One Hell of a Guy (Infernal Love Book 1) Read online

  Weary of it, just suddenly so damn tired of it all, he turned his back on her and signaled Rob for another drink.

  He could feel her, feel the emotions roll off of her. Shock, confusion, anger. Threaded through it all, a bright and shining streak of lust.

  He’d calculated correctly, though, and after a few moments he felt her retreat back to the dance floor. When he could no longer sense her, he drained his drink and turned back around to resume watching the dancers.

  She wouldn’t make another overture, and anyone who’d seen what had happened would steer clear as well. And he’d go home alone. Again.

  Which was just what he wanted. Better to be alone than to live the lie he’d lived until a year ago.

  So why did it make him feel so lost?

  3

  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, alcohol, and an odd sulfurous 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, manned by two bartenders. At each of the four corners was a raised platform; a pair of women danced on each, clad in bikini tops, cutoff shorts, and furry go-go boots. They writhed in lascivious abandon, creating 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 three 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. Until 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; 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, “Look at me.”

  Lily obeyed.

  “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 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 had the face of a model—square, chiseled jaw. Sharply defined cheekbones, full lips. A tight black T-shirt stretched over his wide chest and broad shoulders, and faded jeans rode low on his narrow hips.

  Lord have mercy.

  “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, mortified, and turned to 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. If it was anyone but you, I’d say you were fishing for compliments.”

  “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. Damn it, there was no reason she couldn’t go over there and ask him to dance.

  “Okay,” she said.

  She set her mojito down and headed over to the other side of the bar. Superman-Handsome was standing on the opposite side of the bar 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 what 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, p
erhaps 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 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? That.”

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

  The bartender noticed Lily 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.

  4

  Miri arched an eyebrow when Lily returned 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.

  Miri rolled her eyes. “What a tool. Good thing you heard before you tossed yourself at him.”

  “Right?” Lily set her glass on the bar, considered whether she wanted another drink. “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.”

  “And he wasn’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 again, 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 dimples.

  “Want to dance?” he asked.

  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 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 that 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 avoid a question—and poor Miri had long since learned never to ask directly how her ass looked in a dress unless she wanted an honest answer—but Lily 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 that he looked as off-balance as she felt. “I changed my mind.”

  “Come on.” He reached out and took her hand. “One dance?”

  It was the oddest thing … the second he touched her, every intention she’d had of repeating her refusal just drained away. She turned to look at Miri and opened her mouth, but no words came out. Miri shrugged, then smiled and nudged her towards the dance floor.

  Superman-Handsome shifted his hand to her upper arm and drew her onto the dance floor, where they were quickly lost in a sea of dancing bodies.

  For a moment, Lily felt awkward about her own limited dancing abilities—even if Miri was right that she was being too self-deprecating, the fact remained she wasn’t much of a dancer. But then he moved in close and slid his arm around her, placing his hand firmly on the small of her back and pulling her just close enough to smell him and feel the heat of his body, but not quite close enough to be indecent.

  Then he started to move … and it was so far beyond indecent Lily didn’t have a word for it. She didn’t really have any words for anything, because all the blood drained out of her head and rushed to answer the summons his body was sending out. He had some serious moves; she forgot to be self-conscious and let him fit her along the length of his body and move her however he wanted, losing herself in the music and the heat and the vibe that rolled off him like pure power. Somehow, her normal approach to dancing—just try not to move too much, and don’t show off—fell completely away as she followed his lead.

  Turns out I don’t do half-bad … with the right partner, she thought distractedly.

  He tilted his head down and put his mouth entirely too close to her ear. “What’s your name?” he asked, his lips brushing against her.

  She shivered, then shook it off. “Lily.”

  “Nice.” His lips touched her again, this time just in front of her ear, where she was incredibly sensitive. “I’m Gabriel.”

  She had been sort of amused thinking of him as Superman-handsome, but Gabriel was nice, too.

  “Do you like the club?” he asked, moving against her in a way that had her brain fuzzing over and her nerves sizzling.

  This guy was some kind of whack-job. Women bored him—until he met one who told him no, then he went after her with guns blazing.

  No, wait, she thought. That’s not a whack-job. That’s pretty typical.

  And the worst part was, if she kept dancing with him, he was going to get what he wanted. Because every time his lips brushed along her ear, it roused something primal in her and she felt ready to rub herself against him like a cat in heat. What was going on? This wasn’t like her. She didn’t grind herself on perfect strangers—even if they were, literally, perfect.

  “It’s nice,” she said. “Loud, but I like it.”

  “I like it loud, too.” He was smiling again, and her stomach did a little somersault when she saw the look in his eye.

  Is that an innuendo? she thought, and smiled nervously. “Do you?”

  “The louder the better.” That hand on her back pulled her in closer, fit her hips against his like puzzle pieces. Her nerve endings sat up and sang the Hallelujah Chorus.

  What the hell is wrong with me? She shook her head, trying to clear it. It felt like her brain was full of cotton, and every molecule of her yearned to wrap around him.

  It was confusing and disorienting, but more than that, it was pissing her off. That must have been one hell of a mojito.

  The tempo of the music changed. It wasn’t much of a change—dance musi
c was dance music was dance music, in her experience—but enough that she felt she’d fulfilled any obligation she had to dance. Time for a graceful exit.

  She took a deliberate step back, out of his arms. “Well, you’re in luck,” she said, raising her voice to be heard despite the distance between them, “because it’s awfully loud in here. I actually think I’m going to head home; I’m getting a bit of a headache.”

  He looked at her with the same look as before, like she was speaking a foreign language. “You’re … leaving?” he asked, moving a step closer.

  “I believe I am, yes,” she said, moving a matching step back, nearly tripping over another dancer. He leaned forward to help her, but she practically jumped to get away from him. Better to keep her nerve endings to herself, all things considered. She turned and hurried back to the bar, and Miri, though she could sense him following her.

  “Hey—” Miri began, but Lily cut her off.

  “I’m going home,” she said shortly.

  Miri raised an eyebrow, but she said nothing.

  Gabriel spoke from behind Lily. “Let me get you a cab,” he said.

  “I can get my own cab,” Lily said, not looking back at him as she practically shoved Miri off her barstool.

  “Come back another night,” he said, stepping closer. “I want to see you again.”

  “Maybe,” Lily said noncommittally as she pushed Miri in front of her, towards the door.

  He reached out and stopped her with a hand on her arm; with his other hand, he grasped her by the chin, tilted her head up so she had no choice but to look directly into those improbably blue eyes. “Tell me you will,” he said.

  She nodded, struck suddenly dumb. He leaned down as though he were going to kiss her—Lord, how she wanted him to kiss her!—and brushed his lips along her jawline. Her whole body shuddered, and she felt him smile. It was an odd, grim little smile.

  Then he turned and headed away through the crowd; within moments, he was gone.

  Miri stared at Lily with her mouth open. “What was that?”