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The playful smile on her face fell, and she went on cleaning my leg in silence. The gentle touch of her fingers over my skin nearly made me flinch—not from pain, for pain I could endure, but simply from beingtouched. Soft hands weren’t something I typically encountered.
A happy little chirp announced the arrival of Raelynn’s cat, sauntering down sleepy-eyed from the stairs. He came straight for me, hopped up on the couch, and curled his chubby orange-and-white body against my side, purring as he kneaded the cushions with his claws.
Raelynn paused as she watched me stroke the cat’s head, using my claws to give him proper chin scratches.
“He rarely comes down to visit people,” she said. “He’s usually too shy.”
“Cats and demons tend to get along well,” I said. “They’re the only animal that can be found both on Earth, and in Hell.”
“Figures.” She laughed, but then her face grew somber. “Thank you for saving him. Really. He means a lot to me.”
“You would have gone after him yourself if I hadn’t. And then we would have had a dead cat and a dead woman. I was trying to minimize damage.”
Her eyes were moving over my face; searching, wondering. It was as if she could tell I was lying; the last thing I’d ever tried to do in my existence wasminimizedamage. I was a killer. A destroyer. Saving things wasn’t a path I usually chose.
She rose up from her knees. “Okay, time to take a look at that shoulder.”
She leaned over me, pushed up her glasses, and her nose wrinkled as she examined the gash. It wasn’t pretty: ragged torn flesh and still bleeding. She was right about it being infected, but putting so much thought and care into one’s wounds was a human thing. Forget about it and sleep it off was my usual plan. If an injury posed a greater risk to me, I’d know, likely because I’d be in pieces.
She picked up another cotton ball and doused it. “Are you, uh...going to put on pants?”
I grinned, settling in a little more comfortably. “No.”
She rolled her eyes, but a blush rose on her cheeks. The way the blood filled in the spaces between her freckles was adorable. It made me want to hold her face in my hands and feel the heat beneath my fingers.
She shooed the cat aside and, for the sake of easy access, straddled my lap. Her crotch pressed against my cock, and her eyes flickered up to mine as it twitched at her closeness, the cotton ball paused in mid-air.
I widened my eyes teasingly. “Is that comfortable?”
She bit her lip in silence, bending forward to clean the wound, moving slowly around the tender flesh. I kept the grin on my face, her thighs twitching slightly against mine, the scent of arousal flooding her. Her eyes were focused on her work but her mind was elsewhere.
“You said Hell is like Earth,” she said, staring at the wound, as if she could force her arousal away if she focused on gore. “Is it really?”
“It’s bigger,” I said. “So big that only the oldest of demons have ever seen the ends of it. There’s wide empty plains, forests so deep and filled with monsters that only our strongest dare to go in.” I stared at the ceiling as I recalled it. I’d been on Earth for over a hundred years. I wasn’t all that old, for a demon. Nearly a quarter of my life had been spent here in captivity. “There are oceans as clear as glass and as black as ink. Trees bigger than Earth’s tallest mountains. The cities...they’re art. Metal, glass, and stone, carvings of marble and wood.”
Her eyes had grown wide. She was seated on me fully now, too enamored with my words to try to hover over my lap. It had been a long time since I’d spoken of home. Zane had been polite enough not to bring it up, and he preferred to spend most of his time on Earth anyway since he found humans so entertaining.
But I ached for Hell.
“What do you do there?” she said. “Do demons...have jobs?”
“Most do. It keeps us occupied to do something fulfilling. But we come and go as we please. Resources aren’t limited. Money and economies are nonexistent. Precious metals are as common there as dirt. We do whatever pleases us.”
“Sounds more like Heaven than Hell.”
“Heaven is overrated. Too many rules.”
She looked down when she laughed that time. Something about the shy aversion of her eyes and the sound of her laugh was making me...feel...something. But my brain kept confusing whatever overwhelming feeling this was with a desire to squish her, as if I could find an outlet for this annoying emotion by just taking her face in my hands and squeezing.
I managed to resist.
“What did you do there?” Her question snapped me out of my fantasies of affectionately crushing her. “For fun?”
She wasn’t cleaning my wounds anymore. She was listening with rapt attention, waiting eagerly for what I would say. “There’s plenty to do. There’s—”
“No, no, what didyoulike to do?”
I hesitated. Talking about Hell was strange; talking about myself was even stranger.
