Darkness & Lies: A Brotherhood Novel (#1) (9 page)

“Oh I
know. I
just wanted to hear it from the horse’s mouth,” he smirked, immediately inciting rage and stifling anything she may have been feeling moments
ago.

She opened her mouth to argue when he suddenly dropped his towel
,
leaving his bare body fully exposed to her virgin eyes.

Good lord! Cheyenne dropped her gaze to the co
v
erlet to escape the extreme embarrassment and vivid fant
a
sies that were flashing through her mind. Even with her downward
gaze,
she couldn’t escape him. Her peripherals wouldn’t allow it!

“Don’t worry, lady. We’ll get everything worked out first thing tomorrow morning. Until then, what do you say we get a good night’s sleep?” Erias slipped between the sheets and took one last fle
eting look at the woman’s shame
filled face before he flipped out his light and settled in.

Several moments later he eked his eyes open, the faint light from her table lamp piercing his lids. “Hey, you wanna turn that light out? People trying to sleep over here.” She peeked at him wearily to which he lifted an e
x
pectant brow. With a huff, she stretched back and snapped it off. “Thanks,” he called through the darkness.  A grunt was her response. With a pleased grin on his face, Erias fell fast
asleep.

Chapter 6

A strange pinging sound like a small bell echoed through the halls as Erias walked the long, narrow passage toward The Gate. He couldn’t figure out what it was exac
t
ly
,
but he could t
ell it was getting closer the further in he walked.
Moments later, as the reflective black granite wall came into view, he found its source.

“Behr.” He frowned. “W
hat the hell are you d
o
ing?”

Behr gave a subtle shrug and continued texting. “Just passing time.”

“Texting?”

Giving him a dismissive look, Behr returned to his typing as if Erias’
s
imposing figure didn’t bother him in the least. Not that he was at all surprised. Having known each other for the better half of three hundred years, Behr had seen to the ugly core of him and back and wasn’t at al
l i
n
timidated by his presence.

“What else is there to do up here besides freeze my balls off? Seriously, is it too much to ask for a blanket?”

“Yes,” Erias quipped, feeling just slightly bad for not having considered it
himself, but
only slightly. “Is it too much to ask for some eye contact when I speak to you?”

“Yes.” Another ping sounded as a new message came in. Behr grinned as his thick fingers flew over the m
i
nute keypad.

“So which is it tonight, call girl or stripper?” Erias asked
,
referring to Behr’s own insatiable appetite for all things female. And he did mean all things.

When he first met
Behr,
he had stumbled across him in his master’s barn among bales of hay and farm life. He was still trying to figure out whether or not that sheep was really just keeping him warm or if there wasn’t a more si
n
ister explanation behind Behr’s snuggling with the animal. He never asked and Behr never offered. He was thankful for
that.

His response was clipped at best. “Neither. Hous
e
wife.”

“Hmm,” Erias pondered
,
closing the distance the rest of the way and standing alongside him. He peered down at
the small, well
-lit screen that looked as if it were drowning in a sea of flesh as Behr’s thickly calloused hands enveloped it.
“Bored,
or blind?”

“Definitely bored, but that all ended the moment she laid eyes on these babies.” He lifted his arms and kissed the bulges of his biceps. “Couldn’t resist, naturally.”

“Naturally.
” Erias rolled his eyes in amusement. A fellow member of the Brotherhood, his ego was no less d
e
flated than the others. Sometimes it seemed Erias was the only one who maintained a firm grip on reality.

“Jealous again
, I see.
” Behr grinned, his face lit up by the bright screen lending an added depth of malice to his naturally maniacal face. 

“Of course I am you egotistical bastard. Now put your cock away for five minutes and listen up.” 

Grudgingly, Behr slipped the phone into his coat pocket and rose to his full height
,
which was still a head shorter than him.

“Damn,” Erias grumbled n
ow that they were stan
d
ing face-to-
face. He shook his head in exasperation.

“What?” Behr demanded, narrowing his gaze.

“Noth
ing.
I just forgot to bring a razor.”

“Shut the fuck up
,
E
,
and tell me what the hell brought you up here. Feel the need to freeze your balls off too? If so
,
you can just set them over there in the corner with mine.”

Erias shook his head in mild amusement. “You are such a drama queen.” He held his hand up to stop Behr’s rebuttal. “Look, I came to make sure you weren’t getting distracted and
were
still holding down the fort. Clearly, you are.” Producing a cup of steaming hot coffee, Erias handed it over.

“Thanks, b
oss. Truly, your warmth and generosity
slay
me.”

Erias narrowed his eyes at him. “Completely my i
n
tention, and yet you still breathe. Interesting.”

Behr blew against the hot liquid before sip
ping gi
n
gerly at it. “Damn, b
oss. If I thought you’d look as good in a maid uniform as this tastes
,
I’d hire you to bring me co
f
fee in bed every morning.” Ignoring the petulant glare, he wisely changed subjects. “So, how’s the babysitting g
o
ing?”

Erias tamped down the urge to smile when he thought back to the feisty redhead lying naked in his room back in town. “She’s a
handful; that's
for
sure, but
I’ve managed to slip in under the radar so it shouldn’t be too hard to keep her in line and away from The Gate.”

Behr shot him a doleful smile. “So what you’re sa
y
ing is you are going to seduce her and keep her bedridden until her time is up
here,
and she is forced to leave.”

“Basically.” There was no point in denying it. That was exactly what Erias had
planned,
and it wasn’t as if he would have any trouble accomplishing his goal. The wo
m
an was practically salivating for a taste of him, and oddly
enough; he
was feeling a bit needy
himself.

“Why is it so quiet?” Erias asked, suddenly beco
m
ing aware of the echoing silence around them. The lack of wailing and distant screams of agony, claws ever trying to scratch their way free
,
was troubling.

Behr shrugged nonchalantly. “Sleeping
,
perhaps?” Catching the murderous gleam in Erias’s eyes, he sighed. “Dude, I couldn’t stand the whining anymore. I put up a
barrier,
so I could chill.”

Erias nodded, relieved that there wasn’t some u
n
derlying reason for the pervasive quiet. The last thing he
wanted to do was another clean
–up miss
ion. It had taken more than one
hundred years the last time to get
the persi
s
tent bastards
back in their
cage,
and he didn’t want to relive that whole debacle any time
soon.

“Alright.” H
e nodded his understanding. “I’m hea
d
ed back. Remember,” he called over his shoulder, “eyes wide, ears open. No slips or
—”

“You’ll fry my ass. Yes
,
I know. Believe
me,
I’m still recovering from the last one. At least I don’t have to wax my ass anymore. Don’t
worry,
I have no plans to r
e
live that experience any time
soon.
”

Well
,
that made two of them. “Way to look for the silver lining, Behr.”

Cheyenne woke up to a darkened room with a na
g
ging feeling in the pit of her stomach. She wasn’t sure what caused her to wake up, but she usually slept through the night no problem.

Reaching for the lamp, she hesitated. Even though Muscles McGee thoroughly worked her nerves, she didn’t want to be rude and wake the guy. Besides, then he’d open his
mouth,
and she would be forced to shut it because
,
ho
n
estly, she was so not in the mood for another debate, esp
e
cially one where she turned out wrong and had to admit defeat. She was still roiling over the whole bedroom
situ
a
tion.

Groping around her comforter, she found the thin black silk and slipped it
on,
then headed for the bathroom as quietly as possible. Just as she reached for the doorknob it was wrenched out of her reach.

Cheyenne grimaced, shielding her eyes from the blinding light that flooded over her. “Sorry, I didn’t know you were in there.” She had no idea why she was apologi
z
ing.

Slowly lowering her arm, she allowed her sight to adjust before realizing that she was just mere inches from the bare flesh of the man’s chiseled physique. And wow, this close she could make out the faint dusting of short, crisp hairs across his finely tuned muscles. As her eyes skimmed the length of him
,
across the rocky planes of his severely cut abs
,
she came to yet another, smaller patch of dark hair that started just below his navel and ended…Oh, Jesus! The man was as naked as the day he was born!

Cheyenne gasped and gaped in embarrassment. Even worse, she couldn’t take her eyes off of his manhood. My God, he was huge!

Erias cleared his throat
,
catching sight of her preo
c
cupation. “If you need to get in there, you’ll have to move out of my way first,” he informed her.

“Oh, um, yes. Okay,” she sputtered
,
stumbling to the side so he could pass. It was all she could do not to watch him walk the rest of the way to his bed
,
and it was even harder not to fall to his feet and worship the perfection of his bodacious body. Because that’s what
you did when you were face–to–face with a g
od, wasn’t it?

Closing the door behind her, Cheyenne stood in front of the sink in a haze as her imagination ran wild. She had never, ever been this attracted to the opposite sex b
e
fore.

She took that back. She had never, ever been this a
t
tracted to the opposite sex before that wasn’t a part of one of her sexy romance novels. Though he carried himself w
ith the
over-inflated 
ego of a g
od and seemed to enjoy taunting those around him, namely her, was of little cons
e
quence. He was a man
,
plain and simple
, because g
ods just did not walk the planet with the sole purpose of being as annoying as possible let alone did they even exist in the first
place.

He did have a body of a g
od though, she would de
f
initely concede to that. A woman could do her laundry on abs like that.

Realizing that the cold splash of water wasn’t nearly enough to drown out her colorful musings, Cheyenne turned on the shower and hung her robe on the back of the door in hopes of lulling her
mind into a comfortable, ready-for-
bed state.

Erias lay in his bed staring at the blank ceiling li
s
tening to the spray of the shower through the
paper-thin 
wall behind his head. He could picture the female, her soft, pale skin slick with moisture as the water beaded and slid down her voluptuously curvace
ous body. He was ge
t
ting a hard-
on just thinking about
it.