Heedless (The Hellbound Brotherhood #4) - Shannon McKenna Page 0,9
like, a relaxing slow dance,” he said. “You know. After things wind down.”
Her gaze slid away. “I doubt very much that a slow dance with you would be relaxing.”
He thought of yesterday’s kiss, which had kept him up all night staring at the ceiling, his body thrumming with raw hunger. “You have a point,” he said.
There was an awkward pause, and he just went for it. Fuck it, diplomacy had already failed. “So if you’re not trained for this work, what are you trained for?”
“Nate, I’m busy. Please go.”
“Artist,” he guessed. “Designer, illustrator, graphic design. Those chalkboard menus. The portraits. It has to be art. I’d bet good money.”
Elisa took a step back, throat bobbing. He’d pushed too hard. As usual.
“Never mind. Don’t get uptight.” He backed away, hands up. “I’ll go.”
Fuck. Crash and burn. Again. He just could not catch a break with this woman. And he couldn’t seem to let it go of it, either. He’d tried to put this hopeless crush behind him. Move on. Leave her the fuck alone.
But no. He just kept helplessly coming back for more.
The cold wind off the bluffs cooled the sweat on his forehead as he walked out onto the grounds. He got instantly overheated when he interacted with Elisa, and yesterday’s kiss had supercharged that phenomenon.
It had proved what he had already known instinctively. That if he ever got lucky and managed to seduce her, the result would be explosive. Life-altering.
Of course, knowing this only made everything worse.
The wedding party was in the rock garden on the edge of the bluff. It wasn’t exactly a garden, more like a cluster of dramatic lava plugs, and the gardener of the grounds at Bluff House had come up with the brilliant idea of just trimming all the brush away from the obelisks of black granite and setting them off with stark, emerald green turf. The result was eerily beautiful, and the place had become the traditional backdrop for wedding pictures in Shaw’s Crossing. Demi’s filmy white dress and white fake-fur stole looked dramatic against the grass and the lichen-stained black basalt.
The photographer kept on reorganizing the long-suffering wedding party for more pictures amid the backdrop of the various rock formations as Nate approached. He stopped to watch, reflecting as he did upon the Trask guys’ irrational choices.
Fucking insane, to plan a big wedding while Kimball was gunning for them, but Eric and Demi were adamant. They’d already been cock-blocked seven years before by fate, in the form of Demi’s father, and some twisted permutation of what they all affectionately referred to as the Prophet’s curse. That being shorthand for the toxic bad luck of anyone even remotely connected to GodsAcre, the doomsday cult in the mountains, where the Trasks and Fiona had barely survived their childhood. Unlike the rest of the people who had lived up there, all of whom had died in the infamous GodsAcre fire. At Kimball’s hands.
As far as Eric and Demi were concerned, they’d suffered enough, and waited enough. They’d be damned if they’d let Kimball control them any longer. This wedding was like holding up a big middle finger to that son of a bitch.
Nate understood the impulse, and respected them for it, but still, a wedding? Of course they had cops all around, and a massive security apparatus in place, but still. A vicious killer hated your guts and had no conscience, so what do you do? Gather together all the people that you care about in one convenient place, and send out invitations saying where they’ll all be on a particular day? Go ahead, kill us all in one swift blow, expending a minimum of time, effort and resources! Come on down!
But nobody listened to him. And at this point, he’d hung around long enough to attract the Prophet’s curse to himself, the way a magnet attracted metal filings.
The photo shoot was winding down, but Demi and Eric were still wound around each other, her skirt whipping in the breeze around his legs, madly kissing. The beaming photographer kept snapping picture after picture, unable to stop. Those two were stupidly photogenic. A wedding photographer’s dream come true.
Demi looked up at him, eyes dazed with happiness. “Nate!” she called to him. “Get over here! We didn’t get one with you!”
Nate obligingly climbed up and perched on the rocks with them. After that, he had to wait until they reassembled the rest of the security crew, at least the ones not yet on duty, and configured them