Where Demons Fear to Tread (2 page)

“What do you mean?”

“Perhaps we could arrange a trade. What do you think you could offer me?” His eyes scanned her body.

With trembling fingers, she fished her wallet out of her purse, began to leaf through its contents. “I have fifty dollars. I know it’s not much, but…”

He chuckled. “Refreshing. I’m genuinely amused.” He drew closer. “Sweetheart, it’s not money I was thinking of.”

“I don’t have anything else to offer. I’m just a yoga teacher.” She remained still as he circled around her.

“You may be trying to pass yourself off as such. I think we both know better. Let’s discuss
that
in a moment. But since you insist that you’re
just
a yoga teacher…” She could feel his hot gaze running the length of her. He completed his turn in front of her. “Would you say your body is your temple?”

She nodded once, almost imperceptibly, afraid to move.

“Then let me come in and worship.”

One of his hands slid around her waist, the other into the hair at the nape of her neck. She pulled back, but he held her ensnared in the steel of his arms. He drew her closer. Her eyes fluttered shut as his lips covered hers. She expected roughness, but the kiss was feather soft as his lips brushed over hers. Deepening the kiss, he coaxed her mouth open, his tongue exploring with a gentleness that surprised her. He tasted of unforeseen sweetness and of promised gratification. His fingers tangled in her hair, pressed against her back, forcing her breasts to arch into his muscular chest.

When was the last time she had felt a man’s hands on her, the heft of his body against hers?

An eternity ago. But wait…
She made a little sound of protest. Her hands reached up to push against him, but he held her fast. His lips left hers to travel across her cheek, nuzzling in the nook at the base of her ear. He drew her earlobe into his mouth, sucking. In spite of herself, she gasped, and this time it was from pleasure.

A little voice inside her whispered,
yes
.

With a sweep of his arm, he cleared the desk. The bowl of apples fell with a clatter; fruit rolled in every direction. He pressed her backward, laid her across the desktop before she even knew what had happened. For a moment, lying there on the polished wood, she almost let go.

A pinprick of conscience punctured through the layers of desire. She struggled, pushing herself upright on her elbows. “Wait. You’ve got to let me go. I don’t belong here.”

“What about Nick?”

At the moment, Nick was the furthest thing from her mind. She had been converted into a mass of longing. Her skin was on fire, her breathing came in rapid bursts. Her desire had taken over, and the only thought she had now was Julian. She’d been ordained as a divine being, but this was the closest she had ever come to flying.

He leaned over her, capturing her mouth again. Withdrawing to look down at her, he whispered, “My angel.”

It was like plunging into a bathtub full of ice. Instead of spurring her on as he’d undoubtedly intended, his words brought her thudding back to earth. Back to her duty. Her Assignee was out in the club this very moment, no doubt getting high with a bunch of prostitutes. And she…at this moment, she was no better. Pleasure had conquered her.

She lay panting on the desk. “You got what you wanted. Now give me Nick.”

“We haven’t even begun to explore what I want from you.” His hands tightened on her hip, caressing through the fabric of her dress. “Your soul or his, love? Whose shall it be?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” she gasped.

He leaned over her, grazed a kiss next to her ear and whispered, “You know exactly what I mean.”

An image floated into her mind’s eye—an image of herself and Julian, bodies entwined on top of black silk sheets, their naked skin glistening with sweat. She squeezed her eyes shut and willed the picture out of her head. She could not sacrifice her body to this demon for the sake of a single human soul. It was forbidden.

“I don’t want this.”

“Sweetheart, what you want is irrelevant. I could take what
I
want right now.” The tension in his body was barely controlled, his breathing ragged next to her ear. She had no doubt that he meant it.

“Please,” she whispered.

He kissed her again, this time plundering her mouth with a force that made her arch up against him, pressing her breasts against his hard body and feeling the weight of him on top of her. She moaned, but whether it was in protest or in pleasure, she could not tell. He raised his head, his eyes flashing with lust.

She pushed against the hard plane of his chest once more. But he was impervious. He hovered over her for what seemed like an eternity, his gaze boring into her as though he might pin her there forever. The heat of him seeped into her, his strength barely contained in the rigid tension of his muscles.

When she heard her own voice, the desperation in it surprised her. “Please let me go.”

He froze, as though the words had physically hit him. Then, something in him softened. He rose slowly, removed his hands from her body, curled them into fists. He stood away from the desk as she scrambled to her feet.

“If you intend to leave,
get out now.
”

His last three words were a snarl that sent a chill through her body. It was a warning. Why he should have warned her, she didn’t quite understand. But she fled toward the door without looking back.

Julian watched her go, steeling himself not to give chase. A few grains of sand lingered on the polished wood of his desktop. She’d smelled like the beach. Like fresh ocean air.
Like happiness.
Something he hadn’t known for a very long time. He swept the sand away with his fingertips.

In the pit of his stomach, something howled. Why had he let her go? Because she’d asked? She hadn’t just asked, she’d begged. Like a woman fighting for her soul ought to beg. Like countless women before her had begged. Never once had he relented.

So why now?
he asked himself.

She was unquestionably beautiful. But he knew scores of beautiful women, immortals among them. There was something very different about this woman. She was so vital and alive, still so new and so close to her humanity. For an instant, he longed for the fragile mortality that he had known for such an achingly short time. In the depths of her eyes, he saw everything he had missed—the brightness of a life throbbing with hope. In her presence, he felt a strange feeling he had not known for centuries. Something that was almost like peace.

He shook his head, brushing the feeling away with the last of the sand. Peace…happiness. He had moved beyond the need for such feeble emotions. He had a more important agenda now, and he needed to focus on it.

No.
He had not let her go because of anything so weak, he told himself. He had let her go because now he had two victims instead of just one. He had no intention of releasing Nick. If he’d taken what he wanted, she’d have insisted that he free Nick. But if he waited, he could have both of them, on his own terms.

And because a quick kill was never as interesting as a long hunt. She was a challenge. Not like these mortals, who gave in to temptation so easily, so predictably. She had spirit, this one, and she had faith. That much was clear. Ultimately, though, she was no match for him. The inevitable outcome was that he would break her spirit and crush her faith, causing her to abandon her divine calling and fall victim to the latent desires he awakened within her. She would be relegated to hell for the rest of eternity. And this unfortunate little interlude would be a thing of the past for him.

He knew it would happen that way. Because that was what happened to every woman he chose to destroy. Because that was what had happened to him.

Inconceivable to think it, but once upon a time, he had been every bit as innocent as the little angel was now. Her scent triggered memories that lay long buried in the recesses of his mind. He tried to push them away, but they floated back into his consciousness anyway, scraps of memories…a sunlit summer afternoon spent wandering in a meadow with his mother, who toted his infant sister on her hip…his mother bending down to smile at him. “One day, Julian, all of this will be yours,” she’d said.

He was born in England, in the idyllic countryside of Berkshire in 1752, the heir to a dukedom, at the pinnacle of a vast pyramid of wealth and privilege. Of his early childhood, he remembered very little, only snippets of those afternoon walks, the lavender scent his mother favored, the touch of her gloved hand on his hair. He had been well loved, and he had wanted for nothing.

One morning shortly after Julian’s fifth birthday, his mother did not come to collect him from the nursery, as was her usual morning habit. Mother was ill, his nurse said, and not to be bothered. Julian, a sensitive child, heard the hush in the nurse’s voice and knew that something was very wrong.

Some deeper instinct drove through the discipline instilled in him by his elders. He bolted from the nursery, down the long hallway that stretched into the wing of the house where his mother’s suite was, and through the doors of her bedroom. He stood transfixed in the doorway, suddenly hesitant to approach the duchess as she lay on her bed amidst a jumble of covers. The cloying, sweet smell of the room was not the usual fresh scent he associated with her.

He took a few steps forward. “Mama?”

The duchess lifted her pale face, covered with the sheen of fever. “My little dove. Don’t come near. Mama’s very sick.” In a rasping voice, she called to his nurse, who stood panting behind him. “Get him out of here.”

As the nurse led him away, he glanced backward, saw his mother struggling to sit up. There was something infinitely sad in her smile as she watched him leave, and called out, “I love you, Julian.”

He was sent to the outskirts of the estate, to the cottage where his spinster aunt lived. On the cold wooden floor of that spare cottage, Aunt Etheline made him get down on his knees and pray. There they stayed through the night, middle-aged woman and little boy both praying fervently for the salvation of their loved one. Their prayers were not answered. A few days later, the duchess succumbed to her illness, taking Julian’s baby sister with her. Typhus, the “new fever,” had changed Julian’s world forever.

From then on, he lived with his aunt, who ruled his days by her strict religious code and sent him to sleep with bedtime stories of hell. The fiery pits into which sinners were thrown, demons who fed upon the entrails of the dead—these images became the source of recurring nightmares for the child. Julian, his aunt said, would be thrown into those very pits and burned for all eternity if he did not learn to behave like a good Christian. He thought of his mother often, wondered why God had chosen to take her. When he asked his aunt that question, he was answered with a hard slap and sent to bed without dinner.

After the death of Julian’s mother, the duke became a living ghost. Julian often thought his father might as well have died, too. Julian visited the manor only on holidays, during which his father was always steeped in the scent of brandy, and with increasing frequency, in the garish perfume of whores.

God had abandoned him, Julian decided. For the better part of twelve years, his life continued to be a form of hell on earth. He had no peers or playmates, since he did not attend school, but was educated instead by private tutors who offered him little sympathy. He had never been a rebellious child, but the older he grew, the more outrageous his behavior became as he sought to vent his repressed emotions. He took to playing pranks on his tutors, destroying his schoolbooks, hiding from his aunt in the forest behind the cottage for hours on end. He disobeyed his riding master, galloping hard to the edges of the estate where he would linger and contemplate his escape. By the time he reached his fifteenth year, it was only a strange sense of duty to his family lineage, to the history of his heritage that kept him from leaving. Every act of disobedience earned him a week on bread and water, confined to his room. “Julian, you are mocking God,” his aunt said, “and stepping closer to hell with every passing day.”

He began to pray to the devil instead. It brought better results. A miracle of miracles occurred. A few months after his seventeenth birthday, his aunt died.

The timing of the event was fortuitous. He was sent to Oxford. It was the first time since childhood that Julian interacted with others his age. At university, his mind was blown open, and not only by what he learned in the classroom. He became aware of a world he had never experienced, never even knew existed outside the meager walls of the cottage. He was high on the sudden freedom that even his modest allowance afforded. His classmates were infinitely more schooled in the ways of the world than he. But at seventeen, he was a tall, broad-shouldered youth on the verge of manhood. And he was an earl who would inherit a duchy. Soon, he was accepted into the upper echelons of university life.

His Oxford days passed in a blissful haze of rowing on the Isis, of foxhunting and of horseback riding over the wide-open expanse of Port Meadow. There was the elaborate ritual of dressing for dinner every night in the Gothic, cathedral-esque atmosphere of Christ Church Hall. After almost every evening meal, Julian and his friends would retire to college common rooms to engage in heavy drinking, occasionally daring a foray into the taverns where students were not allowed. Classes were almost an afterthought, although he respected his tutors and inherited their enthusiasm for the latest philosophers of the Enlightenment: Rousseau, Voltaire, Kant.

After graduation, like so many other young men of his social class, Julian embarked on his Grand Tour, a whirlwind trip through Europe. Paris, the South of France, Barcelona, Madrid, Rome, Florence…he tore through the cultural, culinary and sensual delights of each place like a hurricane consuming everything in its path.

Then he arrived in Venice.
La Serenissima, the most serene republic,
a jewel poised on the edge of the Adriatic Sea. Venice was the antithesis to his suffocating childhood, a city of excess and courtesans. Venice was a universe away from his father, who was slowly but steadily rotting away in the ducal seat in Berkshire.