One Hell of a Guy: The Cambion Trilogy, Book 1 (2 page)

“I think it’s from the Bible,” Lily said, but her memory of what it might mean was pretty hazy — she’d had three drinks so far, and Sunday School had been an awfully long time ago.
 

“Everything in Supernatural is from the Bible, Lily. That’s like, its whole schtick.”

Lily snorted. “I just mean, it means something else. I think it might literally mean Hell. I don’t know; my Mom was crazy for church and stuff but I haven’t been in more than a decade.”

“Wanna check it out?” Miri asked. “Maybe the guys there won’t have more hair in their noses than on their heads.”

“From your lips to God’s ears,” Lily said. “Or whoever can send us some eye candy.”

And, giggling, they headed north to find Hell.

Chapter 2

SEBASTIAN LEANED BACK against the bar, keeping to himself as he watched the throng of people writhing and pulsing on the dance floor. He barely noticed the lights and the music anymore, but the waves of energy coming off the dancers just got better and better.

Dancing, if one thought about it, was an awful lot like having sex — at least if you were doing it right. The palpable energy coming from the direction of the dance floor wasn’t as potent as what he might get from having a partner — dance or otherwise — but it fed a baseline need in him. It made it easy to resist the occasional overture from any woman who happened to get past the
not-interested
vibe he was very intentionally putting out.

And the vibe was sincere. Since the day Vivienne — his long-lost and, regrettably, recently-found mother — had swept into his life like a thundering hurricane, everything was different. She’d explained to him who and what he was, and after that he’d had as little to do with the opposite sex as he could manage … which was a lot harder than he’d expected. He was virtually irresistible to them, but it had nothing to do with him, with the Sebastian he’d been for almost all of his life.

Since then, he had taken a woman on occasion, when nothing else would slake the need, but he took no joy from it. The thrill was gone, as the saying went.

He missed it — that thrill — very much.

Sighing, he turned around and signaled the bartender for another drink.

***

Abaddon was an assault on the senses. The music was incredibly loud, with a driving backbeat that practically rattled Lily’s teeth. Lights flashed constantly in a rainbow of colors, sending the gyrating bodies into stark relief one moment, eclipsing them the next. And then there were the smells: sweat, perfume, alcohol … and an odd sulfur smell that made her feel jumpy and nervous. She hoped the wiring wasn’t about to go; with her luck she’d be trampled under the stampede if the place caught fire.

A mezzanine lined three walls of the club, and it was packed with dancers and drinkers. She worried briefly about how sturdy it was — there had to be 200 people up there — then followed Miri through the crush of gyrating bodies, headed for the bar.

The bar was an enormous square in the middle of the huge, warehouse-like room, and at each of the four corners was a raised platform. A pair of women danced on each platform, clad in bikini tops, cutoff shorts, and furry go-go boots; they danced with each other in lascivious abandon, writhing together in a way that created a spectacle that would make most people blush. At one time, in fact, it would have made
Lily
blush, but not anymore — she had lived in New York for two years now, and was accustomed to people making displays of themselves in one way or another, and more often than not that way was sexual. It wasn’t her style — she was far more reserved than her peers when it came to sex. Not a prude and definitely not a virgin, but still … she was picky, and she was careful, and she was
not
interested in jumping into bed with just anyone.

She and Miri reached the bar and immediately a bartender was there, leaning towards them.

“What can I get ya?” he asked, shouting to be heard over the music. Miri ordered a Dos Equis, Lily a mojito.
 

For a few minutes the women nursed their drinks, backs to the bar, surveying the crowd. It was so odd, but Lily would have sworn there wasn’t a single person in the entire place who wasn’t incredibly attractive.

“Do you think they turn ugly people away at the door?” Miri asked, leaning over and shouting an echo of Lily’s own thought into her ear.

Lily grinned. “They let us in, didn’t they?”

“Speak for yourself,” Miri shouted, and did a little shimmy. “This girl’s looking really good these days.”

That was true. Up till about six months before, Miri had been a good fifty pounds heavier than Lily, but she’d done the whole low-carb thing and dropped a lot of weight. At this point she weighed about the same as Lily and, since she was a couple of inches taller, she looked amazing — curvy and slender and just really fantastic.

“You certainly are,” Lily said, leaning over and slapping her lightly on the rear. “Maybe you ought to see if any of the dudes here want to break off a piece of that.”

Miri laughed and shook her head. “Nah, I’m just looking. Things are going great with Matthew.”

Lily nodded, but said nothing. She didn’t care for Miri’s boyfriend. He didn’t seem to be interested in anything but video games and smoking pot, and Lily had been sort of hoping they might not work out, but it seemed things were getting more serious instead. As a friend — as a best friend — it was her job to be happy when her friend was happy, and for now Matthew made Miri happy. Lily planned to keep an eye on him, though.

“Now, you, on the other hand,” Miri said, waving a hand in the air. “I think you should definitely do a little prowling here. I don’t think I’ve seen a non-hot guy yet.”

Lily shrugged. She wasn’t much for prowling; she preferred to wait for someone to approach her. Of course, that hadn’t worked out earlier at Club Domino, and the guys here were definitely smoking hot. She looked around appraisingly, noting a blond guy with a great body at the edge of the dance floor closest to her. She nudged Miri with her elbow, pointing discreetly in his direction. “What about that guy?”

“Oh, he’s a cutie,” Miri said. “Maybe you — nope. Scratch that.” Quick as lightning, she moved to Lily’s other side and said, “Now look at me.”

Lily looked at her.

“Now look behind me. Dreamboat at 1:00.”

Lily shifted her gaze over Miri’s shoulder and almost swallowed her tongue. The guy Miri was talking about, who was standing at the bar watching one of the dancers with a bored expression on his face, was without a doubt the hottest guy Lily had ever seen in real life. His hair was jet-black, the kind of hair that looked almost blue under certain lights, and curled appealingly down to his collar in a way that was casual but managed not to look unkempt. He was broad of shoulder and brow, and could have been used as a picture definition of the words
chiseled jaw
.

“Am I drooling?” she asked Miri.

Miri giggled. “Not yet, but I don’t think anyone would blame you.”

“No, I think — shit!” Lily snapped her gaze away and turned to face out onto the dance floor again. “He caught me looking.”
 

Miri shrugged. “I imagine he’s used to being looked at,” she said pragmatically.

“He looks familiar.”

“Yeah, he does,” Miri said. “That’s because he’s Superman-handsome. They all start to look alike after a while. You should ask him to dance.”

“Have you seen me dance?” Lily asked, shaking her head. “If I wanted him to like me, that would be the last thing I’d do.”

“Oh my God, Lily,” Miri said, shaking her head. “You dance fine.”

“I don’t,” Lily said. “It’s like an epileptic on ice skates.”

Miri sighed and repeated herself. “You dance fine. I’d say you were fishing for compliments if it was anyone but you.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning I’d call you a liar, you weirdo. But it’s not lying if you really believe it, which you shouldn’t. Now go ask him to dance.”

Lily opened her mouth to give another reason why she couldn’t, but the thing was … she could. “Okay,” she said. Maybe she’d been reading too much
XOJane
, but damn it, there was no reason she couldn’t go over there and ask him to dance.

She set her mojito down next to Miri, said, “Watch that,” and headed over to the other side of the bar. Superman-handsome was standing on the opposite side of the square, so it took her a few minutes to make her way through the little knots of people congregating along its length. She used the time to run lines in her head.

Hey, wanna dance?
Not exactly scintillating, but sometimes the old standbys got the job done.

I couldn’t help noticing you look like Superman.
Yeah, no. Even though Miri was right, no. He’d probably heard that, or variations of it, a bunch of times, anyway.

If I said you had a beautiful body, would you hold it against me?

Her own silly thought actually made her have to stifle a giggle, and by that point she was approaching him from behind — and quite an approach it was, because the view was pretty spectacular. She took a moment to appreciate it, which turned out to be a very good thing, as it also gave her a moment to overhear what he and the bartender were talking about.

“—just saying,” the bartender said. “They toss themselves at you like nothing I’ve ever seen and you just turn them all down. What’s up with that?”

“It’s
boring
,” Superman-handsome replied, and he did indeed sound bored, perhaps terminally so. “Have you ever gotten sick to death of something?”

“Sure I have,” the bartender agreed. “Like, the first Halloween in the new house, we didn’t know the neighborhood, right? And we bought three times as many of those little mini candy bars as we needed. So, of course, for every one I handed out, I ate two. Wound up with a hell of a stomach ache.”

“Yeah, like that. Too much of a good thing.”

“And then after the kids were in bed,” the bartender continued, “I banged the hell out of my wife, bellyache and all, because you know what
never
gets boring, man? That.”

Superman-handsome just shrugged. “Anything can get boring.”

The bartender noticed her standing there and said, “Sorry, can I get you something?”

Lily shook her head, avoided Superman-handsome’s gaze as he turned to look at her over his shoulder.

“No, sorry,” she said. “I have a drink, back with my friend,” and she backed up, carefully, three or four steps, then turned and fled back to Miri’s side, giggling the whole way.

Chapter 3

MIRI ARCHED AN eyebrow when Lily turned back up to claim her drink. “That was fast.”

“Yeah, I’ll say.” Lily filled her in on the overheard conversation, then chugged the last of her mojito.

“Are you
serious
? Are you seriously saying you’re
not handsome enough to tempt him
?”

Lily snickered at the
Pride and Prejudice
reference. “I didn’t actually ask,” she said. “I wouldn’t want to bore him to death. I’d rather dance with that grabby old bastard at Club Domino. At least he didn’t think he was too good for me.”

“He didn’t —” Miri’s eyes narrowed, then widened in something resembling horror as her gaze shifted over Lily’s shoulder.

Lily opened her mouth to say something, but cut herself off as she heard a man loudly and deliberately clearing his throat directly behind her.

Oh, no
, she thought, and turned to find — no surprise — Superman-handsome himself, standing there.

Mortified, she felt an almost overpowering urge to look away, at the floor, at the dancers — anywhere — but she’d be damned if she was going to cower like a mouse in front of this guy, no matter how much of a hottie he was, or how much he might have overheard.

He smiled, and it gave her actual goosebumps. She could feel the skin on her arms tingling. What he lacked in personality he more than made up for in sex appeal and eye crinkles.

“Want to dance?” he asked her, though she barely heard him over the music and the sound of the blood rushing in her ears. He really was unbelievably good-looking. Up close, his eyes were a brilliant sapphire blue, an intense color she would have assumed was Photoshopped if she’d seen it in the eyes of a magazine model. Maybe they were contacts? The stubble on his chin was the exact right length to rasp along the sensitive skin of a woman’s neck and his even, white smile made her wonder what it would feel like to have those teeth nibbling along the same area.

Oh, my God,
she thought.
Stop thinking about him nibbling you!

His shoulders were every bit as impressive as she’d thought on first glance, broad and strong-looking and tapered to a trim waist. His black T-shirt was skin tight; she could easily tell there wasn’t an ounce of fat on him, which made her a little too aware of her own not-trim waist.
 
She tugged at the hem of her blouse, self-conscious, ready to say yes simply because no guy who looked like had ever asked her to dance before.

Thinking about
that
pissed her off all over again. “No, thank you,” she said. “I don’t want to dance with you.”

Oh my God,
she thought.
Rude. But true. Story of my life.

Her therapist, Dr. Nussbaum, called it a neurosis. Miri called it a quirk. Whatever one called it, it amounted to the same thing: like George Washington with the cherry tree, Lily could not tell a lie. It made her sweaty and queasy and miserable, and the truth always came tripping off her tongue anyway, so these days she didn’t even bother to try. She could try to avoid a question — and poor Miri had long since learned never to ask how her ass looked in a dress unless she wanted an honest answer — but she simply could not tell a lie.

Superman-handsome cocked his head at her and gave her a mild look of surprise, as though she’d turned him down politely instead of sticking her foot in her stupid truth-telling mouth. “I thought maybe that was why you came over to my side of the bar,” he said, pointing vaguely back in the direction he’d come. She felt a little vindicated when he looked as off-balance as she felt.

“I changed my mind.”