Naughty Karma: Karmic Consultants, Book 7 (24 page)

She still couldn’t quite look at her desk without flashing back to that night.

They’d fallen into something of a routine. Fierce coupling, lazy intimacy in the midnight hours, long, blissfully uninterrupted hours of sleep, and then cool, professional morning partings. It was comfortable, in its own way. But comfortable in the way a house of cards is comfortable. She was always watching for it to come tumbling down.

Luis had reported in that morning with his findings on the maenad who’d contracted with Prometheus for his heart. They knew as much as they could about her and were as ready as they would ever be to summon her and get Prometheus’s heart back in his body where it belonged. They’d scheduled it for two days from now. At dawn, since the handmaidens of Bacchus were said to be most potent at night and weakest in the breaking day. Not long now and Prometheus would be free.

And then what?

Karma accepted the pad thai as Brittany passed it to her. “I have been seeing Prometheus socially, but it’s casual, nothing more.”

Lucy’s jaw dropped. “My God, it’s true. She admitted it.”

“See? I told you she was doing him!”

“
She
is right here.”

Jo grinned, unabashed.

Lucy had the grace to blush. “Sorry. I was just so sure Jo was pulling my leg when she told me. I mean
Prometheus
. How did that even happen? Don’t you hate each other?”

Karma chose to ignore the
don’t you hate each other
part of the interrogation because she wasn’t exactly sure when she had stopped hating Prometheus. “He’s wanted to hire Karmic Consultants for some time now. When he sicced the demon on your wedding, I went to confront him and we ended up agreeing that Karmic would assist him with his issue if he worked for me for a while to make amends for the trouble he’d caused.” Though in retrospect, she’d been kidding herself to think a man like that ever worked
for
anyone. Never an employee, Prometheus. Always the master of his own domain, even if that domain was hers. “After that, one thing sort of led to another.”

Lucy shook her head. “Prometheus. Jake is gonna flip.”

Karma’s stomach clenched. “Lucy, about telling Jake…” Karma told her brother everything, but the thought of him knowing this made her feel lightheaded. Which was part of why she’d been dodging his calls all morning. Was she ashamed of what she was doing with Prometheus? No. Then why was she so scared Jake would think less of her for the way they were using one another? They were two consenting adults. Jake was a big boy. But introducing Prometheus to her parents, to her brother—God, she couldn’t picture it without shuddering. Worlds colliding like that wouldn’t be pretty.

“You don’t want me to tell him?” Lucy’s brow pulled into a frown. “I don’t want to lie to him. And you know he only wants you to be happy. If Prometheus is good for you—”

“I don’t know what Prometheus is for me right now.”

“Oh.” Lucy’s frown darkened—Shirley Temple in protective mode.

“I like him.”

All heads swiveled toward Brittany at her declaration, then Jo admitted, “I do too. I mean, he’s an ass, but I appreciate a good asshole.”

“He’s scary,” Mia added. “Not that that’s a bad thing. There’s something sort of magnetic about his scariness. Like looking at a great white shark. Not quite human. But then, he isn’t, not really.”

Lucy turned to Karma. “Is that why you like him? Because he’s a shark? For the adventure of it?”

She couldn’t deny there was something to that—the fear and fascination of being with someone so overwhelmingly primal, both in attraction and in his power. There was a certain allure, a spike of adrenaline that came with being with someone who could turn on you like a tiger, never entirely tame. It affected her, but it wasn’t
why
. Why was too complicated for gossip over kung pao shrimp. Why was conflicted and tangled up. There was no pretty, happy, fairy tale why. All she had was instinct, emotion and no guarantees it would ever be anything more.

Karma looked at the faces around her. Her friends. Would she ever have let them in this much, let them see this much of her vulnerability before Prometheus? “I don’t know why,” she admitted. “I only know when he runs his finger down the back of my neck, my mind shuts off and all I can do is feel. And everything feels good.”

Jo nodded sagely. “The On Switch.”

“What?”

“That spot where he touches you and it’s zero-to-sixty, hello sailor, all revved up and ready to go. Girls are supposed to be all sexually complicated and shit, but I swear every one of us has a spot that is like flicking a switch. Touch us there and we’re good for it on the spot.”

Mia pursed her lips. “I wonder if that’s physiological or psychological. With the correct experiment I’m sure we could deduce—”

“No science talk during lunch or I’m telling Chase,” Jo interrupted.

“So that’s it?” Lucy pressed. “He just flips your physical switches? It’s not, you know, love?”

“Love? No. Definitely not.” Karma stuffed pad thai into her mouth, stopping herself before she became the lady who protested too much.

In love with Prometheus? Not remotely. But she didn’t like to think about what would happen after they got his heart back. And whenever she thought about the possibility that they might fail, that he might die, she felt a spike of panic pierce deep. She flinched at the thought of him being hurt, but in love? In order to fall in love, you had to believe a future was possible, didn’t you? She and Prometheus, they weren’t the happily ever after types. This interlude was an illusion of romance with an expiration date. She couldn’t let herself think it was any more real than that.

But there were moments, late at night, when it felt disturbingly real. Moments that made her wonder if there was a chance for them, after his powers were gone and he was just Prometheus again, with a regular beating heart. She would wake up, groggy and disoriented from a dream vision, and he would be there, his rumbly voice soothing her back to sleep, or asking her about what she’d seen. She’d gotten better—even in the dreams—at distancing herself from the subject, gaining perspective and learning how to choose the visions she saw. Last night she’d fallen asleep thinking of Jake and Lucy returning from their honeymoon and slid into a muddy could-be-future of a very pregnant Lucy asking Prometheus for charms to keep ghosts out of the baby’s room. She’d woken with a jolt, startled to see Prometheus in an even remotely possible future that related to her, and he’d been beside her in the bed, asking her what the vision was about and so she’d blurted out the first thing that came to her mind—the truth.

He’d flinched, as taken aback as she was, then slowly nodded. “Good dream,” he said cautiously. “Do they want kids?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you?”

The question had startled her. She hadn’t expected it of him. It always seemed so loaded—especially when you were talking to someone who’d seen you naked. She’d hedged with, “I don’t know. Do you?”

And he’d said the words that gave her permission to be brutally honest about her own thoughts on the subject. “Hell no.”

If he’d wanted to turn her off, he couldn’t have done worse. She didn’t want kids. Never had. Her mother always told her that she’d feel that biological urge someday—with the right person, at the right time, when she saw her friends and family members having babies—but Karma had never even felt the first inkling of a maternal twinge. And she’d always felt a little guilty admitting it aloud. Until she and Prometheus shared their horror at the idea. His vasectomy, her IUD—they were a matched set of non-propagators, saluting one another for keeping the population down. He’d made her laugh with his Pledge of Anti-Procreation, and she’d fallen asleep with a smile on her lips, tucked against his side.

That had felt real.

But reality was a ritual to reclaim his heart in a day and a half. After that, it was anyone’s guess. Neither of them had ever mentioned a relationship, emotions or permanence. The casual could only go on so long. Karma couldn’t let it go on forever. Uncertainty only worked in her world if there was an expiration date. And her expiration date with Prometheus was rapidly approaching, hour by hour.

So she scoffed at the idea of love, pressed Lucy to talk about her honeymoon in Italy, laughing when she described the enthusiastic Italian ghosts who had stalked them from town to town, and forgot about uncertainty for a while. For now, things were good. It couldn’t last because it never did, but she was learning to worry less about the press of possible catastrophes and see the present more.

Or at least she was trying.

Chapter Twenty-Six

Survival of the Most Ruthless

Prometheus wasn’t accustomed to anxiety. He’d trained himself not to give a shit about the things he couldn’t change, which had led to a remarkably worry-free existence. But tonight, only a matter of hours before the ritual that would either grant him near-immortality or kill him outright, he was finding it impossible not to care.

He arrived at Karmic Consultants, drawn there as he always seemed to be, after the building had gone dark. She was in there. He could feel her. Who knew how long that would last? If he survived the double-cross, but ended up without his power—he shook away the thought as he closed the front door behind him, flicking the lock closed. It would be a kind of death, losing his power. He didn’t know who he would be. His entire life was built around the power he had bartered for himself. Would he be able to keep the shop if he couldn’t create the charms and potions himself? Would he feel that same inviolate sense of strength and confidence without his power to back it up? Would Karma want him if he wasn’t a walking demigod like her?

No. His life would go up in smoke, just when it was starting to get really interesting. Part of him resolved to take death if it was a choice between powerlessness and that, but a deeper, truer part screamed for survival. You didn’t grow up the way he had without an angry need to keep living just to give the world who tried to destroy you a big
fuck you
. So the decision was simple: survival first, power by any means necessary.

And she was the means. He had to make sure she reversed the power flow and diverted Deuma’s power into him.

Karma wasn’t in her office. He followed the trail of her energy down, hacking into elevator’s security system with a pulse of magic. The elevator doors opened and he found her sitting in her living room, staring at the crate that held his heart, a glass of wine in one hand, a second on the end table beside the opposite end of the couch.

Prometheus took the empty space and the waiting glass, settling beside her without touching or speaking. The red tasted expensive, layers of flavors rolling smoothly over his taste buds as he sipped.

“Nice wine,” he commented.

“I’ve been saving it. Wyatt gave it to me.”

Wyatt Haines, the bajillionaire. No wonder it tasted like money. “Shouldn’t we save the celebrating for tomorrow?”

She didn’t reply, but then she didn’t need to. They both knew this wasn’t a celebration. It was a last supper.

At least her morose mood matched his own. He didn’t think he could have borne it if she was cheerful and excited about the dawn.

Rodriguez would arrive at four to begin prepping the summoning. Prometheus would carry the heart crate upstairs and they would begin at dawn. Summon Deuma. Negotiate with her for a new deal—Karma had done her research and paid the witches to track down an artifact she was confident Deuma would sell her soul for. Or better yet, trade Prometheus’s heart for.

But that was where things got tricky. Karma thought they were only bartering for his life. He wanted his power too. Which meant Karma had to go head to head for him with a maenad who was on her way to goddess status. Did she care for him enough to do that? Plan A didn’t look too secure.

If that didn’t work he had a few bargaining chips of his own. Relics he’d tracked down over the years that could vastly increase Deuma’s powers—provided she let him keep his own. It would make the devil a thousand times more dangerous, but that wasn’t his problem. His problem was survival.

Karma would be angry, that much he was sure of. She might never forgive him for keeping that part of his plan from her. This could break their relationship—such as it was—but the end had always been inevitable between them anyway. He wasn’t the guy you took home to meet the parents. He didn’t do love and romance. What they had now was all he was capable of giving her and she deserved better than that.

They’d never really had a shot at a future. So why did the thought of her walking out of his life make the hollow cavern of his chest ache? Men like him didn’t get happy endings, because men like him were the ruthless bastards who made sure the game never ended. When had that started feeling like a punishment rather than a reward?

“How are you doing?”

He looked over at the object of his obsession, sipping her wine, listening to the rhythm of his heart. She was dressed for yoga and he knew from experience how easily those stretchy fabrics peeled away from her skin. “I’m good.” He stretched his arm along the back of the couch and brushed a fingertip down her nape, just to touch her.

She trembled and took another slow, deliberate sip of the rich red. “Liar,” she murmured.

He smiled. “Always.”

For long minutes they simply drank the wine and sat, his finger stroking her neck the only communication between them. Then Karma lurched forward and set her wine glass on top of the crate, turning to face him. “We won’t let anything happen to you.”