AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Wasn’t it?
“Thank you for having us.” I smiled at Maura. “Sorry if I ruined it a bit.”
“You didn’t.” She took my hand and squeezed it. “I should have known it would be too soon. I just thought maybe…you’d like to have a dinner around a table with no demon for a change.”
I squeezed her hand back. “I didn’t have this growing up, so thank you. Yes, I really did enjoy it.”
The halls seemed hushed other than our footfalls as I followed Cruise from the room. Danvers already headed back to his dorm, Nathan stayed with his family, and otherwise, most people were already in bed. I leaned against Cruise as we walked, allowing him to lead the way with the arm he slung around me.
“Are your sister and Willow okay?” I hadn’t asked about them in a while. The demon must not have wanted to know.
He nodded. “Sure. Mary is happily studying, and Willow works weird hours, but they’re happy. I should probably move out of the house and let them have it already.”
I didn’t know enough about their situation or dynamic to tell him if that was a good idea or not. “Where would you go?”
“Maybe I’d get a place closer to Nathan, downtown. Maybe in the same building. You could be there, too.” He gave me a nudge with his hip, and I thought about it.
In the building with him and Nathan? I shook my head. “I don’t have a job. I don’t even have the prospects of how to find a job, so I don’t think I can afford to live in the same building asyou and Nathan.” Family money allowed them both to exist in the world without having to think too much about bills. Nathan was in a perpetual state of saving people, which he did as a volunteer, but it took all his time, and Cruise worked hard. But neither of them would be figuring out a budget anytime soon, based on their daytime activities.
“You could live with me.” He kissed my hair. “I don’t know why that hasn’t managed to penetrate your thoughts. We’re not kicking you out onto the streets. We’re saying, please, stay with us, Addalee.”
I shook my head. “Cruise, you can’t just invite me to live with you. Neither can Nathan. You guys don’t really know me. You knew me possessed, sure, but you haven’t spent any time with the actual Addalee. I’m boring. In a year, you might hate me. We have demons in common. Hopefully, there will come a time when no more demons torment our lives, and then…what then?”
He took my face in his hands, his eyes somehow almost too intense and serious. With his thumbs, he caressed my cheeks. “Don’t you think we have a little bit more in common than just demons?”
I shivered under his touch. Desire was potent, thickening the air until it became hard to breathe. The desire pleased me, since its being there without the demon meant it was a true sensation, rather than a lie she created to control me. Something special, something just between me and Cruise. My demon might not want to be touched, but I did. I really, really did. Cruise was one of the people I wanted to have doing the touching.
“I don’t mean…sex.” I might be blushing, and I could feel the heat climbing my cheeks like a banner. I wasn’t that well-versed in the subject, and I never got a chance to get comfortable talking about it because demons didn’t care for touching.
He lifted his eyebrows. “I didn’t mean sex, either, although I like that your mind went there.”
Giggling felt foreign, but the bubble of mirth escaped my throat anyway. Cruise grinned at me, and the two of us stood in the hall like teenagers, saying stupid things and finding them ridiculously amusing. “Okay. What else do we have in common?” I finally managed to ask when I stopped feeling giddy about the idea of sex.
“Youreallylike spaghetti. You don’t seem to mind my taste in music. We’re clearly in sync when it comes to our sense of humor. Oh, you didn’t like potatoes, I could tell. I didn’t either, but we both liked the chicken.”
He wasn’t wrong. “So some pretty interesting things to build off, then.”
“Sure, relationships have been built on less than chicken.” He led me down the hall again.
I pointed at him. “I like how you smell, Cruise. Always so clean and fresh. I sometimes just want to push my nose up against you and inhale you until I’m drunk on the scent.”
“Fuck.” He tugged me closer to his side, his breathing rough in my ear, and I leaned against him again. “Do you know what you just did to me?”
I would have answered him, despite the pulse of heat that flooded me. In fact, I had a pretty flirty thing to say, but then a picture on the wall caught my attention. Large portraits dotted the walls of the house so regularly, I hardly paid any of them more than a brief few seconds of attention. Old men and women, posed in formal outfits for expensive paintings—good for them. A long time had passed since I’d concerned myself with topics like history, and maybe it was because I wasn’t ever good at them when I was a kid.
But I recognized the man on the wall. I pulled away from Cruise to stare up at his picture with open-mouthed shock.
“Oh, I see you found him. That’s the last man with nearly pure angelic blood. He’s the one who found me and told me tolook out for you.” Cruise stepped behind me, his touch light on my shoulders. “What caught your attention?”
I stared, pointing as I tried to find words. The gray hair, the dark eyes. I knew him. I’d only seen him once in my life, then my mother put the picture away. She said she didn’t want me to sit around staring at him, because there wasn’t any reason to stare at the dead.
The angelic man? I blinked.No, that isn’t possible.
“Addalee? What’s wrong?” Cruise put his chin on my shoulder. “Talk to me.”
I had to find my voice. “That’s my father, Cruise.”
“What?” He stood up straight, his brow crumpling in confusion. “Your father?”
