Demon Marked

want him would be the second he started forgetting that.

“Then I’ll make a point not to let you.” He reached for his gloves. “You don’t need to sleep or bathe. The bedroom is mine, and you’ll stay out.”

Her brows lifted. “So I’m stuck in this one room?”

“Not stuck.” He gestured to the windows. “There’s a lot of space out there.”

God knew he’d be out as much as possible. Training, as they’d planned. And any other damn excuse he could think of.

“And a lot of cold.”

“Oh, that matters to a demon?” Jesus Christ. He shook his head, and found a damn excuse. “I’m going to put the snowmobile in the shed. There are books and other shit in the storage upstairs if you want to look through them. Just knock yourself out.”

Her expression remained impassive through his tirade, but now another little smile curved her gorgeous mouth. “All right. I will.”

Uneasy, Nicholas waited for her to say more, but she didn’t. So why did he have the feeling that he’d just exposed another bit of himself to her?

Fuck it. He pulled on his gloves, headed for the door. He’d go crazy trying to figure her out.

If he didn’t go crazy with wanting her first.

Nicholas obviously didn’t handle sexual frustration well.

Sitting opposite from him at the small table, Ash watched him sort through boxes of ammunition by the light of a kerosene lamp. In jeans and black cable-knit sweater, he didn’t bother with the tailored perfection from the city. Out here, there was no point—and it would have been ridiculous. A man couldn’t trot around snowdrifts in handmade Italian shoes, and he’d been working steadily since they’d arrived. All but ignoring her, but she didn’t mind. She liked watching him, studying him—and she already knew that retreat was his favored way of dealing with his attraction to her.

Had he never been frustrated before, had no experience with it? She thought it was possible. With his money and looks, and as long as that need wasn’t directed at a specific person, he could easily scratch a sexual itch with anyone. And if there’d been anyone he did want, but for some reason couldn’t have, he’d probably have quickly moved on if the emotion—or the woman—didn’t prove useful.

Ash didn’t have any experience with it, either—not that she remembered—but she also wouldn’t have called the desire she felt frustration. She wanted him so much that she ached, but there was no conflict. She liked him, she wanted him, but she didn’t feel impatience. It was simple. On the other hand, although Nicholas desired her, he didn’t want to. And although they had both begun treating her plots and any discussion of her demonic nature in a lighthearted manner, Nicholas became much more serious about it when sex entered the picture. It had become a recognizable pattern: He reminded himself that she was a demon and put physical space between them. Or he put a table between them.

But he was apparently finished with ignoring her. He glanced up, saw her watching him, but didn’t look away. Instead, he reached into his weapons bag and set a sawed-off shotgun between them.

“All right. You can’t fight yet, but you can pull a trigger—and for now, this will work best for you. Your aim won’t have to be as good, and you can aim fast enough that it’ll shoot in the right direction.” He opened one of the ammunition shells, showed her the pellets inside. “And the birdshot will scatter, do the most damage.”

Ash wasn’t so sure. “I healed from a broken neck. Are those little bits of metal going to slow them down?”

“No. The hellhound venom is.” He set a vial of golden liquid next to the shotgun barrel. “A trace amount of this will slow a demon down. A little more will paralyze one. I’ve got darts, and I’ve dipped my handgun bullets in this stuff—but for you, we’ll make sure the birdshot is covered in it. So those pellets don’t have to do much damage. They just have to pierce the skin.”

“So it’ll stop them before they get in close.”

“Yes. The sawed-off barrel will make close-range shooting easier. But if they’re already in that close—”

“Then I’m screwed.”

“Yes.” He pulled the box of shotgun shells toward him. “I’ll fix these up for you now. We’ll begin practicing tomorrow with regular ammunition so that we don’t waste the venom, but when we aren’t practicing, I want you to keep the gun with you and loaded with the poisoned shells. You keep it with you at all times, either right next to your hand or in your cache, when you figure out how to use that. All right?”

“Yes.” Her very own boomstick. She liked it. “Thank you.”

His gaze locked with hers. “Don’t let a demon close to you again.”

Her chest tightened, like a strange little coil straight through her heart. She didn’t know what Nicholas had felt when the demon had been dragging her around like a rag doll. Afterward, he’d never asked if she was all right.

But she knew now that he never wanted to see it happen to her again.

“Thank you,” she said again, even though “I won’t” might have been a more appropriate response.

He nodded, stood. Her chest still caught in that sweet ache, she watched him cross to the bedroom. He’d left, but not because of sexual frustration this time. Would he hate for her to know that he cared? She thought he would.

He returned a moment later with a set of scales and a small, dusty machine. Except for the empty bottles on the top that fed into a steel tube, it resembled a standing car jack. A lever handle jutted from one side.

“What is that?”

“A reloading press. To seal the shells after I poison the shot.”

“You didn’t bring that with you?”

“No.”

“But you’ve used it before.”

“Yes.” He glanced up from the press. “Why?”

“You’ve been here before, then—after you were old enough to handle guns, ammunition.”

“A few times, in the summer after I came to America.”

“So your grandfather wasn’t a complete hermit.”

“No.”

He set out a line of empty cartridges—a perfectly straight line, she noted, that he gave his full concentration. But that wasn’t just focusing; he was focusing on not looking at her.

Was he lying? Hiding something? She couldn’t be certain, but she thought so.

She had no idea what he could be lying about, though. Perhaps he was just trying to conceal that he cared about someone again—but this time, that he cared about his grandfather.

“It took a while to hear back from him,” Nicholas surprised her by offering. “He only checked his mail twice a year: at Christmas and tax time, in April. I finally heard back in May, and spent my sixteenth summer here. Chopping wood, mostly. Dropping about forty pounds.”

“But you didn’t stay?”

“Revenge isn’t easily served while hiding at a cabin in the woods.”

So he’d left to destroy Madelyn. “Wouldn’t revenge also have been staying here, and completely forgetting about her? By proving that she hadn’t destroyed you?”

His brows snapped together. He looked up from his line of cartridges. “She didn’t. But she did fuck me up pretty well. Pretending she didn’t wouldn’t be proof of anything—it would just be denial. And sticking my head in the sand sure as hell wouldn’t make her pay for any of it.”

He had a point. And the demon had killed his mother, his father, and his girlfriend. Maybe forgetting about her wasn’t enough. Ash wouldn’t soon be forgetting about Steve Johnson; that was for damn certain.

The heat left his voice. “Anyway, whether I live or die, she doesn’t care. Before I left England, I was kicked