“They suit you. I don’t know how you’re single, Cole. I really don’t. You’re kind, charming, handsome.”
“And I never leave the house. Pretty hard to date when you’re eternally alone.”
Fucking Cole again. I hated his name. I hated his face. It should be me she was calling handsome. Not this reclusive shut-in who could barely be bothered to put on a swipe of deodorant. I’d made him the man she saw before her now with the goal of seducing her, but now the thought of succeeding in this form made my skin crawl.
Oh, don’t go looking at it too deeply now. It just didn’t feel like a true victory if I wasn’t my authentic self. That’s it.
“Well, I rarely left my... apartment and still got my heart broken, so I guess I’m not qualified to give advice.” She handed me the clean mixing bowl and pulled the drain in the sink.
A flare of protectiveness caught me by surprise. How dare they hurt her. They had her, had everything I desired, and they broke her. Those overgrown rodeo clowns.
Wait a tick. Why was I frustrated with how they treated her? Their actions put her right where I wanted her. They drove her to me. I should be thanking them.
“You deserve so much better than what you got,” I said, my voice low and measured because damn if I wasn’t feeling actual emotions over what happened to her.
The timer went off before she could respond, forcing us to turn our focus to the fucking cookies neither of us needed to—or frankly, wanted to—eat. At the last second, I remembered to grab a towel before pulling the hot tray out of the oven and setting it on the stove to cool.
“Those smell amazing,” she said, her eyes falling closed as she inhaled. “I can’t remember the last time someone made me cookies.”
Using a spatula, I cut a small piece off one of them and blew on it, making a show of cooling the chunk off. “Here,” I said, offering it to her. “The true test. How’d I do?”
She smiled as she took it and popped the piece into her mouth. “Still hot,” she said, laughing. “But if this were a baking show, you’d get star baker for sure.”
“Don’t go getting too excited. I’m a one-trick baker. Cookies are all I got.”
“Do you really need other tricks when you do cookies so well?” she asked, the question sounding oddly seductive. I suppose that was just a side effect of Merri being part succubus.
She sighed and leaned her head on my shoulder as we waited for the rest of the batch to cool. “Thank you, Cole.”
I stiffened at the name, but then asked, “For what?”
“For being the friend I need.”
A heavy stone lodged itself in my stomach.Friend.
She’d gone and done it now. Here I was trying to be the man she needed, and she went andfriendzonedme. Was there anything worse? It was a damn death knell.
Snagging the rest of the cookie she’d sampled, she walked away from me, hips moving in a mesmerizing sway that couldbring anyone to their knees. I probably would have done so myself, but I was too busy fuming.
Friend. Fuckingfriend. No way was that going to stand. I was not herfriend. I was herdestiny. She was made for me.
“Oh, sweet darling, you have no idea what you’ve done, do you?” I crooned beneath my breath.
No one, and definitely not the personification of sex and sensuality, was allowed to friendzone the devil. The gloves were officially coming off. It was time to make her a deal she couldn’t refuse. And who knew more about making deals than me?
Chapter
Seven
SIN
“So that’s it then?”
My voice rang out loudly in the fucking vacuum of the billiards room. The four of us had been sitting here for hours in silence, no closer today than we were yesterday to coming up with anything constituting a plan. Not even a hint of one.
“What do you want us to say? We have no magic that can trace her. We aren’t omnipotent. Merri left us with nothing to help find her.” Grim’s usually fierce voice was subdued, defeated, almost.
“If you have any ideas, Sinclair, then by all means enlighten us.”
