Chapter 9
9
Invi
T his time, I was prepared. I’d spent almost the entire day on the highest level of my house, which was the look-out on the top tower, watching the town. Not that I could see much from this distance. The rows of town dwellings merged into a colorful ribbon with only a blue blotch for the teahouse. But I spotted the tiny brown dot heading in my direction the moment it separated from the ribbon of the town.
Was it Nicole?
Was she really coming?
Thrill rushed me with rings of tingles, reaching to the very tip of my tail and making my rattle tremble.
Soon, Nicole would be here, and I would hopefully get a chance to plead my case to her.
I slid down the pole from the look-out. Instead of the tail, I landed on the floor below with two feet, shifting into the form that Nicole would find more agreeable. I couldn’t risk scaring her away again. If she so wished, I was prepared to give up my horns and tail for good. Shifting from my natural form always felt uncomfortable, but I’d had more practice doing it than any of my brothers and could bear it better than any of them.
Would she stay for dinner?
I hadn’t spent enough time with Nicole to learn her favorite food, but I had a variety of dishes prepped and ready to cook. A new, sturdier table was set under the willow tree. I put the appetizers out—some greens and seafood. It called for white wine, which I had chilled. But I also put a bottle of red on the table because on the night I met Nicole, she was drinking red wine.
I circled the table, making sure everything was ready and in place.
Was she really coming?
What if the dot I’d spotted wasn’t her? Kindness wore brown too. Except that Kindness hardly ever came to visit me, which was best for both of us. I didn’t care about “keeping in touch” with the entire town through my sister. The less of the town gossip I heard, the better off I was.
What if it was Mother coming to talk again?
Mother preferred brighter colors, however. I couldn’t recall if I’d ever seen her taking that dull shade of brown that Kindness would’ve lent Nicole to wear. I had much lovelier clothes ready for her, if only she would accept them.
Anxious and impatient, I circled the table one more time and realized suddenly that I was no longer walking . At some point, my legs had merged to form the tail again.
Fuck.
I couldn’t let that happen in Nicole’s presence. I had to focus and keep in control.
Shifting back to the form and size of a human, I rushed into the house to put on the clothes I wore the night I met Nicole. The restraining sensation of the fabric would hopefully serve as a reminder for me to stay in this shape throughout the evening.
“Um... Invi?” Nicole’s sweet voice called from the outside while I finished zipping up my pants behind a screen. “Are you there?”
She came.
Making sure I looked the way she was less likely to fear me, I stepped from behind the partition with the trunk where I kept my one and only set of human-sized clothes.
“I’m here,” I said from my main floor sitting room.
She stood on the lawn by the front entrance. But because my house had no walls, I could see her from almost anywhere, even while being inside.
She was dressed in one of Kindness’s demure dresses that was way too long for her. The top part of her thick, wavy hair was pinned up, the rest draped in lush waves down her back and shoulders. And she held my basket in her hands.
“Oh…” She cleared her throat. “Hi.”
“Hello.” I bowed my head, somehow remembering my manners while fighting the overwhelming need to take her in my arms. “I’m…honored to welcome you to my home.”
Mindful of every step I took and making sure that my feet remained feet instead of turning into the tail again, I walked out onto the lawn to her.
“You…” She ran her gaze up and down my fully dressed figure that I made sure to be just a head or two taller than her. “You look different.”
“I’m trying to look as close as possible to the way I did when we met. I kept the clothes, and I can compress my size, get rid of the um…extra appendages.” I blew out a frustrated breath. “But I can’t have a real human body without the moonstone ring.”
“Did Avar take the ring back?”
“He did.”
When I returned to Purgatory, Avar was furious and itching for a fight. I allowed him to tackle me to the ground before he finally calmed down a little. Luckily, I had managed to put Nicole to bed before he showed up. This whole situation could’ve been even more complicated had he seen her.
“What I mean is that you look different from how you did yesterday,” Nicole explained.
“Because yesterday, my appearance scared you.”
“It did,” she admitted. “The horns… The tail… It’s rather unusual, but I keep wondering, and it’s driving me insane… Which one is the real you?”
She looked at me so intensely, I feared that there was only one right answer to that question. Tragically, I had no idea what that answer was.
“Which one do you want me to be?” I said.
I realized immediately it was a wrong thing to say. Her chest rose with a deep breath, and hope in her eyes dulled.
She thrust the basket my way. “Thank you for the food. It was delicious.”
“You liked it? I have more.” I gestured at the table under the tree. “Will you stay for dinner?”
“Thanks, but I already ate.” She pointed at the basket in my hand. “I washed the containers. So, you can just put them back in…” she glanced at my house, “wherever you normally store them.” She rubbed her left arm with her right hand, looking uncomfortably out of place. “I should go. I just wanted to thank you for the food and bring back the basket to save your ducks the trouble of fetching it.” She smiled. It was a tiny, barely-there grin. But she smiled . “How did you train the ducks to provide delivery service for you?”
“Ducks are smarter than many people think,” I said, encouraged by her smile. “Living on my own and keeping to myself, I have enough time to train an elephant to dance ballet if I wanted to. Except that elephants don’t like my wetlands, but ducks are always around…” Maybe I should’ve stayed calm and nonchalant, but desperation got the best of me. “Stay, please,” I implored. “It doesn’t have to be dinner. We could just have dessert instead. Do you like key lime tarts?”
“Normally, I do.” She exhaled a brief laugh. “But I’ve eaten so many pastries in the past two days, I don’t think I’ll feel like having any for a while now.”
“I knew it.” I shook my head in dismay. “I tried to find a way to tell Kindness that humans need more than scones and tea for sustenance, but I couldn’t get close enough to the teahouse to talk.”
“Well, spirits eat for fun, not sustenance. It’s understandable that not everyone knows about every detail of human preferences. It’s okay, though. Kindness means well.”
She glanced back in the direction of the town, and I worried she was thinking about leaving again.
“You don’t have to eat the tarts,” I said quickly. “I have other, non-pastry, dishes. Pistachio dusted shrimp, scallops in a buttery lime sauce, roasted Brussels sprouts with bacon. Or we can just have some grapes and cheese with coffee?”
“Wow, where did you get all that food?” She took a step toward the table, which was in the opposite direction from the town, allowing me to exhale a breath in relief.
“I made it.”
“You can cook? Really?” She glanced at me in disbelief before turning her curious gaze back to the table.
“Why does it surprise you?”
“Oh, I don’t know. It’s just that… Well, I have a hard time envisioning you in an apron by the stove.”
I lifted the tray with the small dishes with appetizers.
“Here.” I offered it to her. “I didn’t know what you like and made a little bit of everything. Tell me your favorite, and I’ll don the apron right now to make more of it for you.”
She bit her lip, eyeing the food on the tray.
“I’m not even hungry, but I want to try it all.” She picked up a shrimp, gingerly so as to not shake off the pistachio spice mix. “Mmm,” she moaned around the mouthful. “So good. I would’ve never expected the Sin of Envy to be such an accomplished cook.”
Her pleasure resonated through my entire being. My knees trembled, ready to merge into the tail, and I forced my mind to focus on keeping my current shape.
“Why not?” I swallowed hard, watching her sample a scallop next.
The tip of her tongue darted out to lick the buttery souse off her lips, and one of my cocks popped out from my crotch like a timer on a turkey.
“Fuck,” I cursed in my mind.
It was getting increasingly harder to control my cocks and my tail. And now, my forehead itched, too, with my horns ready to sprout out.
“Well…” I cleared my throat, holding my entire form as stiff as a rock. “There is a very simple explanation. At some point, I decided to become a better chef than Gul and spent several centuries learning and perfecting my cooking.”
“So, you became an amazing chef just because you wanted to best your brother?”
“Mostly for that reason, yes,” I admitted. “I enjoy being the best.”
“You really take sibling rivalry to a whole new level, Invi.” She shook her head, but the smile on her lips was that of amusement, not judgement.
“The problem is that all my brothers are really good at something,” I said. “Trying to compete with all of them is incredibly hard and often disheartening.”
“You hate losing,” she remembered.
“Very much so. There is nothing I hate more. I do anything to win, even if I have to spend a century or two at the stove, learning to cook while risking burning my tail—” I cut myself off, realizing it probably wasn’t a good idea to remind her of my visual short-comings.
Thankfully, she giggled, covering her mouth behind her hand in a gesture I found irresistibly adorable.
“It sounds dangerous,” she teased. “Well, let’s see what else you achieved after taking all that risk.”
She moved closer to the table, and my hope for an evening with her grew stronger.
Setting the tray on the table, I pulled a chair out for her. “Why don’t you take a seat? Have a glass of wine? Red or white?”
To my relief, she hesitated only for a moment, before sitting down.
“Well, normally, I prefer red,” she said. “But it’s rather warm here today, isn’t it?” She cast me a furtive glance, while pulling at her tight neckline to let the air under her dress.
And now I was thinking about everything she hid under that dress, which didn’t help with containing my straining cocks at all. I plopped into the chair across from her to hide my raging double erection.
“It’s warmer here, in the wetlands.” It cost an effort for my voice to sound more or less normal as I poured her a glass of chilled wine, then poured one for myself, too, because I needed to chill the fuck out here. “The air is more humid, which adds to the heat, I believe.”
“This place is only a short walk from the town. How is the climate here so different?”
“Distance doesn’t have the same meaning in Purgatory as it does in your world. Our climate is rather subjective. Many factors affect it, even state of mind sometimes.”
“Interesting.” She seemed distracted, unbuttoning the two top buttons of her dress.
I forced my eyes away from the sliver of her skin revealed in the opening but wished she’d keep going. The effort it took me not to stare at her neck and chest, weakened my control over other parts of me. I felt a horn pushing through my skull and quickly covered it with my hand, pretending to rake my fingers through my hair.
“Yes. Purgatory is a world of its own.” My voice came raspy this time, despite my best efforts.
“I’ve been here for two days now, but I still know very little about this world,” she said. “I didn’t explore it much, mostly because I was told to stay in the teahouse for my own safety.”
Her words hung between us in the silence that followed. I was the one she’d been hiding from in the teahouse. I was the reason she had to hide.
“You’re afraid of me…” I exhaled, crushed by it.
She gave me a prodding look. “Not enough, clearly. Since I’m here now, despite all the warnings.”
Now was my time to set things right between us.
“Nic, I’m so, so sorry.” Shoving the chair away, I did what the legs allowed me to do much better than a tail would—I fell to my knees in front of her. “I wronged you. There is no excuse for what I did, other than my fervent desire to get to know you better. Please forgive me. If I could, I would take you back home instantly.”
“Would you?” She focused on my face as if trying to confirm the meaning of my words in my expression.
“You don’t trust me.” It came out as a statement, even as I had intended it as a question.
“How can I?” she sighed uncertainly. “Everything I thought I knew about you turned out to be a lie.”
“Not everything. Actually, everything I ever told you about myself is true. But if you have any questions, just ask. Ask me anything you want.”
She kept her assessing gaze on me.
“Will you be honest in your answers?”
That was my intention. But my intentions mattered little if I failed to convince her in my honesty.
The memory of something I’d seen on the magical Pandora’s Box or TV, like humans called it, gave me an idea.
“Let’s play a game,” I offered.
She arched an eyebrow skeptically. “What kind of a game?”
“Truth or dare. You’ll ask me questions, and I will answer them truthfully. One can’t lie when playing that game, can one?”
“One shouldn’t lie,” she corrected, keeping her close attention on me. “Well, it wouldn’t hurt to try, I suppose. But it’s probably best if you get off your knees and sit in the chair again.”
“Does it mean I’ve been forgiven?” I asked hopefully, not moving from my kneeling position.
“I accept your apology, but my ultimate forgiveness will depend on how honest you’ll answer my questions.”
That was better than nothing. It was a step in the right direction. At least, that was how I longed to see it.
Taking my seat again, I folded my hands on the table in front of me.
“I’m ready,” I said. “You can ask me ‘truth or dare?’ now, and I will choose.”
She shook her head.
“No. We’ll change the rules a little. I’ll choose for you whether it’s truth or dare.” She stared straight at me. “And it’s truth . Tell me, Invi, why did you abduct me? Why did you bring me here? Why didn’t you at least consider asking me if that was something I was ready for?” I opened my mouth to reply, but she wasn’t done yet. “I know we agreed we both were open for more. But ‘more’ normally means something like another date. Not an actual fucking abduction to another world.”
She clearly felt strongly about it. Her voice rose and her face flushed with the color of anger. I knew that shade of red well. I had an entire brother in that very color.
“Why, Invi?” Her voice dropped. She clutched the stem of her glass so hard, it was in the real danger of snapping. “Is it because the mortal sins are used to doing whatever they want?”
“No,” I rushed to explain, then faltered, “Well, yes. That is possibly a part of it. When everyone thinks the worst of you, sometimes it’s easier just to prove them right than to keep trying to convince them otherwise.”
“But I didn’t think the worst of you. I thought very highly of you when we first met. I…I liked you so much…” Her voice broke, and it broke something inside me too.
Liked, she said. Past tense.
Somehow, I had managed to have this delightful woman like me.
And I blew it.
Was there even the slightest chance for me now?
She asked for honesty, and that was what I had to give her.
“Nic, I didn’t plan to…um, abduct you. At first, I thought we’d have breakfast together in your world. But then this man knocked on your door at a rather indecent hour.”
“What man was it?” She looked genuinely shocked, and I liked it. It meant his visit hadn’t been arranged between them. It appeared, it hadn’t been welcomed by her, either.
“I’m not sure who he was,” I said, wishing I had at least punched her midnight visitor in his jaw, to deter him from any thought of ever pursuing my woman again. Instead, I’d just shut the door into his face, repulsed by his very existence in such a close proximity to my Nicole.
“What was his name?” she asked. “Did he introduce himself?”
“No, he didn’t. Which is rather rude, come to think of it.” I scratched my chin.
“What did he look like?”
I shrugged. “A relatively tall human. With red curly hair and those…what do you call them?” I waved a hand in front of my face. “Freckles.”
“Geoff?”
“Who is Geoff?” My shoulders rose, and my hands clenched into fists, as if ready to fight the human whose name slipped so easily from the lips I couldn’t wait to kiss again.
“He’s our new and only employee,” she explained. “Jess hired him just before we left for the city to do the challenge because we needed three people on our team. I don’t know him that well…” Her eyes opened wider as she stared at me with a new horror. “Tell me something, Invi. Did you open the door naked?”
“Yes.”
“Oh no…” she groaned, dropping her face in her palm.
“Nic, sweetheart, these are the only clothes I own, and I procured them literally on the day we met. I’m simply not in the habit of being dressed.”
“Right.” She scraped her hand down her face. “Did he say what he wanted?”
“No. But by his outfit that consisted only of a bathrobe and a bottle of wine in an ice bucket, it was quite clear what he had in mind.”
Her cheeks turned the loveliest shade of pink. “But it doesn’t make any sense.”
“It makes perfect sense to me,” I disagreed. “He clearly thought you were in your room alone and desired to spend the night with you. I can’t blame him for seizing the opportunity, but I couldn’t let him have you. I just couldn’t…” The stubborn horn tried to make its presence known once again, and I rubbed my forehead against the itchy spot. “Even the slightest possibility of losing you to him was more than I could bear. I realized I couldn’t wait until the morning and risk someone claiming you before me. I had to bring you here, where I thought we could be alone. Where you’d be mine and mine alone.”
“Oh, Invi…” She shook her head, her lips pursed in displeasure.
“I didn’t mean to scare you,” I tried to explain. “Never in a million years would I have wanted you to fear me. I went to the teahouse to get us some pastries for breakfast, afraid that baking them myself would take too long and they wouldn’t be ready by the time you woke up. And the tail… Well, my brothers and I were created as monsters. That nightmarish form is just more comfortable for me to be in, but I never meant for you to see it.”
“Is that form, with the horns and the tail… Is that the real you?”
“It’s all real, Nic. All of me. In every form. No matter what I look like on the outside, I can only be me on the inside.”
She drew in a breath, slowly spinning her wine glass on the table by rotating its stem between her fingers.
Moments ticked by, and she said nothing. Needles of apprehension pricked my chest. I had told her everything. I’d deliver my apology the best I could, but I feared it might not have been enough.
“Do you hate me?” I expressed my fear out loud before I could think better of it.
“Hate?” She glanced up. “No. I don’t think I ever did, even when I seriously tried to hate you. I was terrified of you, though.”
“But not anymore, right? Tell me you aren’t afraid of me anymore.”
“I don’t think so. No.” She let go of her glass and placed both hands on her lap. “But of course, it all depends on what you do from now on, on how you act in the future.”
My chest expanded with hope.
“Does it mean there is a chance for us to have a future together?”
Frown wrinkled her forehead. “That wasn’t what I said.”
But she didn’t deny it either.
I gripped the edge of the table.
“Then say it. Say it isn’t so,” I challenged, halting my breath in anticipation of her answer.
Her chest rose with a long breath as she searched my eyes.
“But why, Invi? Why me? What is it about me that you want so much? Because, let’s face it, I’ve lived in this body for close to three decades now, and I never had a man fight for me this hard before. Men don’t find me very desirable, to be honest. I’m not sure what you see in me that attracts you, but whatever it is?—”
“Your soul.”
“What?” She scrunched her nose in concentration, struggling to understand something that was so clear to me.
“Nic, it’s not just your body. I desire you in every way a person can be desired. All of you. Your soul suits me. I love how I feel in its presence. But to win your soul, I realize, I have to win your heart too. Your body is also a lovely and quite exciting addition that I can’t wait to have my hands on again.”
The blush on her cheeks flared anew, and I forced my thoughts away from her body.
“I’ve never cooked for anyone before,” I said. “But I enjoyed it today. And I want to do it again. I want to know what it’s like to care for someone and to have them care about you in return.”
The well-familiar longing squeezed my chest, forcing me to stop talking.
“Invi.” She reached across the table and covered my fist with her small hand.
The contact rushed me with sensations. For a moment, I could focus on nothing but her.
“Oh—” she sucked in a sharp breath, and I realized with horror why she was staring at my forehead.
The damn right horn made it out after all. And the left one followed.
“Fuck,” I cursed under my breath, raising both hands to the base of the horns. “Just give me a moment, please. I’ll get this under control?—”
“Don’t,” she said softly, snapping my attention back to her with that one word.
“No?” I dropped my hands on the table. “But I don’t want to scare you.”
“I’m not scared.” She eyed my horns. “I’m just…curious. And since you said you don’t want to hurt me?—”
“I don’t.”
“I believe you. If it’s more comfortable for you to have the horns out, just do it. You don’t have to force yourself to be something you’re not just to please me. May I?” She reached for the left horn, and I stiffened.
On one hand, I’d be damned if I denied her anything at this moment or anytime thereafter.
But on the other hand, her touching my horns would have a similar effect to her stroking my cocks, and I just didn’t know if I could take it. I’d either have to fuck her right here on the table or I would simply combust into the pink flames of lust.
“This is different,” she murmured, sliding her light fingers up the curved edge of my horn.
I bit my lip so hard, it’d bleed if I had a physical body with blood. Desire rushed to my groin, filling my entire being with the tingling sensation of need.
“It feels warm and not quite as hard as I expected,” she said, squeezing my horn in her deft little fingers.
Oh, I was hard. And not just in the horns. My rock-hard cocks pushed against my pants, literally bursting out of them. With the mortifying sound of ripping material, my cocks and my tail both busted out of their jail.
Nic jerked her hand away.
I thanked Heaven for the table that concealed my erection. But there was no space to hide my tail. Like an uncoiling spring, it unfurled in thick, green loops all around me. The chair I’d been sitting on fell backwards, then rolled down into the creek, spooking the ducks.
Nic jumped to her feet.
“What happened? What did I do?”
“Ugh, the fucking horns.” I groaned, grabbing one in frustration.
Her stroking them had the same effect on me as my sucking and licking her nipples had on her. And now, all I could think about were the little moans she made when I played with her breasts.
A hot charge of desire shot through me, making me let go of my horn as if it was a hot iron. My shirt busted open at every seam. Clearly, I was no longer human size. I lost all control over my own shape.
“Wow…” Nic tilted back her head, sliding her gaze up my monstrous form. “So, this is the real you.”
I blew out a breath in defeat.
“Yes. That’s me. In all my monstrous glory,” I said with a bitter smile.
There was no point in hiding now. Trying to shrink again would only make me look ridiculous. Also, my clothes had been irreparably ruined.
“This is incredible.” Nic tipped her head to the side, examining my tail. “I mean I saw you in this form before. But I was so terrified, I had no presence of mind to appreciate it.”
“Are you really appreciating this?”
“Well, it’s not something one sees every day. At least not where I come from.” She glanced up and down my height as I propped myself on a coil of my tail. “You look even bigger up close.”
She said it calmly. Wonder had melted the fear from her hazel eyes, and she looked like she really appreciated what she saw.
“Now that you know the truth, how do you feel about us spending the night together two days ago?” I asked carefully.
A shiver of apprehension ran down my tail in anticipation of her reply. My rattle trembled with a subtle buzzing.
“What’s that?” Nicole perked up with curiosity. “What’s that noise?”
Instead of an answer, I silently raised the tip of my tail in her line of vision.
“It vibrates?” she asked incredulously.
“It does.” I shook the tip faster, making the rattle vibrate harder.
She propped her hands on her hips, narrowing her eyes at me. “Well, that explains the mysterious appearance of a vibrator in my bed that night.”
“You seemed to enjoy it.” I ventured a smile.
She didn’t deny it. A gentle smile played on her lips, with a dreamy expression settling over her eyes. She leaned forward slightly across the table toward me. And I hated that table for still standing between us.
I wanted her close so badly, my chest ached.
“It’s my turn now. In our game,” I rasped through my tightening throat.
“Are we still playing it?”
“Yes. And since you chose for me, I’ll choose for you now. It’s a dare, my dear Nicole.” I propped my hands on the table and leaned across it toward her. “I dare you to kiss me.”