focus. “Sorry, yes. You were saying?”

As Mark resumed talking about his training for the Iron Man, she found herself back in the cold outside of that cottage, watching that man and that woman.

Shoot. She’d engineered this date only because she’d wanted an outlet. It wasn’t because she particularly cared about Mark, as nice as he was.

In fact, maybe she had done this because her personal trainer happened to be really tall, and really well built, with very dark hair and very pale eyes.

When guilt rang her bell, she thought, oh, for chrissakes. She was an adult. Mark was an adult. People had sex for all kinds of different reasons—just because she didn’t want to marry the guy didn’t mean she was breaking some cardinal rule…except, crap. Her grandmother’s morality aside, and his shiny, pearly whites and big shoulders to the contrary, she wasn’t actually attracted to Mark.

She was attracted to the man Mark reminded her of.

And that was what made this wrong.





FIFTY-THREE


Even though Qhuinn was hardly an arbiter of taste when it came to meetings of the Council, it was pretty damn clear to him that the assembled group had come to the house expecting one thing, only to get something else entirely.

Wrath didn’t waste or mince words and, after laying the smack-down, wrapped things up within five or ten minutes.

This was a good thing, actually. The faster he finished, the quicker they could get him home.

“In closing,” the king said in his bass voice, “I appreciate the opportunity to address this august group.”

In this case, “august” clearly meant “a-hole-ish.”

“I have other commitments at this time.” Namely, staying alive. “So I will be departing. However, if you have any comments, please direct them to Tohrment, son of Hharm.”

A blink of the eye later and the king left the building with V and Zsadist.

In the wake of the departure, all the fancy-pants in the dining room stayed sitting in their chairs, shock and now-what playing across their attractive features. Clearly, they had expected more…but also less. Kind of like children who had pushed their parents too far and finally gotten a wooden spoon on the ass.

From Qhuinn’s perspective, it was pretty fucking amusing, actually.

The party finally began to break up after the hostess rose to her feet and yammered on about what an honor it was to have had all the yada, yada, yada.

Qhuinn cared about one and only one thing.

And that was the text that came through on his phone about a minute later: Wrath was home safe.

Exhaling slowly, he put his cell back in the inside pocket of his leather jacket and thought about setting off a couple of rounds into the floorboards to get this bunch of stiffs to dance a little. He’d probably get in trouble for that, though.

Bummer.

The crowd started to file out shortly thereafter, to the clear dissatisfaction of the hostess, as if she had gotten dressed up and rearranged her house with the expectation of a long, socially prominent evening—only to find that all she got were two seconds of celebrity and a bucket of KFC for eats.

Sorry, lady.

Tohrment lorded over the exodus, standing in front of the fireplace, nodding his head, saying a few words. In this delegation, Wrath had made a wise choice. The Brother had the appearance of an ass-kicker, with all his weapons, but he’d always been willing and internally inclined to be a peacemaker, and that was no different tonight.