Chapter 21
Lionel
“ Keep doing things like that, and I’ll have to restrain you.
” Lucifer’s deep, warm, and unnecessarily seductive voice had no business taking up the real estate it was currently occupying in my brain.
His voice was an obnoxious squatter, not unlike how the Devil his own damn self was…
squatting. In my personal space, standing next to me with his arm around my waist in his all-white rich-people living room.
Except squatting made him sound small, and that he was not.
Not that I was talking about the size of his penis at all. I’d never seen his penis, didn’t want to see his penis, and…well, maybe immortals didn’t even have penises. Who knew?
Out of the corner of my eye, I caught Tiamat walking down another hallway and leaving to go for her midnight swim. She briefly met my eyes, and an echo of that sense of belonging I had felt earlier rushed through me.
“Please keep doing things like that,” Lucifer whispered into my ear. “I’d really like to restrain you.”
“Get off me.” I shoved him in the chest.
Oh, sweet gods. Lucifer was solid. He didn’t move an inch. I might as well have shoved one of those antique marble statues, except those had a better personality than the Devil, were mostly naked, and hadn’t forced me to go on a juice cleanse, so I liked them much better.
Lucifer completely ignored me. “You seem to have had a bad day. There is this scent about you…hmm. Death, I think. I’d let you tell me all about it, but when the Dragon Mother sends one to bed, one doesn’t argue.”
I knew I needed to remain stalwart here. I needed to embrace celibacy. Plus, I’d not seen definitive proof that Lucy even had a penis, not that I wanted or needed it.
Stalwart, I kept repeating over and over in my head as I said, “Stop with this bullshit already, Lucy. I’m leaving.”
Lucifer chuckled. His blue eyes focused on mine, drowning me like a stormy ocean would a shipwrecked sailor.
“No, you’re not. We’re going to bed. You’re my boyfriend.”
He raised his chin, the light in the room making his eyes seem like they shone with an innate glimmer.
“Lucy, I’m not your boyfriend.”
“Shush, Nelly.”
“Don’t you fucking shush me!”
He grinned like the trickster he was. “That’s something you’d only say to your boyfriend.”
“No, it’s not.”
This deep, unusual growling noise he made again. “Yes, it is.”
“No!”
“Yes. Say no one more time, and I’ll tie you up nice and tight, and then I’ll—”
“N—thanks, but I don’t think that’ll be necessary.”
His nostrils flared. “Come on, babe. Let me show you our bedroom.”
“Wh—?"
His arm snaked around my waist, and he dragged me along with him through the house.
I tried breaking his hold—stalwart!—but it was no good.
He was stronger. Him smirking at me distracted me momentarily, and I went right back to…
not thinking about the penis he maybe didn’t have, a real Schrodinger’s cat of a penis.
His fingers managed to work my shirt up above my waistband.
That could have been accidental, but I didn’t think anything the Devil did was accidental.
I figured skin-to-skin contact—him drawing circles with his thumb on the small of my back—was going to give me a boost, so with all my power, mostly, I zapped him, trying a brute force play to get him to back off.
It made Lucifer chuckle like a crackling bonfire marking the changing seasons.
“Nelly, is this you asking me to get creative? Spread you out on your belly while I make you moan underneath me?”
Nope, no. That did not put an image in my head, and it did not make me feel anything at all. Damn my cock. I needed to be thinking with my brain right now. I needed to leave and forget this had ever happened.
I huffed, trying to get my thoughts lined up with the focus on…
well, leaving. Meanwhile, Lucifer had walked me to another room, large enough to be a ballroom but not nearly as well lit as the one with the fireplace.
He headed for a large staircase on the left that snaked up the wall in a curve, leading to a second-floor balcony that looked as if it ran the circumference of the ballroom.
I tried to grab the banister to anchor myself, but Lucifer, not half as oblivious as I would have liked, saw. He reached around me and caught first one wrist and then the other in his hand.
“Nelly, what is that thing they say about idle hands?”
“Huh? How the fuck would I know?”
That Devil noise again. “I could tell you. Would you like that, Nelly?”
“N—I mean, perhaps some other time.”
He cackled like a hyena about to dig into a massive feast, then he leaned in close to whisper in my ear.
“Please. Say no, Nelly. I’d make you enjoy it so very much.”
He followed that up by sucking my earlobe, nipping it with sharp teeth before he let go and carried on maneuvering me up the stairs.
It was a nice, grand staircase, really. Just the kind of thing I could imagine he’d use to descend like some magnificent playboy, slick and handsome, a gleaming smile on his face to dazzle and impress the masses.
Yeah, people could use the lowest stairs to fall at his feet and beg him to tie them up.
Not me though. I was still an agnostic about the existence of his penis.
“I should go. I have work.”
The Devil clicked his tongue. “No, babe. You have quality time with your boyfriend now.”
“N—I mean, I should finish…uh.”
I tried dragging my feet, but that did me no good. It just made Lucifer hold me tighter and use his hold on me to carry me, rather than allowing me to walk by myself or knocking my toes into the stairs.
“Finishing sounds delightful, but not finishing can be fun too,” Lucifer mumbled, making it seem as if he were thinking out loud.
He wasn’t though, I knew he wasn’t, because he was deceptive like that, and I, Lionel Hawkes, professional necromancer, was not going to fall for it.
Also, I had places to be, and I needed to stop thinking about the Devil showing me his bedroom and focus on getting to those places.
Even if, in the moment, I couldn’t recall precisely where they were.
By the time we got to the top of the stairs, sweat had broken out all over my skin. Lucifer seemed downright affable, and I wanted to kick him in the balls, which I definitely would do if he’d give me that kind of opening. I swallowed. He wasn’t going to give me that kind of opening, was he?
When he put me on my feet again, I got a big breath of his scent, full of dark woody notes and about as ridiculously seductive as his voice. It was possible my mouth watered, but no, I didn’t do that kind of thing.
“I am not going to bed with you,” I said to him in the semi-darkness of the upstairs floor as we walked—as he dragged me along. My voice was shaky and my legs were starting to get wobbly.
I felt him kiss the top of my head, and damn it, that felt good. No, no. Not good. It couldn’t feel good. I tried to get my hands free again, to no avail.
“Babe, where else would you sleep after that long, hard day at work you had?” Lucifer asked, lingering on that “hard” as if he were a horny pubescent human.
“At home,” I said. “In my own bed.” I turned my head away when a shaft of light made his sapphire eyes shimmer like faerie lights. “Alone.” I added, just to make that clear.
“Ever so stubborn,” Lucifer said. He released my wrists, but only so he could open a door and flick on the lights in the room beyond, which was…well, it was a bedroom. A bedroom on steroids, but a bedroom nonetheless.