Clyde halted those thoughts with a mental screech of metaphoric brakes.
That just couldn’t happen. He’d come here, taken this blood-sucking assignment so he could get out of Hell with no idea he’d find himself attracted to this free spirit. Whether he succeeded or not, he had an egg timer attached to his time on this plane.
When it dinged—he’d never see Delaney again.
And that made his gut clench into a tight, unwelcome fist.
Fuck.
twelve
“Oh, Clyde. Is it my perfume? No, wait, I know. It’s my animal magnetism. My va-va-voom. Yeah. ’Cause I have so much of that. It just oozes from my every pore.” Her laughter tinkled, but her body was on fire. Clyde’s arm around her waist, the crisp hairs on it brushing against her arm, made her nipples turn to tight beads—which was totally and utterly pathetic. Given how little it seemed to take to turn her on these days, she might as well start humping lampposts.
No disrespect meant to Clyde, who was far and away much more attractive than a lamppost.
Clyde stiffened behind her, stirring to the sound of her voice.
In fact, every part of his body was stiff.
Every. Part.
“I’m in your bed again? How do you suppose this keeps happening?” His voice rumbled, groggy with sleep in the deep velvet of the night.
“Uh-huh, and I’m taking a stab in the dark, but I think it must have to do with the binding.”
“Right. The binding. Am I naked?”
Oh, sweet Jesus. Was he? “Were you nak—uh—nu—ah . . . when you went to bed on the couch earlier?”
“Affirmative.”
Perfect. “Then I imagine not much’s changed. And you’re sucking up more than your fair share of the bed. Not to mention, you have all the covers. So you know what that means, don’t you?”
“I’m apologizing?”
She giggled despite his sinfully tempting nudity. “No, you’re taking the dogs out—as penance, bed hog.”
His groan tickled her ear before he lifted his head to look at her alarm clock. “They’re still asleep. It’s three in the morning. So I say we go back to sleep, too. We deserve to sleep in, don’t you think? It’s been a rough few days.” He burrowed closer to her; the impulse to lie back into his strength was pushing overwhelming, bordering desperate. Clyde curled his fingers into her waist when she tried to get up.
Delaney fought the hitch of her breath. “You’re right. We have stuff to do, demon. So hit the bricks so we can get some sleep and call Tia in the morning. I’m still not convinced her being here at exactly the same time as you is a coincidence. I find it very strange rather than coincidental. I know you don’t want—” Clyde rolled her over with swift hands, pulling her flush to him, making her forget why they had to call Tia.
But it was important.
Really important.
His blue eyes gazed into hers, glittering despite the late hour, and his hands spanned the width of her back, creating an arch in her spine that made her hips lift toward his. “We definitely have stuff to do.” His nose pressed to hers, his breath caressed the corner of her mouth.
Wow—way to put some distance between you and the demon, Delaney. Get up, tard. Get up from this bed right now and don’t look back. But . . . this was soooo nice. And so wrong. Very wrong, Delaney Markham. “This presents a problem, doesn’t it?”
“I think it might.”
The breath she took shuddered with nervous hitches, but if she was about anything, she was about honesty, and that was required here. “Let’s just lay this on the line. If we do this, Clyde Atwell, you know it can’t go anywhere, and I’m not just saying that like some standard ‘no strings attached’ line. I’m saying that because it really, really can’t. Ever. We won’t have to wonder if it’ll end because it will end. No ifs, ands, or buts. Which might be completely fine with you. For all I know, you were a real playa in life and all this ‘I was a lab rat always wrapped up in my work’ is just crap.” And even then, she didn’t know if she’d still turn him down because if that really had been the case in Clyde’s life, what diff did it make if in the end he’d be gone anyway?
Well, the difference is, you’d be shimming his shank just to shim.
Yes, indeedy.