Wolves at the Door - Lidiya Foxglove Page 0,27
man sitting across from me either. Except that he seemed a little troubled, and so was I.
We had a bottle of wine to share, and we were drinking more than we ate. I felt like we needed to talk but I wasn’t sure what to say.
“I’ve never gone so long with my phone off,” Graham said. “And…now, of all times.” He held up the phone. “This doesn’t feel real anymore.”
“It’s not…your world,” I said. “You’re just learning that.”
“My world is…” He reached for my hand, running his fingers across my skin so lightly that I shivered, but his touch was almost absent. He looked at the restaurant, small and candlelit and old-fashioned, with dark wood chairs and tables and paintings of old riverboats on the walls. Piano standards were playing gently. The world will always welcome lovers…as time goes by.
“I’ve never gone so long without sex either,” he said. “I mean, since the first time.”
“Ohhh. Well. Good,” I said. Good? Should I have said that? But it was good. If he was a warlock, I might have rolled my eyes, but I knew how genuinely hard it was for an incubus not to have sex, especially when he’d been running this election campaign and needed energy and power. Sex was literally food to him, and he must be running on empty. But he’d controlled himself very well today, I thought.
The very idea was making me sweat.
“What do you want?” Graham asked, turning back to me. “Out of life? In the long run?”
“Ummm…I don’t know. I guess…I already have what I wanted.”
“But no home of your own. No dog either. I saw the way your eyes lit up in that cottage.”
“Yeah, I might be a little lonely sometimes. I wasn’t really thinking about a husband or kids. So much pressure on me to get married when I was young. Sometimes I would think, it’d be nice to have an old Airstream trailer or something to drag around, but then I would hate driving. I like to speed.”
“Maybe you wouldn’t mind having the Sullivan brothers around to work with more often?”
“I—I don’t know.”
His eyes twinkled in the candlelight as he slipped his fingers beneath mine. “None of this is what you thought you wanted, is it?”
“Nope…”
“Me neither. But…you know what I do want is just to make you really happy tonight and I don’t care if you aren’t sure what you want, or who you want. I need to follow my gut, not the world I thought I knew, because that world is slipping away from me.”
He didn’t seem so jealous as he was before. I wondered what on earth Byron said to him when they were talking.
“What about your election?” I asked.
“I’m going to lose,” he said.
“How do you know?”
“Because I haven’t had sex in a month. I didn’t want to win with magic.”
I giggled—the giggle was definitely thanks to the wine. “Watch out or you’ll start having dream sex with old ladies.” If an incubus couldn’t get sex in real life, they could start feeding in dreams, and there were plenty of jokes in the magical world about incubi getting stuck in dreams with horny old women on accident.
An incubus who wasn’t getting laid at all was a demon whose powers would grow weak and desperate. Was he doing this to prove something to me? That was pretty cute.
“I’ve never done anything without a plan before,” Graham said.
“I know. I could tell that from the moment you ordered the low calorie heart-healthy option in the diner. You’re a sensible plans guy.”
He finished off the wine bottle, dividing it between our glasses, and then he pressed his knees against mine as his gaze told me that tonight…he knew why I was here. There would be no second thoughts. I felt the strength of his long legs, the brush of fine suit material against my thin tights. He pinned my knees between his and then, under the table, he slipped a hand between the tight space between my thighs and stroked as far as he could reach without being too obvious. Just that one simple touch made me almost too hungry for him to eat the gumbo. The gesture was dominating and left no doubt about what I’d always known about him. He was going to have his way with me tonight.
It wasn’t even that scandalous a move on the surface but it left me flustered. My heart was beating faster now as he opened his legs and released me, edging his