Lustfully Ever After Read online

  I thought I was dead by the time I saw him. I thought the green of Roman’s eyes was the last thing I would think of before I met my abuela again. Strange, how much I must have wanted him, even from those few moments in the rose candle’s light, that I would think of him then.

  Roman put his hands on the sides of my face, and the warmth of his palms felt so good it tore a scream from me. The sleeves of his jacket smelled like ash tree bark in summer. The hollow of his neck shared the same color and scent as agave nectar. I was all ice now, and the warmth of him was breaking me. He put his jacket around me, and the lining held so much of his heat that I thought it would splinter me into snowflakes.

  He shook me to get me to look at him. “Stay with me, okay?”

  His breath was hot against my mouth, and my lips stung with thawing. He put my arm around his shoulder and picked me up off the steps. My body was too numb to fight him or hold onto him. I was still dying, and though I felt the warmth of Roman’s chest against my cheek, I could still see the falling star.

  He shook me gently. “Don’t fall asleep,” he said. “Look at me.”

  I didn’t listen.

  The last thing I felt out in the cold was the snowflakes melting from my eyelashes and slipping down my cheeks. After that it was the soft pain of my skin warming again, of his hands stripping away my clothes. I fought him then. I tried slapping him, but he only grabbed my hand and looked at it, front and back, like he thought I might be bleeding.

  “I’m not gonna hurt you,” he said.

  I fought harder when I realized I was in his bed. The wood scent of his skin and the smell of that old leather were on the sheets.

  “Your clothes are wet,” he said. “They’re gonna get you sick.” He pulled my blouse off hard enough that I sat up from the force, falling when my arms were free of the sleeves. He held the small of my back to slow my fall. The tips of my breasts brushed against the quilt. He put a hand on my forehead and whispered something I couldn’t make out. His fingers shone with oil, and his hand smelled like wild blue sage.

  He held my hand. I tried to pull it away.

  He pinched the middle of my palm between his thumb and forefinger. “Do you want to lose half your hand or do you want me to help you?” he asked.

  I stopped fighting. He cut a blade from a potted áloe and spread the wet inside over my fingers. The pain dulled at his touch. I must have talked in my sleep as he took me away from la plaza, because he knew to show me one of the rose candles. He pinched the blackened wick with his thumb and third finger. He drew his fingers up quickly, and the candle lit. I looked for a match hidden in his palm. There was nothing. He’d ignited it with his bare hand, but he looked neither surprised nor impressed with himself.

  “How did you?” I asked.

  Now he bowed his head to let his hair fall in his eyes. “It happened the first time when I was five,” he said. “I lit a candle but I didn’t mean to.” He winced in a way that told me someone had beaten him for it, thinking he’d been playing with matches. “It was always things that were supposed to be lit,” he said. “Candles. Lanterns. But my bisabuela taught me to control it.”

  The light, orange-gold as a harvest moon, brought out the olive in his face as he set the rose candle on the table next to the bed.

  “Tiene un corazón solitario, pero usted no es el único,” he said—you have a lonely heart, but you’re not the only one. It must have been something he had learned from his bisabuela, who had been kind to him, who had never beaten him for making fire between his fingers.

  What a strange man, who lit candles without matches, who called the woman he had cared for most bruja.

  He turned just enough for me to see a streak of dirt in the wound on his temple. Flecks of dried blood still clung to his lip. He had not taken the same care with his own body as he had taken with mine. I wondered how long the men in la plaza had kicked him and hit him before he and I drove them off with the twelve truths.

  I brushed away a few flecks of blood, my thumb grazing his lower lip. “You’re hurt.”

  “I’m all right,” he said.

  I pulled his shirt off anyway. He let me. Bruises darkened his body, some already violet as blackberries. They shaded the contours of his chest and back. My abuela would have said that was good, that him bruising quickly meant he would heal quickly.

  My hands were ice on his bruises. Each time I moved them, he winced at the cold, but then relaxed to feel it spread.

  “Las malvarrosas,” he said, because he must have known I was wondering why he had been out in la plaza so late. “They grow wild in the hills on the other side of town, but I gotta get them at night, or they don’t keep.”

  I’d seen them, the fluffy flowers that turned the hillsides red and gold and blush pink in springtime. I didn’t ask why he wanted them. Maybe their scent helped him sleep, or they were his bisabuela’s favorite.

  His back was darker than his chest, the brown of a clay jar. His skin was so warm I thought a little of the sun must still be in it, that I could see it letting off light if I looked close enough. I kissed the darkest bruise on his back, just below his left shoulder blade. I’d meant it as kindness, more out of gratitude for him pulling me from the cold than out of desire for the heat of his body, but I felt the flinch of his muscle under my mouth. He knew.

  I did the same with his chest, kissing a patch of blue over his heart as though it would veil the longing. But I realized my hands were on his jeans, and wondered if the tensing in his thigh muscles was from that same desire or only because he could feel the chill of my palms through the fabric.

  The inside of me spun hot as a new star, but my skin was still so cold I felt like I was cracking whenever I moved. I shuddered with the ache of coming back to life. It began below my collarbone and ended with a rush of warmth and wetness between my legs. With every new scent I picked up on him—the ash bark, the green herbs, the jacket he must have inherited from his father or uncle—I wanted him in that new way.

  The feeling came back to my fingers like light across water. I kissed him hard enough that the breath at the back of his throat deepened to a low, quick groan. His mouth tasted like copper rock salt.

  He pulled the quilt around my shoulders. “No,” he said. “No ahora. No porque usted tiene frío.” Not now. Not because you’re cold.

  “No es porque tengo frío,” I said. “Es porque soy vivo.” Not because I’m cold. Because I’m alive.

  It must have been enough of an answer, because he kissed me, one forearm under the small of my back. He pulled my panties off with the same urgency of tearing my wet clothes away. He unhooked my bra as if it were made of ice and it would kill me if it stayed on my skin.

  The áloe had brought most of the sensation back to my fingers, but they were just numb enough that I struggled to unbutton his jeans. He was patient, even as he grew hard against my hands. I got his pants down around his knees and kicked them the rest of the way off his legs. My hands found the warmth of his bare thighs and then strayed to his erection.

  He didn’t thrust against my palm, but he moved a little toward me, letting me know he didn’t mind the cold. I couldn’t understand it, how any man would let a woman with so much cold in her fingers touch him where it could hurt him most. But maybe there was enough heat in his body that he liked it, his nerves responding to the sudden change. He got harder against my hand. When I offered my mouth to his, he took it.

  The gash on his lip reopened from kissing. Without thinking, I tongued the trickle of blood. He startled. I stopped and gasped, afraid I’d stung him, but he breathed in with a soft noise that told me he liked it.

  The heat of his body spread over me. I was a shimmer of cold sand, and he was the salt of a warm ocean, turning my million rough grains back into flesh. I cried out at the pleasure of it. He did not startle again, not until I opened my legs and guided him into me. He set his teeth like the feeling surprised him, like he’d never felt it before. I didn’t ask; it would’ve be
en cruel. I could see the desire in the tensing of his muscles, but there was something chaste in the agave green of his eyes. It made me think I should handle him gently. I couldn’t. I was still too cold. My fingers could not touch him delicately. They were too hungry for his warmth.

  “It’s inside me,” I said.

  “What is?” he asked.

  “El frío,” I said. The cold.

  He pushed deeper into me, reaching that last part that was iced over and armored in snowflakes. The same finger that had lit the candle touched me until I felt like a close star. He was all warmth and salt. I bit his shoulder, and even there he tasted like rock salt. I opened to take him in. The black of his eyes flinched as the inside of me pulsed around him. The green darkened, and the last ice inside me shattered. He still looked kind, but not chaste. I still had the glisten of snowflakes on my skin, but there was no winter inside me.

  When he came, it spread through me like hot amber, melting the part of me that still fought what his hands were doing to me. “Roman,” I said, calling for him like we were in darkness. I finished, and he held onto me tighter, like he was catching me. Coming down from the feeling of his touch made me dizzy, like falling into grass after spinning under the night sky, and I slept.

  His arm was around my waist when I woke up. It wasn’t yet dawn, and snowflakes still spun outside the window. The glow of my abuela’s candle let me see the spice jars and potted plants along the wall of his bedroom. Agave and moonflower. Cayenne and blue lavender. The same plants that skilled women used to heal children with nightmares or fevers and men and women with susto. Roman went to the hillsides in the dark for las malvarrosas because he wanted them for his remedios.

  “You are a brujo,” I said.

  He slowly ran his fingers through my hair. “Sort of,” he said. “Apprentice brujo. For now I pay the bills with carpentry work.”

  “Who do you apprentice to?” I asked. I didn’t know a curandero in town, man or woman.

  “Nobody,” he said. “It was my bisabuela, but she died last year, so I’m figuring it out as I go.”

  “That’s why you knew the twelve truths.”

  “Since I was six,” he said. “I fought it for a while. Then I gave up. The gringos were calling me warlock, and the rest were saying brujo. I figured I’d better take it.”

  I stroked my fingers along the side of his face. The constellations of freckles on his temple and the bridge of his nose seemed as unlikely as the life flickering in my blood. “Last night,” I said. “How’d you know?”

  “Something didn’t seem right,” he said. “So I came back.”

  “You live here alone?” I asked.

  “My bisabuela lived here.”

  “You’re young,” I said. “To be a curandero.”

  “She said I was ready, before she died. Sometimes I don’t know though.”

  I kissed the bruising on his temple and on the side of his mouth.

  “What were you doing out there?” he asked. It wasn’t a question I was meant to answer with my lips. He put his hand to my forehead, not so much reading my thoughts as feeling the shape of what I was willing to let him know. I’d heard of curanderos doing the same, but never one so young.

  “Oh,” he said.

  I didn’t meet his eyes.

  “You could stay here,” he said.

  “You don’t know me,” I said.

  “You got those guys off me. That’s as much as I need to know. Los corazónes solitarios gotta stick together.” He got up from the bed and, one by one, lit my abuela’s candles by sliding each wick between his fingers. The whole room glowed rose-gold.

  He lit the last of my abuela’s candles. I caught his hand and pulled him toward me, the heat of a falling star between us. He covered my body with his, so close I could watch the muscles in his back as I stroked that bluish bruise on his shoulder blade. I shivered when he took the most sensitive part of me between his thumb and his forefinger, nervous that it might turn to fire at his touch. He stroked it like a candle’s wick, and the pleasure spread so quickly it felt like embers on his fingertips.

  I could have gone back to la plaza and waited for the cold to take me to my abuela. I could have gone to my mother’s and waited on her front porch. But I didn’t want any of it. I wanted nothing more than this man with the fire on his fingertips.

  THE BEAST WITHIN

  Emerald

  In the headquarters of Castle Jewelers, the young CEO sat, as usual, locked away from everyone in his high tower office. He glared at the email from the board of directors open on his computer and the corresponding appointment notice on his calendar and snarled out loud to himself as he turned his chair away and stood up. The CEO was a notorious figure among the employees who sat in the offices on the lower floors—his internal ugliness had become legendary, making his chosen reclusion in his office welcome among all who worked for him. The impeccability of his blue suit and expensive gold jewelry did nothing to hide the beastly disposition his workers had always seen in him.

  Across town, Julie Bellevue had been called from her small cottage by the lake by her father, who had fallen from his ladder and hurt his ankle as he was fixing the siding on his house. Julie hovered now by her father’s hospital bed as the doctor informed them that the ankle was indeed broken.

  Mr. Bellevue moaned. “Oh, what am I going to do? I have my first appointment with Castle Jewelers in an hour. I must be there!” Julie, who was his youngest daughter, reached for his hand, her beautiful face drawn with sympathy. He turned to her. “Julie. Sweetheart, I’m going to need you to go and take over the job in my place.”

  Julie felt some apprehension at this request. The young woman was already an employee of her father’s consulting business that specialized in conflict resolution for businesses and organizations. Though her father had been grooming her in his line of work for years, and the recent acquisition of her master’s degree in transpersonal psychology was already supporting the next step of her getting to take on her own clients, she had not yet served in a capacity beyond providing her father assistance with his cases.

  “Please, Julie. This is a very important client—I can’t afford to lose it right now.”

  Julie recognized the desperation in his face, and she knew this job was a significant one, both financially and for his reputation. If it were lost, the hard work he had put into forming and running his consulting business for the past several years could be in jeopardy.

  So, to save her father’s business, Julie agreed to go to Castle Jewelers headquarters in his place. As she was about to take her leave of the room, her father called to her again.

  “Julie,” he said, concern evident on his face. “Your meeting is with the CEO—Heath Castle. The board has hired us to work with him individually in addressing the conflict between him and, well, the rest of the company. I was to coach him in sensitivity training and interpersonal communication.

  “I want you to be warned—Heath is not said to be a nice individual. He has, in fact, an ugly reputation. He is reputed to be a rather beastly manager, very difficult to work with. His workers mostly vacillate between fear and loathing of him, and he’s not even usually seen around the workplace. Generally he locks himself in his office in the highest tower of the building.”

  “What makes him so not nice?” Julie asked her father.

  Her father shook his head. “I don’t know.” His face crinkled into a smile. “That’s what they pay us to find out.”

  Julie smiled and leaned down to kiss her father’s cheek, then turned and hurried out the door and across town to make her father’s appointment at Castle Jewelers on time.

  At the highest office in the top of the headquarters building, Julie met the eyes of the company’s thirty-eight-year-old CEO. As she’d read her father’s file, she had been struck by the young age of the head of such a large and lucrative company. Upon reading further she had found that the circumstances surrounding his position were a bit mysterious—it was
a family company, and Heath’s mother had taken over after his father had died several years before. She had run the company for a short time before Heath had abruptly assumed the leadership role. There was no further information about his mother’s current status with the company or why this turnover had taken place.

  The man in front of her had a tall, sturdy, and potentially intimidating build as he stood behind his desk with his arms crossed. His hair was dark and longish, his suit tailored to fit his bulky frame flawlessly. The truth was that Heath was a handsome man, but no one who worked for him even noticed his physical attractiveness anymore, so accustomed were they to the hideousness of his demeanor.

  It was when Julie looked into the man’s eyes that she saw what her father had warned her about. They appeared flat, dark with hostility and emanating an energy about as welcoming as a prison. In fact, Heath had eyes of a lovely bright blue, but they had reflected darkness for so long that they appeared black to most who looked at him now.

  Julie’s father had been retained to conduct a one-hour session with Heath each morning for two weeks. Julie understood immediately the complaints of those who worked for him and the reason the board had procured her father’s services. The voice of the man in front of her was low and menacing, and not once while she was in his office did he smile. At times his demeanor seemed downright ferocious, almost animal-like in the refined environment of posh furniture and spectacular views from the broad windows behind his desk. That day’s meeting was the initial consultation, and Julie’s heart sank a bit as she realized she would be trapped in this office tower with him every weekday morning for the next two weeks.

  The beautiful young woman also found herself forgetting the attractiveness of Heath’s physical appearance as she interacted with the internal ugliness that had so obviously alienated his colleagues and employees. Even so, when she stood up at the conclusion of their first session, she found herself admiring his solid build and chiseled features, formed into a frown as frequently as they were. She approached him to shake his hand and bid him well for the day, and his eyebrows came together in an even deeper frown as he hesitated before offering her what may have been the coldest handshake she had ever experienced.