Fire & Brimstone (Neighbor from Hell #8) - R.L. Mathewson Page 0,27

or test out the recipes that he’d been working on all week.

The only thing that he wanted to do was to lay here with the adorable demon, hog the pillow just to piss her off and pretend that the only job that he had was to keep his hand on her stomach and keep her safe.

*-*-*-*

“Are you going to tell me?” she asked as Lucifer shifted to mimic her position, but careful to keep his hand on her stomach.

“No,” he said flatly, but he didn’t have that homicidal glimmer in his eyes that he normally had when someone asked him about his nickname.

“Then what are we going to do to pass the time?” she asked as she shifted closer to him until their knees and elbows almost touched and she could see that scowl marring that handsome face of his.

Sighing, she reached up and gently ran the pad of her finger over the crease between his eyes, smoothing it away. “If you’re not going to tell me how you got your nickname then tell me something else about yourself,” she said, placing her hand beneath her head since he refused to let her have the whole pillow to herself.

“Like how many people I’ve killed?” he drawled lazily, but the scowl didn’t return, she noted with satisfaction.

“Thirty-five,” she said with a teasing smile, hoping to coax a smile from him, but the stubborn bastard refused to play along.

Still…

He answered so she took that as a win.

“Thirty-six,” he said and she would swear to the day that she died that the corner of his mouth started to pull up into a smile.

“What else you got?” she asked, happy to have something else to focus on for once instead of her own problems.

“What else do you want to know?” he asked, honestly surprising her because the man was not known for his conversational skills.

He was known more for glaring…shouting…and making grown men cry…and many other things that probably gave people nightmares.

“Well, since you won’t tell me how you got your nickname, maybe you can tell me about those men that hang out in the parking lot every day calling you over a hundred different combinations of bastard?” she asked, biting her lip as she waited impatiently for him to answer, because that was one question that she’d been dying to know for the last five years.

“Pass.”

“Can you do that?” she asked with a frown.

“Yes,” he answered with a mocking frown of his own, further surprising her, because she honestly never would have thought that he could be playful.

She was definitely learning a lot about him lately, she inwardly mused as she tried to come up with something else to talk about, but it was proving difficult now that the pain in her stomach was starting to subside and the timber of his voice was lulling her to sleep.

“Go to sleep,” he said softly as he removed his hand from her stomach and pulled the blanket up to her chin.

“I’m not tired,” she argued even as her eyes began to close, calling her a liar and making it difficult to wrangle more answers out of him.

Maybe just a few minutes of sleep, she thought as she reached over and placed a hand on his arm, hoping that he would stay just until she was asleep. She felt the slight hesitation and then with a sigh he was pulling her closer and wrapping his arm back around her.

She considered telling him to keep his hand off her ass this time, but given the circumstances that seemed kind of rude. So, instead she stopped fighting sleep, prayed that Melanie didn’t come in here to get more photos for her Facebook page and let everything go, knowing that for once, she didn’t have anything to worry about.

Chapter 14

Thirty-Six Hours Later

“You’re being ridiculous,” Rebecca said, doing her best to resist the urge to yank one of the dozen or so pillows shoved under Melanie’s head free and smother her with it.

“Shut up. I’m dying,” Melanie muttered, sounding miserable as she curled up into a ball on the couch and pulled the comforter up to her chin.

“You’re not dying,” she said with a sigh as she stood there, wondering how she was going to talk sense into her best friend when she was so damn determined to go through with this asinine plan of hers.

She didn’t need to do this, but no matter how many times Rebecca tried to explain that to her, Melanie refused to budge. She’d made