Dead Man's Deal The Asylum Tales - By Jocelynn Drake Page 0,100
to change. I just didn’t have a clue as to how that was going to happen.
18
WHEN I GOT back to Asylum after leaving the bloody mess outside of Diamond Dolls, I wasn’t thinking clearly. I had lost Reave, who was threatening the entire world with his scheme, and he’d deftly thrown my brother in front of the bus that was the Towers. It seemed as if every step I took created a bigger mess rather than fixing things. And now I was relying on the help of a creature who might think itself to be Mother Nature, to help the elves so that Trixie could have a safe place to hide when all hell broke loose, while I watched the Towers tear the world apart in their search.
Slamming the front door behind me, I stomped through the lobby and into the back tattooing room. Trixie was rising from her chair when I entered, a worried look on her face. But it wasn’t her face. She had opened the shop and I hadn’t bothered to activate the antiglamour spell in the lobby, so I was now looking at the heart-shaped-face, brunette version of Trixie.
“What happened?” she demanded as soon as I rounded the corner. Her eyes widened and she gasped as her gaze dropped down to the blood-soaked side of my shirt and pants. Dropping the little white book she had been holding on to the counter, she closed the distance between us. She jerked up the shirt and leaned down to inspect my side, which now held an angry red line smeared with dried blood. It hurt like hell when I moved, but the worst of it had healed. I wasn’t sure if the scars on my soul would ever heal. “Who did this?”
“The guy with the information,” I bit out. “Things didn’t go so well.”
“I guessed as much.” She let the shirt fall back into place as she straightened, a frown on her lips. She opened her mouth to say something else, but I caught it in my own mouth as I roughly kissed her. Something had snapped in the back of my brain. Maybe it was her closeness. Her smell. The softness of her lips or her voice. Or maybe it was the thought that I was close to losing her. I don’t know. I needed to kiss her more than I needed anything else in this world. She hesitated for only a second before she kissed me back, her tongue tangling with mine as she wrapped her arms around my neck.
My hands drifted down, cupping her ass as I pressed her against me. It was almost painful how quickly I got hard. I kept her against me, grinding against her softness until she moaned in my mouth. Sliding my hands down to the back of her thighs, I tried to spread her legs so that I could step between them while trapping her against the counter, but she was still wearing the skirt from earlier and it was restricting her movement. With a grunt of frustration, I stepped back enough to start pulling up her skirt so that it was gathered about her waist.
“Gage,” she said in a half gasp, half moan. “The shop is still open. Anyone could walk in.”
Clenching my teeth, I released her with my right hand. Summoning up some energy, I waved my hand toward the lobby. A click of the dead bolt falling into place echoed through the quiet shop while all the lights blinked out. The place now looked closed. Sunlight seeped around the shade over the window in the tattooing room, allowing me to clearly see the woman in my arms.
“Lose the glamour,” I said harshly while putting my right hand on her upper thigh again. Trixie closed her eyes and gave a little sigh before I found myself once again holding the beautiful blonde that I loved. It wasn’t that I found the blond version more attractive than the brunette. It was that I felt like I was cheating on Trixie when I kissed the brunette. It also didn’t feel real, and right now I needed real.
When she opened her eyes and smiled at me, I kissed her with the same urgency that I’d felt when I started this. I pulled her legs apart enough that I could step between them, pressing my own raging erection against her. Trixie groaned, threading the fingers of one hand through my short hair while the fingernails of her other hand scratched along