Stone Passions Trilogy (109 page)

Ferris reluctantly smiled at her mother’s words. She couldn’t afford to lose faith no matter how rocky the path became.

Armand had betrayed Ferris’s secret without any hesitation because he had wanted her to hurt as badly as he was hurting. In the heat of the moment, he had lashed out at her in righteous fury, the burden of having to pretend to be what she wanted lifted from his shoulders. Even as pain tore through his body and soul he had felt an incredible sense of relief that she was finally seeing him as he truly was. But one look into those shattered turquoise eyes had pierced through the pain and righteousness and relief and he hated her for being everything he had ever wanted. He hated himself even more for being so completely heartless.

Instead of enjoying his return to the world, he had spent the night brooding in his bedroom, ignoring the pounding on his door, the voices of his brothers demanding a conversation, fueling the guilt that was starting to gnaw at the edges of his conscience. Eventually they had given up, returning to the loving arms of their mates and their children.

His family had gone on without him.

When the sun rose he remained in his bedroom, trying to keep as still as possible so his gargoyle form wouldn’t break anything. For days he held himself together through sheer force of will. But then he snapped, tearing his room apart because the agony inside was too much. When the sun went down on the fourth day, he found himself physically, spiritually exhausted, sprawled across his broken bed with a fine sheen of sweat covering his naked body.

He couldn’t get the image of her out of his head, the way her eyes darkened to teal when she was aroused, the feel of her body as she writhed against him, the taste of her skin as he drove her to orgasm. Curling his fingers around his cock, he stroked the fickle organ, his breathing labored as he tried to exorcise her from his head.

His spine tingled and his balls tightened with imminent release. His face twisted into a grimace as his back arched into the coming orgasm, desperate for the oblivion of pleasure.

The image of her with his father flashed into his head, her expression of ecstasy as the glorious Apollo made love to her. A broken cry tore itself from his bowels, leaving his throat raw and bleeding. Leaving his soul raw and bleeding.

She had been with a god... how could a broken gargoyle compete with that?

Rolling to the edge of the bed in disgust and frustration, he sat up and scraped his fingers through his hair. He needed her with a desperation that bordered on the pathetic and he hated it. There had to be a way to bury the shattered fragments of his heart so he would be safe from her hollow promises that he desperately wanted to believe. With her, he would have been a better man even if it killed him because he never wanted to disappoint her.

His muscles ached as he raised his head and finally looked around his room and the destruction he had wrought while lost in his grief and regret and rage. Shards of glass littered the floor from broken mirrors and picture frames, the pieces catching the light spilling into the room from his bathroom. Broken pieces of wood were scattered throughout the room and feathers still floated in the air from the pillows that had been ripped apart. The door to his summoning room was barely hanging on by a hinge and he cringed to think of the damage he had wrought within.

Laughing without humor, he pushed his battered body up from the bed, wishing he could get drunk enough to numb the guilt and longing and rage that burned inside of him. Picking his way through the destruction, he picked up a pair of boxer briefs from the pile of underwear and stepped into them, pulling them up his legs. With hands on his hips, he looked around the room and shook his head. Only she had this kind of power over him.

It was going to take an act of God to get her out of his system but it was something that had to be done otherwise he would go mad with wanting.

Pulling on a pair of jeans, he paused before he buttoned them, remembering what Ferris had said. She had been drinking…. Apollo saw his chance and he took it with an inebriated Ferris. His stomach balled into a tight knot of shame. He had flayed her alive, left her bleeding and alone to face the judgment of her family. It hadn’t been his place to spill her secrets and if he had been thinking instead of blindly lashing out he would have held his tongue.

He had to apologize to her. She would forgive him, she always forgave him.

But what would happen afterwards? The idea of living up to her expectations still filled him with dread. If she had come into his life when he still had a purpose maybe it could have worked but now he was simply Armand, a wrecked gargoyle in a world full of unlimited enchantment.

Shaking his head to scatter the gathering doubts, he knew that he had to find her and apologize for his inexcusable behavior. He would worry about the future once he straightened out his present, and that included making things right with Ferris.

Knowing where he would most likely find her, he quickly finished getting dressed, ignoring the tension along his shoulders, his back. Stumbling over to the liquor cabinet, he pulled out a bottle of bourbon, needing the liquid courage even if it was only temporary. He pulled the stopper out and drank directly from the bottle, feeling the alcohol burn all the way to his gut.

It was time and he made his way through the eerily quiet suite, grateful for the solitude while wondering where everyone was. The younger gargoyles were probably out on the town while Vaughn and Rhys and their families were doing whatever gargoyles with wives and children did. In all honesty, Armand couldn’t imagine a thing since his brothers were the first of their kind to have children. Hell, Vaughn and Rhys were the first to have true mates.

A wave of nausea rolled through him but he didn’t examine the reason why too closely. Maybe his brothers had remained human for the day and took off, leaving him alone with his darkness. He couldn’t imagine them wanting their children exposed to the insanity that had possessed him all week. With a self-deprecating smile, he took another swig of the fiery liquor. How could a mere slip of a girl make him lose his control, his composure, so easily?

How could he live with her?

How could he exist without her?

He took another long swallow from the bottle of bourbon, relishing the moment of numbness that quieted the warring voices in his head. With the half-finished bottle still in his hand, Armand closed his eyes and took a deep breath as he stood outside the closed door to Ferris’s studio. Memories of their brief time together slammed into him, stirring his cock to full arousal in half a heartbeat.

She had too much power over him.

Releasing his breath with a shudder, he opened the door, turned on the light, and stepped into Ferris’s world only to discover the girl wasn’t there. Relief and disappointment flooded his system as he stepped further into the room, ridiculously curious to see what she had been up to these past ten years, to see how her talent had blossomed.

The room was very similar to how it had been when he had lost his heart to her nearly a decade before with the exception of the sheer number of paintings that were there. Canvases were stacked five or six deep all along the edges, large masterpieces hung on the walls, and her work space had shrunken to a third of its original size. Every image hit him in the solar plexus: he was blown away by her talent. She was able to capture a moment in time and make it eternal, making the observer feel every emotion that she felt when she painted the image.

He stood before a picture of two young, towheaded children in a field of unnaturally colored flowers. The light seemed to be coming from the children as they smiled at something beyond the canvas, probably Ferris. His lips curved up in a smile at the spark of mischief in their blue-green eyes and he could feel the love she had for them and it made his heart swell and ache in his chest. Children were something he had never considered, something that he would have denied Ferris had he given up his nights for her.

She never would have complained or lamented the loss either. Yet seeing how much she loved her children, how much they obviously loved her, it would have been cruel of him to offer her his nights and deny her motherhood.

Staring at the beautiful image, seeing Ferris in her children, he also started seeing Apollo. His gut clenched as he saw his father in the delicate arch of their blond eyebrows, the arrogant lines of their jaws. Why did it have to be Apollo?

Tearing his gaze away from the image, his eyes landed on a portrait of the three gargoyles: Raphe, Leo and Michael. The three were obviously trying to look bad ass but were failing miserably because they couldn’t keep the amusement from flashing in their eyes. He could almost hear the three of them joking with her as she painted, the memory of laughter that taunted him just beyond his hearing. She managed to capture the essence of their gargoyle forms in their human faces, from Leo’s massive liger to Michael’s proud white lion to Raphe’s sleek, black panther.

There was love in this painting as well.

Swallowing against the lump in his throat, he moved onto the next image and almost forgot how to breathe. His heart beat erratically and painfully in his chest as his eyes moved over the lines of Ferris’s pregnant belly to the swell of her breast beneath the gauzy, white material. A soft smile curved her lips as she closed her eyes in prayer. But it was the other person in the painting that made him die a little: Apollo.

The man had golden hair and an altered face but Armand recognized his father. Ferris wasn’t able to hide the light that emanated from the man, a light that almost hurt the eyes even if it wasn’t tangible. It was his aura that she had captured, the essence of a god.

Her hand rested on Apollo’s head in benediction as he kissed her stomach, his eyes burning with love as he looked at Ferris.

A humorless chuckle pushed past his raw throat. Only Ferris could make a god fall in love with her. And Apollo was able to give her the children she had never even known she wanted when she was making all of her promises to Armand.

Armand took a shuddering breath, understanding how Ferris could have fallen in love with the man who gave her the chance to be a mother. He could take some comfort in the fact that his father genuinely had feelings for Ferris and her love wasn’t unrequited. And Ferris being the wonderful, generous, sensual being that she was… of course they would have sex.

How long did their affair last? Did she love him still? Was the affair even over? After all, they had two children together and Apollo was quite protective of those who gave birth to his children. With effort, he put the questions behind him. If he let them, they would destroy him and he loved Ferris too much, even if she no longer loved him.

A chill went down his spine as he realized what he wasn’t seeing: paintings of him. Moving over to the nearest stack of canvases, he started flipping through them, seeing paintings of his brothers and their mates and their children, paintings of the imp Ajreis, paintings of the various creatures that inhabited the castle, from Toulia the succubus to Pix the sprite to Dizzy the dog. Dizzy, who was no longer there. The loyal little dog passed shortly after he turned to stone, her little heart broken, and he hadn't been there for either Ferris or Dizzy. Yet another way he had failed Ferris.

Faster and faster he blasted through the paintings and not once did he see an image of himself staring back. The pain that knifed through his chest was unlike anything he had ever experienced. It was worse than losing Vaughn when Melanie didn’t show up, worse than the moment Katrina turned her back on him, worse than the betrayal of Ferris fucking his father. She had told him she loved him and yet there were no paintings of him in her studio.

The notion that perhaps she kept them in another place evaporated the moment the door opened and all rational thought disappeared from his brain. She stood there looking impossibly beautiful in a pair of blue jeans and a plain t-shirt. The wounded beast inside of him wanted her to suffer the way it suffered, it wanted her to howl in agony the way it howled. He opened his mouth to speak but found that his voice box was too tight to let any sound pass.

“Armand.” Her voice came out nearly breathless as she stared at him with wide, blue-green eyes.

His grip on the bottle tightened until his knuckles turned white. He had to harden his heart to the sensuous girl who made empty promises, whose bruised eyes hid a treacherous heart. Motioning his head in the general direction of her art, he bit out, “You’re quite talented.”

“Th… thank you,” she murmured, stumbling over her words. Watching him wearily, she jerkily made her way across the room to her work area, setting down a bag he hadn’t even noticed. Her eyes darted to a space just behind him and he could see her pulse fluttering madly in her neck. She was hiding something from him.

Chancing a glance over his shoulder, he saw the painting from earlier, the one of her and Apollo looking so damn perfect together. Of course she wouldn’t want him to see that painting because it was a reminder of her betrayal. But he had already seen it. Swallowing the bile that threatened to spew all over her, he looked back at her and softly asked, “Was it just the one time?”