Demonfire (14 page)

Still, Eddy followed Dax and
grabbed a couple of clean towels out of the linen closet. She left them on the
counter, along with a toothbrush still in the wrapper and a new razor.

Did Dax even know what
everything was for? She raised her head and caught him watching her with a
bemused smile on his face. Once again, she wished she had an idea what he was
thinking. He was still so hard for her to read. She slapped a tube of
toothpaste next to the toothbrush. “Here,” she said. “If you need anything
else, just yell.”

Then she scooted past him
before he said anything, and made a point of closing the door behind her as she
left. She heard the water go on, the sound of the shower door sliding open and
then closed. She paused beside the bed. Pictured his big body sprawled out
across the rumpled covers and immediately turned to stare instead at the closed
bathroom door.

Now she imagined him in there
under the warm spray, with his hair slicked back behind his ears, brown eyes
closed, face lifted to the pulsing jets of water. His thick, dark eyelashes
would be all clumped together from the spray. Water would glisten like tiny
beads across his broad, broad shoulders.

The muscles in her belly
clenched. A spike of need so strong it felt like a physical touch raced from
her suddenly taut nipples to pool in her lower abdomen. Her vaginal muscles
tightened in reflexive reaction. She sighed.

Damn. Just like his curse, her
response to Dax was growing stronger by the moment. Her need for him seemed to
have taken on a life of its own, but there’d be no cooling touch from Dax to
control her beast. No. If Dax touched her, things were just going to get a
whole lot hotter.

“Get a grip, girl.” She
couldn’t stand here watching the bathroom door like an idiot! She had to do
something, anything, to take her mind off Dax naked.

By the time she heard the taps
shut off, Eddy had the bedding changed and the blinds drawn. The room was
comfortably dark, even though it was only a little after one in the afternoon.
They had at least six or seven hours before they had to go out on patrol.

Dax stepped out of the
bathroom followed by a cloud of steam, and all her good intentions to think of
anything but him flew out the window. His dark hair clung to his cheeks and
neck. He hadn’t shaved, and the day-old stubble on his chin and cheeks made him
look even sexier, if that was at all possible.

Water beaded his chest, and
the tattoo glistened, crawling up his belly from the lower right, crossing the
left side of his chest, and curling around his well-defined pectoral. He’d
wrapped a short towel around his hips, but the tail of the snake peeked out
beneath the towel on his right leg, just above his knee. The jaws still gaped
over his nipple—right over his heart.

All Eddy could think of was
where the snake traveled between those points. How it crossed the soft skin
where his thigh met his groin, passed over the thick root of his penis through
the dark thatch of pubic hair, and curled up the left side of his belly.

The visual was crystal clear,
the way she remembered what he’d looked like naked when she found him in her
potting shed…. Was it only the night before last? Hours ago, actually. How
could she feel as if she’d known him forever? Already her relationship with Dax
had an intimacy she’d never experienced with another man, even if they’d been
lovers.

Would she and Dax ever…? She
wasn’t ready to go there. Not yet. Eddy cleared her throat and ducked past Dax,
into the steamy bathroom. She dug into her stash of disposable razors and
showered, quickly shaved her pits and legs, washed and conditioned her hair…all
without allowing herself to think about the man in the next room.

Whether it was from denying
her mind the directions it wanted to take, or the schedule they’d been on the
past couple of days, when Eddy finally shut off the shower she realized she was
completely exhausted.

And confused. Really, really
confused. She stared at her image in the foggy mirror and admitted she didn’t
have a clue what she wanted with Dax. Pregnancy wasn’t a fear—she was on the
pill—but was she ready for that level of intimacy?

Was she ready for sex with a
guy who wasn’t even human? Did Dax even want her? He’d kissed her, touched her
as if he cared, but he was the first to admit he wasn’t human.

Except he was more human, more
of a man, more than any man she’d known. She rubbed her short hair dry, slipped
quietly out of the bathroom…and realized all her worry was for nothing.

Dax slept soundly on the far
side of the bed. The blankets were pulled up to his waist, but he lay on his
back with his left arm stretched above his head. The other draped across the
blanket covering his belly.

His lips were slightly parted,
and his face, relaxed in sleep, looked angelic in spite of the shadow of a
day’s growth of beard. Without any self-consciousness at all, Eddy dropped the
towel on the floor and crawled into bed to lie naked beside him. She snuggled
close and wrapped her right arm over his, across his chest. Her palm rested on
the snake’s head.

She could have sworn she felt
the smooth, hard surface of fangs, but that was impossible. She felt heat,
though, and the slightest movement, as the curse tried to fight her cooling
touch. She thought of healing, of goodness and love, and within a few moments
the skin beneath her hand was cool and blessedly still. Dax sighed. The tension
left his body with his warm exhalation, and he relaxed into deeper sleep.

He was such a big, powerful
man that holding him like this, watching him sleep, hit her like a punch to the
heart. She’d never been needed by anyone before, not like this. She actually
had the power to help him, to ease his excruciating pain and help him get some
much-needed rest.

His skin still felt damp from
his shower. His dark lashes were so long and thick they looked almost fake
lying against his face in dark half moons. So beautiful. So absolutely perfect.

Except, he was a demon.
Silently, she spoke the word, wrapping her lips around the shape of the sound.
Demon.

Impossible. All of this,
utterly impossible. Smiling, her hand still covering the snake’s head, Eddy
slipped into sleep, surrounded by the feel, the scent, the very essence of the
most amazing man—the most human man—she’d ever known.

He’d never felt so refreshed,
so completely rested. Dax lay there for a moment in that blissful period
between sleep and full wakefulness, and silently categorized the many
sensations he wanted to take with him if he ended up back in the void.

Eddy’s amazing scent was a
seductive lure all by itself. Her touch that both excited and soothed him, the
soft puff of her breath as it left her lips. The warmth and life of her, the
soft swell of her bare breast against his chest, the slow, even cadence of her
breathing. Even the weight of the one leg she’d somehow wrapped across him.

Paradise was a dream, but he
couldn’t imagine any paradise even remotely as wonderful as waking up in a
clean, warm bed with a beautiful woman sleeping beside him.

One particular beautiful
woman.

His eyes remained closed, but
he smiled. Paradise had to be waking up with Eddy Marks curled against his body
with one shapely leg stretched across his thighs. Her hand rested on the
tattoo, her fingers gently caging the vicious-looking mouth with its four sharp
fangs. She must have held her hand there even as they slept, soothing the pain,
cooling the fire.

No wonder he’d slept so
soundly.

The house was quiet. Alton and
Ed must still be sleeping. Regretfully, Dax opened his eyes. He had no business
lying here in such comfort when demons prowled the earth. He had work to do,
and it was growing late. The room was almost dark—a glimmer of light leaked in
around the blinds—but it had to be close to dusk. He should be thinking of
waking himself fully, of getting out of bed and preparing for the night ahead.

For the battles to come.

But all he could think now was
how good this felt, how perfect. Eddy sighed and snuggled closer. She was warm,
and her skin was as smooth as silk. Her hair smelled like flowers, and he
wanted to bury his face in the short, sweet tangle. Her fingers curled against
his chest, and her lips touched the sensitive skin stretched across his ribs.
When she exhaled, he felt the little puffs of air against his side. It sort of
tickled—in a good way—and it was a feeling unlike anything he’d ever
experienced.

His cock was hard as a post.
That was sort of familiar—he’d been hard most of the time in his demon form,
though it hadn’t felt anything remotely similar to this. For a demon, an
erection wasn’t a thing of pleasure—it was merely a way of life when on Abyss.
You had to be ready to kill or eat or fuck, or else you were the one who ended
up dead, eaten, or screwed.

Now though, he was hard, and
his cock was trapped beneath the smooth muscles of her thigh. Close, but not
close enough to another taste of Paradise. Dax lay there for a few minutes,
imagining how it would feel to part Eddy’s soft nether lips and slide the thick
head of his cock between them. She’d be tight.

He’d been huge as a demon—he
was almost as large in his human form. Her feminine muscles would have to
stretch to give him entry. Once he was deep inside, she’d clasp him with those
muscles, and he’d be able to feel the soft, rhythmic ripples all along the
length of his shaft.

He lay there a moment longer,
imagining the tightness, the moist heat, the sense of belonging she would grant
him, should he ever find himself buried deep inside Eddy Marks.

Imagination was about the only
way he was going to know.

Now certainly wasn’t the time
for sex. For making love. He’d never made love before, and it would definitely
be lovemaking if he took Eddy. This body knew how. As each hour passed, Dax
felt the symbiosis with his borrowed body grow more powerful, his understanding
of the things it had done and what it knew becoming clearer, easier to
understand.

He knew this had been a
soldier’s body, one plucked from the morass of swirling time accessible through
the void. Nameless to him, the soldier whose face Dax wore, whose body was now
a strong and healthy receptacle for the demon’s consciousness, had fallen in a
fierce battle at a place called Normandy during the prior century. He’d died a
hero, and his badly damaged body had been buried as one of many unknown soldiers
at a place called Colleville-sur-Mer in France.

The names meant nothing to Dax
now, though the brain within this body retained the memory of its final resting
place. Most of the memories of the man would be with the body’s original
spirit, resting now, he assumed, in Paradise.

Dax was glad he’d been given
the body of a hero, a man in his prime who had been in his midthirties when he
fell in battle. Repaired and strong, now, it gave him hope that his demon
spirit might somehow learn whatever the body could teach.

From the beginning, he’d known
to touch softly, to proceed with caution. Things like shaking hands, brushing
teeth, combing hair. Shaving and dressing and putting on pants and shoes and
the cadence of speech, of reading expressions. In the beginning, he’d needed
Willow’s help to understand, but now he seemed to manage quite well on his own.

He still needed her for
drawing energy, both to access the demon powers within his tattoo, and to fight
the curse inhabiting the damned thing. When Eddy wasn’t there with her healing
touch, it was Willow he turned to for help.

Eddy snuggled closer against
him. He thought of waking her. They needed to get moving. Then he thought of
waking her and making love to her. He knew she wanted him. Knew they would both
be swept up in the intimacy, the act of love, but dare he risk it? Lovemaking
with Eddy could be highly dangerous to her.

If they were fully intimate,
their dynamics would surely change. How would he control the curse if he was
buried deep inside her feminine heat? It took all his strength to hold the
growing power of the cursed tattoo under some semblance of control, yet he
knew, without any doubt at all, that sex with Eddy would take away every bit of
his control.

And what of the demon? What if
his demon self surfaced? What if that creature decided to make Eddy his own? It
wouldn’t be lovemaking then. No, it would be fucking, pure and simple.

Eddy deserved more than that.
She deserved better than Dax.

She moved again and wriggled
closer, and then he heard a soft little gasp of surprise and knew she was
awake.

Awake and fully aware of how
close she lay beside him, how intimately their bodies touched. She knew how his
body responded to the weight of that one delicious thigh—knew by the way his
erect cock pulsed between her warm, muscular leg, and his belly.

“Did you sleep okay?” he
asked.

All heavy-lidded and warm, she
blinked and rubbed the side of her face against his chest. “I did,” she said.
And then she yawned. “How about you?”

“I slept well, thanks to you.”

“What’d I do?” She blinked and
then slowly closed her eyes, as if it was too much effort to keep them open.

“You kept your fingers over my
tattoo. You drew the pain through all the hours. I slept entirely without pain,
without any action from the curse at all. Your touch is magic.”

She arched her back and
pressed herself against his hip. He felt the brush of that small thatch of hair
between her legs, the way it tickled his flank. Her thigh moved over the length
of his cock, a slow, seductive slide that effectively destroyed all his good
intentions when he swelled even more against her.

There was no sense of his
demon self, but he couldn’t relax. Not while she kept up the slow slide of her
thigh over his shaft, moving just enough to drive him wild. Her body writhed
and undulated against him. He thought of the snake tattoo, the way it moved in
a painful dance over his torso.