Page 23 of The Devil

I don’t know what comes over me but for reasons I can’t understand, I find myself pulling off the T-shirt and my panties. I want to be naked in his bed. I want to lie naked where he lies naked. Where he sleeps.

I remember how it felt when I wrapped my hand around his shaft earlier. How big and hard he’d been for me. How muscular his chest, arms and shoulders were. Like rocks. He’s strong. I guess in his line of work he has to be. At the image of him crouching before me, nose to my pussy, inhaling my scent and declaring me a virgin, my sex burns hot.

I need to stifle my own moan as I slide my hand between my legs and feel the damp there. I move my fingers to the memory of it, of how dark his eyes had gone, how he’d wanted me.

Does he lie here, I wonder, and grip the shaft of his cock in the small hours of the night. What does he imagine? How dark do his eyes go when he comes?

I run my fingers through my folds before rubbing my clit imagining it’s him touching me. When I come, I turn my face into his pillow to muffle my cry, squeezing my thighs together imagining it’s his hand there, between my legs. Jet making me come. And when it’s over, when orgasm subsides and I blink my eyes open in that dark room, I slide my fingers out from between my legs and smear them onto his pillow, mingling our scents, the thought of him smelling me in his bed wrong but darkly erotic and irresistible.

And for the first time in a long time, I sleep like a baby.

7

JET

Sleep is out of the question because every time I close my eyes, I imagine her just inside, a few steps from me, wearing my T-shirt, lying in my bed, her head on my pillow, and I’m wide awake again. Wide awake and remembering exactly how she looked when she stripped off her clothes and asked me to make love to her.

Make love.

Fuck.

I toss the throw off and sit up, finished with trying to sleep. I work the kink in my neck. Cotton raises her head, interrupted from sleep.

“It’s okay, girl,” I tell her and she settles back down.

I’m confronted by my reflection in the glass wall and push my hair out of my eyes. My watch tells me it’s not yet six o’clock. I’ve grabbed twenty minutes here, thirty there all night long. Can’t seem to sleep with her in the other room. Hell, maybe I don’t trust myself to.

I stand, stretching as I walk across the room to turn on the espresso machine. My phone is a mess of messages from Cassian. I don’t bother to read more than the first and instead watch rich brown liquid pour into my cup. I drop a second pod into the machine then drink the scorching double espresso in two gulps before grabbing a bottle of water from the fridge and heading down to the gym. I’ll kill a few hours and burn off some of this energy before waking her up.

A dozen curving stairs lead down to the lowest level. My version of a basement. A sort of walk-out unlike any other because rather than the wall of glass here, there’s a swimming pool which is fully enclosed in reinforced glass and steel, even the bottom, so I can watch the sky and the ocean as I swim my laps. But swimming alone isn’t going to do it today.

I pull on the pair of sneakers I keep down here and walk over to the treadmill. Plugging my earbuds in, I start my run. I’m wearing sweatpants which aren’t ideal for running but my clothes are upstairs. I’d changed out of the clothes I’d worn to the baptism while Amal was in the bath last night. I run staring straight ahead at the calm water of the pool while Nine Inch Nails screams about fucking you like an animal which is exactly the wrong song to get last night out of my head.

Because Amal Lombardi has always been the one woman who is never far from my mind.

Maybe it’s our shared roles in what is Cassian’s world. We are on the fringes of it. Not quite in, not fully out. For me, it’s a choice. I like the life. I want it. For her, it simply is. Malek Lombardi made the choice for her.

“I’d marry you myself before I let that happen. Before I allow any man to lay a fucking finger on you.”

“Christ.” I up the incline and the speed, sweat dripping from me as my feet stomp on the belt. When the song is over, I play it again and again.

Those words came out before I consciously thought of them, but they’re true. I feel the certainty like nothing else. It makes no fucking sense but there it is.

And hell, her asking me to fuck her, no, her asking me to make love to her, is not the same as what I said. Marriage. She’s twenty-two. She shouldn’t be getting married. She should be out having fun, living her life. Being carefree. Dating.

Except when I think about her dating, when I even start to consider another man’s eyes on her or hands on her, I make fists of my own because I think I’d kill them.

I know I would.

I crank the volume, the lyrics crowding out my thoughts as I exhaust my body. Half an hour later, twenty pull ups later, I’m at the weight machines lifting more than my usual, my body pushed to the max and still she slips into my thoughts, this lost little virgin.

My lost little virgin.

“Fuck me.”

Amal and Daniel fly back to Florida today. Once they’re safely on their flight, I’ll talk to Cassian. Figure out exactly where his head’s at regarding Amal. And I’ll fix it, whatever it is. I will keep my promise to her.

When the sun breaks the horizon and my body cannot take any more, I climb the stairs back up to the main floor, the muscles of my thighs on fire. I down another bottle of water and make a cup of coffee for her. I’m not sure how she takes it but since I don’t have milk or sugar in the house, it’s going to be black.