He cocked his head, his lawyerly instincts perking up. “In other words, you knew you were still in trouble even after that demon abandoned your brother.”
Reluctantly, I nodded. I stared at the Taser in my lap. “And I know it’s not going to go away anytime soon.” I forced myself to look up, to meet Brian’s eyes. “You’ve gotten hurt because of me once before. I’m not going to let it happen again.”
His jaw set grimly. “You’re really a piece of work, you know? Did it ever occur to you that I’m a big boy and can make my own decisions about what risks I want to take?”
For someone who was supposedly trying to push her ex-boyfriend away, I sure was saying things better suited to the opposite purpose. I shook my head in frustration.
“You can’t make an informed decision about this. There are too many things I can’t tell you. All I can do is beg you to listen to me and keep away.” I frowned. “Once it’s safe for you to keep away.”
“I’m not sure I can do that, Morgan.”
As usual, my mouth started moving before my brain caught up. “You’ve been doing a pretty good job lately.”
I felt the blood heating my cheeks, and even though I put a hand over my eyes—as if I could somehow hide from my own stupidity—I saw the spark of triumph in Brian’s eyes. He didn’t say anything, but I had begun to think his sudden disappearance from my life hadn’t meant what I’d thought it had.
Indignation helped chase away my irritation with my runaway tongue. “You hadn’t really given up on me,” I said accusingly. “You were just playing with me!”
He shrugged, still looking smug. “You know what they say—absence makes the heart grow fonder. I thought I’d test the theory out.”
And, damn him, his little experiment had worked. When he’d been pestering me relentlessly, sending me flowers and love letters, trying every romantic gesture known to mankind, it had been almost easy for me to be my normal, contrary self. Someone pushes me, I push right back. Harder, if possible.
“You’re one manipulative son of a bitch,” I told him, but there wasn’t enough heat in my voice to make it the kind of slap-down it was meant to be.
“Honey, I’m a lawyer. I’m paid—and paid well, I might add—to be a manipulative son of a bitch. So now that we have all that out of the way, can we go to bed and have wild monkey sex? I’ve been missing you in more ways than one.” He waggled his eyebrows at me.
The temptation was enough to make me squirm. I doubted he’d forgiven me, doubted even a bout of wild monkey sex would make things right between us after all I’d done to sabotage the relationship. But it would feel so good to lose myself in him, if only for a little while.
I tried not to think about what Brian’s body felt like pressed up against mine. Tried not to think about the physical chemistry between us that practically lit the bed on fire when we were together. Tried not to think about everything I was giving up by giving up on him.
“Sorry,” I said. “I don’t do wild monkey sex when a sociopathic demon might come crashing through my front door any moment.” I thought it made a damn good excuse.
He grinned at me. “So we ask Andrew to keep watch, and then we go have wild monkey sex.”
I suppressed my sudden urge to grin right back at him. “I am not having sex of any kind when my brother’s in the next room. That’s just…eww.” I crinkled up my nose in disgust, and Brian laughed.
“I’m sure your brother knows you’re not a virgin,” Brian started, but I made a slashing gesture across my throat.
“Cut it out. Now! I’m not having sex with you, and I’m not getting back together with you. That’s final. Now, can we talk about something else? Or, better yet, maybe there’s something good on TV.”
I grabbed the remote and turned the TV on, desperate for any escape from the quicksand I was trying to pick my way through. Obviously, I was a lot safer if I just kept my mouth shut.
I expected Brian to protest, but he merely sat back in the cushions and made himself comfortable. He knew he’d pushed as far as he dared, and like any predator worth his salt, he knew when to back off and wait for his prey to make a fatal mistake.
I was beginning to feel like a gazelle with a pride of lions on its ass. Somehow, I needed to figure out how to run faster.
Brian, Andy, and I took turns keeping watch in two-hour shifts. Whoever got the short end of the stick for a shift got to hang out in the living room watching the door while the other two slept. Brian, of course, wanted to sleep in my bed. I told him he could sleep in it when it was my turn to watch, and dared him to keep pushing me. Wisely, he backed off.
After a quick Taser 101 course I let Andy take the first watch and retreated to my bedroom. My entire body felt heavy with exhaustion, not all of it physical. Even so, I had a hard time falling asleep. I wasn’t sure how much I trusted either of my roommates to guard the door. And my treacherous mind kept conjuring images of Brian, nude and eager, lying in bed beside me.
Somehow, I managed to drift off, and once again I dreamed of Lugh. In retrospect, I think I knew he would have something to say to me that night, and perhaps that’s part of why I had such a hard time falling asleep. For a demon, he’s a really great guy, and I actually like him. But his ability to see inside the dark corners of my soul—and his insistence on sharing what he sees—scares the crap out of me. There’s a reason I keep the metaphorical lights out in those corners.
At least we were back in his living room, not his bedroom. Brian’s arrival had put my hormones in overdrive, and I wasn’t sure I’d be able to resist Lugh’s charms if we were in that bedroom.
He looked different today. No black leather. Instead, he wore a pair of close-fitting jeans and a plain white button-down shirt, and he sported a pair of pristine white sneakers. I knew exactly what he was up to. When I had any impure thoughts about Adam, Lugh would appear in my dreams as the S&M poster boy. Now that it was Brian who’d cranked up my hormones, he was going for the all-American-guy look. Only he was far too dangerous-looking to pull that off.
“I like the outfit,” I commented as casually as possible, dropping into the love seat across from him. I myself was wearing comfy knit pajama bottoms with a wispy camisole top. It was better than being naked, but not by much.
Lugh smiled. “I thought you might.”
I scrubbed at my eyes. “Can’t you just let me get a good night’s sleep?”
“You’ve only got two hours coming to you,” he said, knowing I had taken the second watch shift, “and you wasted more than an hour of that tossing and turning. I’m not depriving you of much.”
“But I’m too tired to deal with you right now.” Even to my own ears, I sounded like I was whining.
Not surprisingly, Lugh didn’t care about my desire to escape serious conversations. “I’ll make this brief, then.”
I gave him a dirty look, but he ignored it. “I understand your need to protect Brian,” he said. “And ordinarily, I would do anything possible to keep a defenseless human out of the line of fire. But it’s clear to me—as it is to you, in your heart of hearts—that even if you aren’t actively dating him, he’ll always be vulnerable because of your past history.”
“Thanks!” I snapped. “I needed to feel a little more guilty about dragging him into the middle of a demon civil war.”
“What this means is that there’s no reason for you to keep pushing him away for his own safety. Doing so is hurting both of you, and it’s obviously not keeping him safe.”
But the reasons I was pushing Brian away were so much more complicated than that, and Lugh knew it. Yes, keeping him safe from Dougal’s minions was my primary motivation. But I was also trying to keep him safe from my own majorly fucked-up life.
“And,” Lugh continued, “I think if he’s going to remain in the line of fire, he deserves to know the truth.”
I blinked, not sure I’d heard him correctly. “The truth?”
Lugh nodded, his dark amber eyes seeming to peer into my soul as he stared at me. “You have my permission to tell him about me. And about Dougal.”