Dark Champion (Flirting with Monsters #4) - Eva Chase Page 0,21

he loved me for the first time less than an hour before our last mission. It’d obviously been difficult for him to reveal that emotion, even though I’d returned the sentiment. We hadn’t had time to settle into any kind of new normal afterward—maybe he was feeling a bit awkward about that still.

I squirmed upright with the swing of the seat back and reached over to grab his hand. “You’ve been awfully sweet the whole flight. Trying to give Snap a run for his money now that he’s honing in on your usual territory?”

Something flickered through the incubus’s expression and vanished just as quickly. He shrugged, a familiar twinkle lighting in his warm hazel eyes. “It’s the least I can do.”

“Well, your efforts have not gone unnoticed… nor will they go unrewarded.” I winked at him and walked my fingers along his jaw to draw him into a kiss, wishing I could slip them right under his cap to grasp his horns the way he liked without exposing them for all the regular mortals around us to see.

With the seatbelt lights already on, I couldn’t make that reward a membership to the mile-high club, but maybe that wasn’t what Ruse would have wanted most anyway. At least one woman he’d cared about in the past had shown she only cared about how well he could get her off in bed. Instead, I rested my head against his shoulder, nestling closer when he put his arm around me.

It was hard to feel all that sour about the bounty on my head when this whole mess had also brought the most fascinating, thrilling, and delectable men I could have imagined into my life.

Once we’d departed the plane, a few texts with Omen directed us to a quiet spot off the road between Paris and Versailles where he and the others had parked the Everymobile to wait for us. As we got out of the cab across the road from the RV, I couldn’t stop a startled laugh from spilling from my lips.

“What in sweet Satan’s name happened here?”

Maybe to someone who’d never seen it before, the Everymobile in its current state wouldn’t have looked that odd. But the trip through the shadow realm had definitely made an impact.

In its current tour bus form, bright purple polka dots spotted the lower edge of the vehicle’s otherwise dark walls with their sweeping yellow—made-up—logo. A crooked antenna I’d never seen before protruded at an angle over the windshield. And toward the rear end, a propeller I couldn’t figure out the function of was spinning wildly as if in a brisk wind, although the cool evening air around us barely moved.

The door opened, and Omen beckoned. “Stop gawking and get your asses on here.”

I reeled my jaw back in, but I stayed where I was. “What did you do to Darlene?” I said, intending to rankle him by using the name he’d given the vehicle despite it not really being his.

He let out a short huff of breath. “The transition through the shadow realm may have had a few side effects. She still runs just fine. Are you coming or did you fly all this way just to park yourselves here?”

I rolled my eyes at him with a teasing smile. “Excuse me for asking.”

We tramped on board. In the dining area, Snap promptly pulled me onto his lap where he was sitting on the sofa-bench and planted a possessive kiss on my mouth. The engine started up with a sputter and... a sound like distant bells ringing?

“Keep any commentary to yourself,” Omen grumbled from behind the wheel.

“All I have to say is, you definitely can’t blame this vehicular mishap on me.” I made a flourish with my hand toward the road ahead. “Next stop, Versailles!”

7

Sorsha

I’d prowled around quite a few opulent mansions in my time, mostly to separate shadowkind collectors from their cages of lesser beasties, but none of those sights had prepared me for the Palace of Versailles. “Palace” was definitely the word for it, to the power of one million.

Staring up at the three stories of sprawling, ornately carved and gilded walls, my jaw went slack for a few seconds before I managed to recall it and myself.

“I see what you mean about extravagance,” I said to Omen as we crossed the vast, shadowy courtyard, keeping my voice low. There wouldn’t have been visitors here this late in the evening anyway, and from the signs we’d passed on our way in, the sphinx had