Hollywood Demon (The Collegium Book 6) (14 page)

Mark had never entered the chamber before. The entrance to it might be inside the Yarren Estate, but the chamber was the Ramirez family’s responsibility. He followed Clancy into the cottage. He would have followed her anywhere.

He’d been in his room, unsettled in himself, and unsure what to do. All of his old fears and unreasonable guilt regarding Phoebe had swirled around and through him. He needed to go back down to his study, sit there, and not leave until he had some sort of plan for dealing with Faust and freeing Phoebe’s soul.

Instead, he’d seen Clancy walking beside Jeremy, tripping and steadying herself, before she walked on and the trees hid them. He’d kicked off his ocean-soaked boots, stripped off his socks, and kept watch. He’d seen them reappear, the rain re-start, and their walk adjourn to the gazebo. He’d noted with a punch to his gut Clancy’s slumped shoulders and the slow, reluctant way she joined Jeremy in the shelter offered by the gazebo.

He’d forgotten to put on other shoes.

Clancy hadn’t broken when facing Faust, but something Jeremy said to her left her defeated. Had Jeremy invoked his position as the Collegium-appointed geomage for California to tell her to leave? Doris wouldn’t stand for it!

As he and Clancy entered the cottage, they found Doris seated at the kitchen table, flicking through a magazine. The oven was on and there was a smell of baking. A mixing bowl stood in the sink and wire racks waited on the counter for cookies or cake.

Whatever was baking smelled good, but he wasn’t hungry.

Nor did Clancy stop. She nodded to Doris and walked on into the laundry.

Doris carefully closed her magazine. For a normally chatty woman, her silence suggested she’d seen Jeremy with Clancy. Whatever had happened between the brother and sister, even their grandmother was treading cautiously.

The trapdoor thudded to the tiled floor of the laundry. Clancy straightened. “The ladder goes down about thirty feet.” She started down it.

Standing in the laundry room, he couldn’t see Doris. And he didn’t hear an objection from her. He waited till Clancy would have had time to descend some way down the ladder, then started after her. The rungs of the steel ladder were cold under his bare feet.

He had no idea what to expect. He was entering Clancy’s world in utter trust.

A glow of blue-tinged light grew stronger the deeper he descended into the chamber. It let him see the space that he felt around him. They weren’t descending via a tunnel. Although it started narrow, the entrance soon opened to a large cavern. The light seemed to come from every direction and none, and he realized that the very walls of the cavern were its source.

He reached the bottom of the ladder and found not rock but dirt beneath his feet. Warm dirt—or was that only the contrast to the chill of the steel ladder?

Clancy sat on a rock and unlaced her boots. “In here, I prefer to feel the ground.”

He could understand why. “I’m not a geomage and even I can feel the energy in it.” He looked around. Stalactites and stalagmites and jumbled rock created paths and an entire subterranean landscape around a central cleared space.

Clancy stuffed her socks into her boots and stood. She shrugged out of her jacket. Her hair was already dry. This was the environment that nurtured her magical talent, and she instinctively adjusted it for her comfort.

“Is Jeremy going to make you leave?” he asked abruptly.

“No.” A small unhappy smile. “He’s offered—told me—he’s going to help me to control my magic.”

Mark swore. “Arrogant idiot. You control your magic just fine. You made a demon flee.”

“I operate on emotion, but never mind.” She shrugged off the topic. “I didn’t come in here to worry about things.” Her fingers caressed a stalagmite beside her.

He had a sudden, inappropriate sexual image of her caressing him when he was hard. “I’ve never been here before.” He turned away, trying to focus on the sense of power in the chamber and the flow of it. He could sense the geo-energies as a shadowy, amorphous cloud stream.

“I always feel better in the chamber,” she said. “I thought it might help you, too.”

“It does.” It—or she, herself—certainly distracted him from his problems. He walked around an outcrop of rock that resembled an over-turned tortoise, and clutched one of the tortoise’s feet.

Clancy stood at the edge of the clearing, her hair stirring in an impossible breeze, her lips parted, her whole stance signaling sensual arousal. Her eyes were closed as she smiled. Her breasts pushed against the soft fabric of a long-sleeve t-shirt that was tucked into her jeans before her hips flared out gently. They tipped forward as she arched and stretched.

He could have sworn he made no sound, but her eyes snapped open.

He walked forward. If she’d said “no” or “stop” or “we can’t”, he’d have climbed the ladder and gone.

But she waited for him.

“Have you ever brought anyone else here?” he asked.

“Only you.”

“Good.” He kissed her, and her taste was everything he remembered, but more. Her mouth was hot and eager, and her body…she undulated against him. “You’re turned on. Is it the chamber?”

“Never…like this…before.” She kissed him between each word.

He didn’t have a condom and her grandmother was upstairs. “Tell me if you want to stop.”

She sealed his mouth with a scorching kiss.

Guess that answers that.
And he was properly grateful. She’d burrowed her hands under his shirt and was lightly scratching his chest with her nails. He pulled at her t-shirt and she helpfully wriggled out of it, reaching behind her back to undo her bra and shrug it off, too. He stripped off his shirt so that her breasts could squash against his bare skin.

They both groaned.

She was shorter than him, their hips wouldn’t align and he needed to rub against her. He looked around for a rock the right height to lean against or to lay her flat and—

“On your back,” she said, pushing at him.

He lay down on the thin covering of dirt over the rock floor, and the rock was as soft as a pillow. “What did you do?”

She laughed. Her hair fell down to feather caresses over his chest as her lips found his flat nipples. She sucked one, and he forgot about the cushioned softness of the rock he lay on. She straddled his hips and he gripped her butt to keep her there. She rubbed against him and he played with her breasts, went lower, undoing the button on her jeans, unzipping them. The denim gaped, but her wide-straddled legs pulled it too tight for him to insert his hand.

He swore in frustration.

Clancy stared into Mark’s eyes. She’d never felt so wild with arousal, her pulse beating
want-want-want
. If she got her jeans off, Mark would touch her there where she ached.

She rolled off him, bucked her hips up, and slid down her jeans. He was on his knees and pulled her jeans and panties all the way off. She was naked on the sand and it felt like floating in the sea.

He came up her body, kissed her mouth while his chest brushed hers and one muscled thigh inserted itself between her legs. She rubbed herself against his thigh and his breath hissed. He pulled back, readjusting, and his mouth clamped over her left breast, sucking hard while his hand traced down from her stomach and began teasing.

Tiny detonations of pleasure bloomed. She lost all awareness of anything beyond her body and how Mark owned it. She cried out when he abandoned her breasts, but his mouth swallowed her protest and she had the flavor of him as he finally stopped teasing. Two fingers pushed slowly inside her, turned and pressed that g-spot just there.

His tongue mimicked his fingers’ penetration, filling her as completely as he could when neither had a condom with them. She shuddered and shook beneath him, tremors going on and on as he either kept her orgasm rolling or triggered another. She didn’t care which.

“Mark.” She caressed his bare back, feeling the heat and power of his muscles. He was rigid over her, against her.

He groaned. “I’m going to break the damn zipper, I’m that hard.” He rolled, panting, onto his back.

She leaned up on one elbow. The chamber glowed brightly, red-tinged, passion-saturated. She wasn’t embarrassed at how her magic had escaped her control this time. She barely noticed it. “Undo your zipper.”

He stared at her for a long moment, then shook his head. “First time, I want to come inside you.”

Her womb clenched at the sexual promise, and at the intensity in his voice and look. “Then what can I do for you?”

“Cuddle up.” He wrapped her against him, her bare legs tangling with his jeans-clad ones.

She rested her head on his shoulder. Heaven was real.
All this and a cuddler, too!
She stroked his chest.

Slowly, their racing hearts steadied and their breathing evened out. The energy of the chamber pulsed around them and through them, deep and thrilling. Primal, but contained. Her magic settled, too. The floor beneath them became rock again, and not softly boiling sand. Her magic even feathered away the grains of sand that clung to her skin and Mark’s.

“You are lovely.” He lay on his back, watching her dress.

She flushed, hearing truth in his voice, but not believing him. “I’m not, you know.”

He got up as she zipped her jeans and reached for her bra. He stood behind her and cupped her breasts before she could cover them. “You are real, not Hollywood perfect. Something better. Something to be trusted.” He lifted the weight of her breasts, gently squeezing, treasuring, before releasing them and sliding his arms around her.

She leaned into the heat of his chest, twisting her head to receive his kiss.

Then he helped her fit her bra, stooped for her t-shirt, turned it right side out, and helped her into it.

She could dress herself, but this was caring. She melted at the gentle way he finger-combed her hair.

His hand slid on down her neck, to her shoulder and away. “I like you real, Clancy Ramirez.”

“There’s no other way I can be.”

“And I like that most of all.” He pulled on his shirt abruptly, as if startled at his own emotion or needing to end the moment.

She had to swallow a lump in her throat. What was loveliness but being loveable? It was validation of her worth, valuing her more than she valued herself. Coming after Jeremy’s undermining of her self-respect, Mark’s honesty meant even more. She concentrated on her socks and boots so that she didn’t get teary-eyed. When she had control of her emotions, she looked at him standing in the clearing where they’d made love. “Thank you.”

They climbed the ladder in silence. Mark went first, with her distracted by his thighs and butt. However, she wasn’t so distracted that she didn’t think of what waited them. They were both clothed, again, but she suspected that she, at least, showed what they’d been indulging in. Sensual satisfaction glowed deep inside her and softened her muscles. Doris would take one look at her and know what they’d been doing.

Mark didn’t seem concerned. He helped her step off the ladder into the laundry room, before crouching and closing the trapdoor.

Clancy stomped on her rising sense of embarrassment and walked into the kitchen.
Whew
. Her spine slumped in relief. “Grandma isn’t here.”

There were chocolate chip cookies cooling on two wire racks and a note beside them.
The cookies are for you. I’ve gone to Kim’s. Don’t worry! Grandma.

“Who is Kim?” Clancy demanded.

Mark bit into a cookie. “Korean witch. Friend of Doris’s. Crazy powerful. Doris isn’t kidding when she says she’ll be fine with Kim. Satan himself would flee her.”

“I’ll just text Grandma. ” Clancy put down the note and reached for her phone.

Doris’s reply came instantly.
Im ok
—punctuation and long sentences were beyond her texting skills.

Clancy picked up a cookie to munch. “She’s okay.”

To Mark’s credit, he didn’t say,
I told you so
. Instead, he dusted cookie crumbs off his fingers. “I’m starving.”

“I could make something.” Clancy looked around the kitchen.

“So could I, at my house,” he said. “Pasta suit you?”

“Sounds good.” It was only early evening, but with both of them skipping lunch, dinner sounded great. “Let me put some cookies on a plate for dessert.” She scooped half a dozen of the large cookies with their chunks of chocolate and pecans onto a plate.

He held the door open for her and they walked out into a spectacular evening. The setting sun was painting the last of the rainclouds a blazing orange-gold. The air was cool and scented with damp dirt and the oils from the leaves of plants that had opened their pores to the rain. A snail slimed its way across the garden path.

In his kitchen, Mark refused her offer of assistance, so she sat on a barstool at the counter and watched him move around. He’d poured her a drink of soda water with a twist of lime, and drank his own beer as he cooked.

Watching him sent butterflies rioting in her stomach. She wanted him.

He caught her look and paused, his gaze smoldering, before he left the stove to cross to the counter, lean over it and kiss her.

She kissed him back eagerly, snatching at the chance.

The water in the pot on the stove boiled over.

Mark sprinted back to it to deal with the mess and add the pasta. “That pot is how I feel.”

Me, too.
She laughed. “Hot and bothered and ready to come undone?”

“I want you to come again.” His voice was deep and dark with the innuendo.

She shivered. “I intend to. With you.”

They sat down at the table to eat. The spinach and ricotta ravioli came from a packet, and the tomato and basil sauce from a jar, but they were hot and flavorful and liberally sprinkled with cheese. And simmering beneath everything was her and Mark’s awareness of each other. As awesome as their encounter in the chamber had been, that was only foreplay. Only!

Yet, she didn’t feel nervous. She felt comfortable with him. There was anticipation, but also confidence that they could satisfy—and more than satisfy—each other.

They even strung out the anticipation by tidying the kitchen and making mugs of tea to have with the cookies. Clancy giggled as Mark grabbed her around the waist and buzzed a raspberry against her throat. If you could laugh with a guy, the sex would be great.

The intercom chimed.

Mark kissed her, ignoring it.

Mmmm, sweeter and more decadent than chocolate.
She could drown in his kisses. He’d backed her up against the counter, caging her in. That was thrilling.

The intercom chimed three times. Someone was stabbing at it.

Mark pulled back. “Sorry.” He crossed to the security panel, and swore. “It’s Gilda,” he said to Clancy, and to Gilda, “Gate’s open.” He pushed a button, making it so.

Clancy pushed a hand through her hair. She was a mess; something that hadn’t mattered with Mark who was responsible for her dishevelment, but not something she wanted Gilda to see.

“You can tidy up in my room,” he said.

“Thanks.” She ran up the stairs. Her lips were swollen with kisses. Nothing she could do about that, but she could splash water on her face and comb out her hair. She entered Mark’s bedroom and desire unexpectedly exploded. His bed was large, but not extraordinarily so. What mattered was that she expected to share it with him. She could picture them together, his big body over hers. Hers over his. Their limbs entangled. She could feel how it would be. She could hear them: her gasps, his triumphant shout.

Even with Gilda bringing who knew what bad news, Clancy wanted to lie on the bed and imagine Mark coming to her.

“Soon,” she whispered.

In the bathroom mirror—
don’t think of that decadent tub
—her face was flushed, her pupils wide with arousal, and her hair like a bird’s nest. “Oh, bananas!” She’d sat opposite Mark at the table looking like this.

She found a comb and dragged it through her hair.

Out of nowhere, she remembered Jeremy’s warning, that Mark couldn’t be truly interested in her. That she wasn’t in Mark’s league. “Jeremy was wrong,” she said to her reflection.

Mark wasn’t superficial or shallow. He knew she was ordinary and he’d seen her looking like this, and his words and actions all aligned to say that he wanted her, Clancy Ramirez. He valued her.

Which left her with an ugly thought. If Jeremy was so devastatingly wrong in his advice regarding Mark, what else had her brother lied to her about?