Stone Destiny (Stone Passion #3) (29 page)

Laughing without humor, he pushed his battered body up from the bed, wishing he could get drunk enough to numb the guilt and longing and rage that burned inside of him. Picking his way through the destruction, he picked up a pair of boxer briefs from the pile of underwear and stepped into them, pulling them up his legs. With hands on his hips, he looked around the room and shook his head
. Only she had this kind of power over him.

It was going to take an act of God to get her out of his system but it was something that had to be done otherwise he would go mad with wanting.

Pulling on a pair of jeans, he paused before he buttoned them, remembering what Ferris had said. She had been drinking…. Apollo saw his chance and he took it with an inebriated Ferris. His stomach balled into a tight knot of shame. He had flayed her alive, left her bleeding and alone to face the judgment of her family. It hadn’t been his place to spill her secrets and if he had been thinking instead of blindly lashing out he would have held his tongue.

He had to apologize to her. She would forgive him
, she always forgave him.

But what would happen afterwards? The idea of living up to her expectations still filled him with dread. If she had come into his life when he still had a purpose maybe it could have worked but now he was simply Armand
, a wrecked gargoyle in a world full of unlimited enchantment.

Shaking his head to scatter the gathering doubts, he knew that he had to find her and apologize for his inexcusable behavior. He would worry about the future once he straightened out his present, and that included making things right with Ferris.

Knowing where he would most likely find her, he quickly finished getting dressed, ignoring the tension along his shoulders, his back. Stumbling over to the liquor cabinet, he pulled out a bottle of bourbon, needing the liquid courage even if it was only temporary. He pulled the stopper out and drank directly from the bottle, feeling the alcohol burn all the way to his gut.

It was time and he made his way through the eerily quiet suite, grateful for the solitude while wondering where everyone was. The younger gargoyles were probably out on the town while Vaughn and Rhys and their families were doing whatever gargoyles with wives and children did. In all honesty, Armand couldn’t imagine a thing since his brothers were the first of their kind to have children. Hell
, Vaughn and Rhys were the first to have true mates.

A wave of nausea rolled through him but he didn’t examine the reason why too closely. Maybe his brothers had remained human for the day and took off, leaving him alone with his darkness. He couldn’t imagine them wanting their children exposed to the insanity that had possessed him all
week. With a self-deprecating smile, he took another swig of the fiery liquor. How could a mere slip of a girl make him lose his control, his composure, so easily?

How could he live with her?

How could he exist without her?

He took another long swallow from the bottle of bourbon, relishing the moment of numbness that quieted the warring voices in his head. With the half-finished bottle still in his hand, Armand closed his eyes and took a deep breath as he stood outside the closed door to Ferris’s studio.
Memories of their brief time together slammed into him, stirring his cock to full arousal in half a heartbeat.

She had too much power over him.

Releasing his breath with a shudder, he opened the door, turned on the light, and stepped into Ferris’s world only to discover the girl wasn’t there. Relief and disappointment flooded his system as he stepped further into the room, ridiculously curious to see what she had been up to these past ten years, to see how her talent had blossomed.

The room was very similar to how it had been when he had lost his heart to her nearly a decade before with the exception of the sheer number of paintings that were there. Canvases were stacked five or six deep all along the
edges, large masterpieces hung on the walls, and her work space had shrunken to a third of its original size. Every image hit him in the solar plexus: he was blown away by her talent. She was able to capture a moment in time and make it eternal, making the observer feel every emotion that she felt when she painted the image.

He stood before a picture of two young, towheaded children in a field of unnaturally colored flowers. The light seemed to be coming from the children as they smiled at something beyond the canvas, probably Ferris. His lips curved up in a smile at the spark of mischief in their blue-green eyes and he could feel the love she had for them
and it made his heart swell and ache in his chest. Children were something he had never considered, something that he would have denied Ferris had he given up his nights for her.

She never would have complained or lamented the loss either. Yet seeing how much she loved her children, how much they obviously loved her, it would have been cruel of him to offer her his nights and deny her motherhood.

Staring at the beautiful image, seeing Ferris in her children, he also started seeing Apollo. His gut clenched as he saw his father in the delicate arch of their blond eyebrows, the arrogant lines of their jaws. Why did it have to be Apollo?

Tearing his gaze away from the image, his eyes landed on a portrait of the three gargoyles: Raphe, Leo and Michael. The three were obviously trying to look bad ass but were failing miserably because they couldn’t keep the amusement from flashing in their eyes. He could almost hear the
three of them joking with her as she painted, the memory of laughter that taunted him just beyond his hearing. She managed to capture the essence of their gargoyle forms in their human faces, from Leo’s massive liger to Michael’s proud white lion to Raphe’s sleek, black panther.

There was love in this painting as well.

Swallowing against the lump in his throat, he moved onto the next image and almost forgot how to breathe. His heart beat erratically and painfully in his chest as his eyes moved over the lines of Ferris’s pregnant belly to the swell of her breast beneath the gauzy, white material. A soft smile curved her lips as she closed her eyes in prayer. But it was the other person in the painting that made him die a little: Apollo.

The man had golden hair and an altered face but Armand recognized his father. Ferris wasn’t able to hide the light that emanated from the man, a light that almost hurt the eyes even if it wasn’t tangible. It was his aura that she had captured, the essence of a god.

Her hand rested on Apollo’s head in benediction as he kissed her stomach, his eyes burning with love as he looked at Ferris.

A humorless chuckle pushed past his raw throat
. Only Ferris could make a god fall in love with her. And Apollo was able to give her the children she had never even known she wanted when she was making all of her promises to Armand.

Armand took a shuddering breath, understanding how Ferris could have fallen in love with the man who
gave her the chance to be a mother. He could take some comfort in the fact that his father genuinely had feelings for Ferris and her love wasn’t unrequited. And Ferris being the wonderful, generous, sensual being that she was… of course they would have sex.

How long did their affair last? Did she love him still? Was the affair even over? After all, they had two children together
and Apollo was quite protective of those who gave birth to his children. With effort, he put the questions behind him. If he let them, they would destroy him and he loved Ferris too much, even if she no longer loved him.

A chill went down his spine as he realized what he wasn’t seeing: paintings of him. Moving over to the nearest stack of canvases, he started flipping through them, seeing paintings of his brothers and their mates and their children, paintings of the imp
Ajreis, paintings of the various creatures that inhabited the castle, from Toulia the succubus to Pix the sprite to Dizzy the dog. Dizzy, who was no longer there. The loyal little dog passed shortly after he turned to stone, her little heart broken, and he hadn't been there for either Ferris or Dizzy. Yet another way he had failed Ferris.

Faster and faster he blasted through the paintings and n
ot once did he see an image of himself staring back. The pain that knifed through his chest was unlike anything he had ever experienced. It was worse than losing Vaughn when Melanie didn’t show up, worse than the moment Katrina turned her back on him, worse than the betrayal of Ferris fucking his father. She had told him she loved him and yet there were no paintings of him in her studio.

The notion that perhaps she kept them in another place evaporated the moment the door opened and all rational thought disappeared from his brain. She stood there looking impossibly beautiful in a pair of
blue jeans and a plain t-shirt. The wounded beast inside of him wanted her to suffer the way it suffered, it wanted her to howl in agony the way it howled. He opened his mouth to speak but found that his voice box was too tight to let any sound pass.

“Armand.”
Her voice came out nearly breathless as she stared at him with wide, blue-green eyes.

His grip on the bottle tightened until his knuckles turned white
. He had to harden his heart to the sensuous girl who made empty promises, whose bruised eyes hid a treacherous heart. Motioning his head in the general direction of her art, he bit out, “You’re quite talented.”

“
Th… thank you,” she murmured, stumbling over her words. Watching him wearily, she jerkily made her way across the room to her work area, setting down a bag he hadn’t even noticed. Her eyes darted to a space just behind him and he could see her pulse fluttering madly in her neck. She was hiding something from him.

Chancing a glance over his shoulder, he saw the painting from earlier, the one of her and Apollo looking so damn perfect together. Of course she wouldn’t want him to see that painting
because it was a reminder of her betrayal. But he had already seen it. Swallowing the bile that threatened to spew all over her, he looked back at her and softly asked, “Was it just the one time?”

She turned her head away and the color rose dramatically in her cheeks and suddenly he didn’t want to hear her answer. He hadn’t realized that he had been praying that it was alcohol and misery that drove her into Apollo’s arms. The kernel of hope died a quick and brutal death, taking another slice of his heart with it. Her voice trembled as she murmured, “It’s not what you think.”

“Did you fuck him more than once?” he asked again, ignoring the way she winced at his words. Her lips parted but she didn’t say anything, she didn’t explain, and he laughed painfully, “Of course you did. After all you’re just a silly girl.”

His words were met with a horrid approximation of a smile that didn’t reach her eyes. There was a wealth of pain in those eyes but all she said was, “Yes
, I’m just a silly girl who’s still in love with a stubborn, foolish gargoyle.”

Grudgingly, he crossed the room, his body’s desire to be close to her overruling his head’s desire to stay as far away from her as possible. Reaching up, he cupped her face in his hand and brushed his thumb along her lower lip. Electricity travelled up his arm from where he touched her and he welcomed the agony and the ecstasy. “Ferris… tell me something to make this torment go away.”

“You’ve already condemned me, Armand,” she said solemnly, her eyes so much older and wiser than a mere thirty-one years. “What could I possibly say that will change your mind?”

“Tell me you didn’t have sex with him,” he pleaded irrationally, desperately. Much to his chagrin, his cock swelled in arousal at being so close to her
. He wanted her. “Tell me that I am still encased in stone and this is just a dream, that I will wake up and you will be waiting for me.”

Holding his eyes, she turned her head just enough to kiss his palm before stepping out of his reach, “Tell me you didn’t give your nights to a stranger so you didn’t have to give them to me.”

There was a core of steel to her that hadn’t been there before, an inner strength that radiated throughout her entire being giving her a stillness that most people her age lacked. She had the presence of someone who had experienced a great deal and survived it all. There was also an air of isolation that surrounded her, something he had seen when she was a child but now it was almost impenetrable. She was incredibly self-contained, watching the world but no longer participating. How could he see so much and still feel as if he didn’t know her? “You’re not the same Ferris that clung to me when I lost my nights.”

With a sad smile, she shook her head
no
in agreement. “It’s what happens when you have to go on without the man you love.”

He winced at her words, desperate to believe her words. But he couldn’t get the image of her and Apollo out of his head and so he tormented himself by what he could no longer have. “Ferris….”

“Did you mean it when you told me you loved me?” she asked softly, looking at him with those turquoise green eyes that reached into the depths of his being and made him feel whole.

Except now he saw Apollo’s laughing
as the god laid claim to everything that Armand could have had but threw away. His eyes scanned her face as he pressed his lips together, no longer knowing the woman she had become, how much she had changed. If Apollo were around would she even spare Armand a second glance? Perhaps this new maturity was to mask her misery over Apollo’s absence, perhaps her lusty welcoming had been desperation to hide her missing lover. Finally, Armand answered, “I meant it at the time.”