Dream Lover (6 page)

Lire was curious as to what he was, but knew it wouldn’t be polite to ask any further; he hadn’t answered her question, which meant that he didn’t want to. She could have asked three times—it wasn’t just genies that were bound by the Truth of Threes—but that was considered something beyond impolite. Nearly criminal, if used for nothing more than your own curiosity. “Well, then, Mr. Not Dragonkin nor Demon. What can I get for you?”

“Something sweet,” he said.

She had to laugh. “It’s a bakery. Everything’s sweet.”

“Sweetest thing you have.”

Lire had a funny comeback in her mind, but it never reached her tongue. The man’s hand was reaching out, touching the side of her cheek, his skin cool against the flush of her face. She felt the vibration of him in her bones. It was strong, but not unpleasant, sort of like if she’d held her favorite vibrator up to her face. It was easy to imagine what that hand would feel like between her thighs, the way it would hum against her skin.

He leaned in, and she swore she could actually feel the neurons in her brain popping as his face got close to hers. It was cliché and sad and kind of stupid, but she really wanted him to kiss her, to feel the heat of his lips against hers. She’d been tastetesting Angel Wings all morning, so she knew what her mouth would taste of—cinnamon and sugar, sweet dough and butter. Now would be the perfect time.

But as his face got closer, his eyes changed, flaring once then fading to yellow. The hum of him was growing louder, and Lire was pretty sure that it was something she both felt and heard
this time. She thought he swayed a little, but it was hard to tell. She was feeling a little rocky on her feet herself. Not to mention a little stupid.
Sweet kiss, my ass
.

“Okay,” she said, her voice professional. “Cupid Cookies or Sinfully Del—?”

“Both,” he said, his voice losing some of its richness as he cut her off. “Now, please.”

Lire bit her tongue against the response that swelled in her mouth and bent down to get the pastries.

“Big man down! Big man down!” Margipe croaked. And when Lire looked up, there was only a blank space in front of her, and an odd stillness in her bones.

At first she thought he’d left, but when she leaned over the counter, she realized he’d just fallen. He lay flat on his back, sprawled across her bakery floor. Margipe was hopping on the man’s stomach, yelling “Down! Man down! Downed man!” incessantly. It was only when Lire leaned over him and heard the man whisper, “Get it off,” that she realized he wasn’t dead.

Now she was on her knees next to the man—the thing, the non-Dragonkin, whatever he was—who was half-sitting up, eating the second Cupid Cookie she’d offered him, shoving it into his mouth. The hum was returning, as was his color and alertness. Her body offered a matching hum in return, a low-key but steadily rising throb that started somewhere between her chest and her knees.

“Want to talk about what just happened?” Lire asked.

“It’s like…hmm, like human diabetes,” he said between bites. “Lack of sugar.”

Now that the color in his skin was returning, so was the intensity of his eyes. Lire found it hard to look at him.

Margipe, apparently nonplussed, had gone back to guarding the door, which at the moment meant he was sticking his long
tongue to the window, letting it slide down with a squeak.

“Shall I call someone for you?” Lire asked.

He stuffed the last of the cookie into his mouth and then turned to Lire, his hand sliding around the back of her neck. His touch was somehow both gentle and incredibly strong. He pulled himself toward her, pushing his lips against hers, his mouth tasting of her own cookies and something entirely new, honey and foreign spices. She felt like she was being lifted, as though the floor, the bakery, the world had disappeared and she was nothing more than a soft flutter on someone’s breath.

He let her go and everything slid back, making her dizzy.

“What
are
you?”

“I’m Thadeous. Fairy-kin if you will. Pleased to make your floor’s acquaintance. And yours as well, of course. Not so much with the bouncing frog-thing.”

“Yeah, I get that a lot,” Lire muttered.

It took a second for the rest of his words to sink in. “Wait. You’re fairy? Fey?” Now it was Lire’s turn to stifle a laugh. Surely he couldn’t be serious. She’d seen fairies, of course—her garden was full of them in the summer, as was her bakery in the winter, when it got too cold for them to be outside. They were tiny, small enough to slip through door cracks and sit on the handle of her spoons, light and clumsy enough to nearly drown in batter if she didn’t watch them closely.

This man who’d kissed her couldn’t be fairy. Or if he was, he certainly wasn’t of the same ilk. Talk about different genetic structures.

His eyes studied her face for a moment and then he laughed, that baritone edge back in his voice. Then, mimicking her voice almost perfectly, he said, “Yeah, I get that a lot.”

She didn’t know whether to feel embarrassed that her response was so obvious on her face or to give in to the delightful shiver
that slipped through her at the sound of his laugh. As she discovered, she could do both at the same time.

“But, how did you get so…?”

“Big?” There were so many meanings and entendres in his voice that Lire just wanted to nod a million ways to Sunday.

“I’m not the only one,” he said. “We just don’t cross over too much. It takes a lot of sugar to keep a metabolism like ours revving. As you may have noticed.” Now it was his turn to blush a little, and Lire thought she’d never seen anything so magnificent as this big creature staring at her with obvious heat, two small dots of pink appearing on his cheeks.

He reached out to her again, but stopped just short of touching her. For the first time since she’d seen him, he seemed uncertain of himself.

“Do you want some…?” Lire stopped the question even as it came out. What had she been about to say? Lunch? Dinner? Sex with a sugar-coated baker? Yes, that last one was definitely it.

“I…I have to go,” he said. “Thank you for the sugar.”

“Oh,” Lire said. She felt suddenly worn out and smushed small, like her emotions had been thrown in a mixing bowl and tossed around for a couple of hours. Desire and hope folded in with embarrassment and worry, all mixed with a couple of drops of disappointment. Thank the gods she was better at baking than she was at flirting.

She forced herself to head back behind her pastry case where she was at least partly protected, even if only by glass and spun sugar.

“Well, then,” she said. “Come back anytime. We do our signature Devil’s Food Cake on Thursdays. It’s to die for. Haha.”

Despite her move away, she wished for him to say something obvious and delightful and cliché like, “Well, I came in for sugar, but I found you instead.”

He didn’t say anything like that. He didn’t say anything at all. Instead he gave her a long look, a pitying look she was sure, which she mostly avoided by ducking her head to wipe some crumbs of sugar off the counter. Everyone wanted her pastries. No one wanted her. Fine. Lire could live with that, if it meant she didn’t have to go through anymore emotional mixing bowls.

She heard the door open and close, and then Margipe’s tongue smack and squeal along the window before he pulled it into his mouth. “Big man go bye-bye!” he said.

Lire tossed a cookie at the frog’s head. “Shut it, or I’ll be offering frog’s legs as the special tomorrow.”

“Not sweet,” the frog said. “Not sweet at all.”

“Tell me about it,” she said.

 

After three busy days where both she and Kelly were cranking at the shop, Lire did as she’d promised herself and took a day off. She left Kelly and Margipe—the frog had been surprisingly quiet—in charge of the bakery and headed off for supplies. She didn’t think of Thadeous for the whole day, except for maybe once or twice when she saw someone with dark eyes or dark curly hair, or when she ran into a gaggle of pint-sized fairies while buying sugar.

“How’d it go?” Kelly asked when she got back.

“Perfect,” Lire said. She didn’t mention the fairies, how they’d swarmed around her, sniffing at her arms and hands, jabbering on about “big fairy boys” while they sighed longingly and fanned their wings at her.

“Some man came by for you,” Kelly said. “Well, not a man. He might have been one of the lesser gods?”

Lesser demon is more like it,
Lire thought. “Blackish eyes?”

“Yeah, really nice blackish eyes. Intense.”

“Great,” Lire said.

Kelly shrugged. “Margipe seemed to like him.”

“Margipe likes everyone,” Lire said. “Did the guy pass out and then scam free cookies off you?”

Kelly laid down the rest of the supplies on the baking counter. “What?”

“Never mind,” Lire said. She looked at the supplies, at the tiny spots of dirt in the kitchen, and decided that a cleaning party was just what she needed. Alone. Maybe a little “Devil Went Down to Georgia,” to clear her head. “Go ahead and go on home, Kel,” she said. “I’ll close up.”

“Are you sure? There’s—”

“Yeah,” Lire said. “I got it.”

Lire threw on her cleaning apron as soon as Kelly got out the door, tied her hair up in a loose bun, threw on some music, and set to scrubbing. She kept a clean bakery, really. Cleaning wasn’t necessary, but it made her feel better. Stupid fey, getting in her brain like that.

She was singing along, loudly, by the time she got out the Windex and newspapers to wipe the front bakery cases. As she stepped through the swinging doors into the front of the bakery, she heard Margipe say, “Lire, Lire, Lire! Big man! Big man!”

“I know,” she said, as she headed toward the pastry cases. “I heard.”

“What did you hear?” The voice wasn’t Margipe’s at all. It was his. Thadeous.

“Shit,” Lire said as she saw him sitting at one of the tables. The hum she’d noticed last time was absent, which had to be why she hadn’t noticed him. “You scared the fuck out of me.”

“Good thing that blue stuff won’t kill fairies,” Thad said. “Or I have a feeling I’d be halfway to dead.”

Lire realized she was holding the bottle of Windex in her hand like a weapon. “Shit,” she said again. Trying to recover,
she stayed where she was, keeping distance between them. “I suppose you’re in need of another sugar fix?” she asked. Her voice wasn’t nearly as hard-edged as she’d hoped it would be.

“Yes,” he said as he stood. “And no.”

“Also, how long have you been here? Kelly closed up the shop hours ago. How did you get—”

He smiled at her, a slow, languorous smile that made her insides turn over. “Oh,” she said. “You’ve been here the whole time.”

“Long enough to hear you sing at least four songs, all of which, I can’t help but noticing, were either about broken hearts or devils. Got something you’re working out?”

Lire’s face went hot again. Goddamn these non-mortals and their ability to make her blush. She had an instant where she remembered a movie where the lead character had yelled, “I just want a normal boyfriend!” which was sort of how she felt right now. Except she didn’t have a boyfriend at all. And normal was apparently beyond her. What she had was a bakery in a paranormal hot spot, a talking frog and the world’s biggest, sexiest, most insulin-dependent fairy who wanted nothing more from her than her baked goods.

Thadeous stepped toward her, and as he did so, she felt his body hum. Like before, the motion rattled her, made her hips shimmy slightly, made her very atoms feel like they were dancing.
Awesome,
she thought.
More vibrations.
And here she was in her dirtiest apron, her hair cockeyed on her head, probably with who-knew-what on her mouth.

“What do you want?” she asked.

He lined himself up in front of her, not touching her; not a single bit of him was touching her, and yet she could feel his skin somehow, the heat and hum of it.

“One of those to-die-for Devil’s Food Cakes,” he said. “And
the woman who made it. Not in that order.”

As he finished his words, he did touch her, pressing his body, the full length of it, against her. In the places where their skin met, Lire’s own skin seem to buzz slightly, like it was being brushed by honeybee wings. His lips did the same thing to hers, sending small shivers against her mouth and down through her body.

Still touching, still kissing, she realized he was also speaking. She could barely hear him over the hum. “I did come in for sugar. And then there was you. Something wicked in your eyes, your lips all coated in sweetness. I wanted to eat you up instead.”

Lire had to pull back, away from the velvet vibration of touch that his lips gave her, one of the hardest things she’d ever done. But she couldn’t help herself. “Why did you go then? I thought—”

Even as he released her lips, his hips pressed more fully against hers. He was tall, taller than she’d realized even, and broad. His big hands on her hips pulled her tight, held her there so that she could feel him. It was both constraining and freeing, all at once.

“Shush,” he said, and she did. His mouth was on her again, his tongue probing her, his teeth nibbling her as though she was the sweet dessert. The song of his skin made her head feel light, so that she was noise and music, the soft beat of heart and want. “I know what I want when I see it, Sugarspinner.”

“You’ve not seen me,” she said.

“I will now.” He knelt in front of her, untying the apron from around her waist, his fingers deft and sure. His head was so close to her thighs. She wanted to grab it, to pull it into her, to see if his vibrations alone would be enough to set her body humming. She had a feeling that they would be.

He undressed her quickly, somehow taking every opportunity
to put his fingers to her skin as he removed the fabric. When his fingertips brushed her between her thighs, she released a small, quiet cry of want.