The Demon's Song - By Kendra Leigh Castle Page 0,33

her. What did she think he was? Phenex wondered, as his jaw muscle began to twitch. He was ancient, powerful, immortal! He offered her the kind of pleasure most humans would only ever dream of! And she wanted…conversation? She needed to think about it. Really? He didn’t need to be here. He could find about a million better things to do. Things where people actually preferred he kept his mouth shut. He could…he could…

He could quit bitching and start thinking, because whether she understood it or not, Sofia had just thrown down the gauntlet. And if anything, he was only more determined to have her. Clever little witch. Stupid, stupid demon. And knowing it didn’t change a damned thing.

“Hellfire.”

After a few minutes of muttered curses, Phenex stood, slung his guitar over his shoulder, and stomped downstairs.

Chapter Eleven

The next morning, Sofia immediately knew something was up.

Part of it was that Phenex cooked her breakfast again, this time adding pancakes and eggs to the ridiculous amount of bacon he seemed to find necessary. If he stayed much longer, Sofia thought, she was going to have to start using the gym membership she’d studiously ignored for the past three months.

The other, bigger clue was the question he asked as soon as she sat down with the plate he’d piled with food. That, and how uncomfortable he looked asking it.

“So what kinds of things do humans, you know…do together?”

Sofia paused with a forkful of food halfway to her mouth. She waited a moment to see if he was messing with her, but since he looked a little like he wanted to crawl out of his own skin immediately after asking, it made her think otherwise. Slowly, she put the fork down.

“You mean, what do they do if they want to just hang out?”

“Yeah, sure. That works.”

Sofia tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear and considered him. There was something just a little bit human in the way he hunched, slightly defensively, over his own breakfast. She didn’t want to find it endearing—it just made the situation that much more frustrating—but it was impossible not to. If he’d been the sort of distant sex god that his friend Gadreel seemed to be, it would have been a lot easier to write him off. But something about Phenex pulled at her, despite the fact that the more she thought about getting involved with him, the more certain she was that it was a terrible idea. After what had happened in the parking lot the other night, she wasn’t ready to jettison the bodyguard thing entirely, no matter how awkward it was, but taking on some kind of supernatural creature as a temporary lover would be adding problems she didn’t need.

Too bad she couldn’t just say no and let it be. Instead, she’d baited him last night, telling him she needed something that she was almost positive he wouldn’t be willing or able to give—not just sex, but intimacy.

The last thing she’d expected was that Phenex would actually take the bait.

“Well,” she said, propping her chin on her fist as she thought about it. “This is DC. There’s a ton of stuff to do.”

“Like?”

Sofia frowned at what seemed to be his genuine lack of knowledge. “Don’t you live here?”

“Sort of,” he replied, an edge in his voice. “I’m mostly at Amphora. I don’t pay a lot of attention to what humans do up—I mean, around here.”

“Okay,” she replied, deciding not to push it. She’d already gotten the feeling that he lived in a place that wasn’t exactly out in the open. “Well, people go out to eat, they go see movies. And in DC you can do the touristy thing, see the monuments, the museums. There’s a bunch of amazing stuff, if you like art or history or science.”

“What do you like?”

“Um,” Sofia said, still waiting for the catch. There didn’t seem to be one, though. He just looked deadly serious. When he stayed expectantly silent, she decided he actually wanted to know. She wasn’t sure whether to feel vindicated or nervous. He seemed to have taken her insistence that he get to know her to heart.

Which meant that he must really, really want to get her naked. Her chest suddenly felt very tight, and it was difficult to breathe. Whatever his reasons, having Phenex’s undivided attention was heady stuff. She was going to have to watch it or she’d decide that crawling up the front of him before they went anywhere was an acceptable