Brimstone Prince. Barbara Hancock J.

When her eyes opened, Grim’s glowing red irises blinked at her as if to say, “I’m a useful monster, aren’t I? By the way, I know your secrets even if my master doesn’t.”

      Then she noticed she was bundled in a clean, dry sheet and nothing else.

      “Um. Little help?” she asked, muffled beneath sulfuric fur.

      “Grim, that’s good. You don’t have to smother her with your devilish charm,” Michael said.

      The hellhound heating pad slowly got up, stretched and moved away. Lily blinked against the sudden light that glared from the fireplace once the hellhound wasn’t shielding her from its glow. Michael sat on the hearth. He sipped dark wine from a glass. She noticed the sip first. The slow, savoring movement of his mouth on the rim of the crystal and the glistening moisture of the crushed fruit on his lips. The flick of his tongue. The intimacy of his throat as he swallowed.

      Then she noticed the tape on his fingers. Every pad was bandaged, and the white of the bandages was stained with blood.

      “Your hands,” Lily said. She gripped the sheet around herself and rose to her knees. She and the hellhound had been lying in front of the fire so the move brought her to Michael’s legs.

      He didn’t move away. He simply placed his glass to the side and waited to see what she would do. Lily held the sheet across her chest with one arm and reached for one of his hands with the other. He didn’t resist. She looked from his taped fingers up to his shuttered eyes.

      “I played to drown out your call,” Michael said.

      Her hair had dried in a riot of waterfall waves around her face and shoulders. She didn’t have enough hands to hold her sheet and his hand and push back her hair. As if he noticed her quandary, he reached up with his free hand to softly brush waves back from her face. But he paused in the middle of the move when his hand glanced against her cheek. He released her hair to cup her jaw as if he couldn’t merely perform a practical move when he was distracted by touching her instead.

      “I don’t want you to hurt yourself. Not for Lucifer’s wings. Not for me. Ever again,” Michael said.

      “You hurt yourself for me,” Lily reminded him. The hand on her face was bandaged, too. She couldn’t imagine the intensity of his playing if it had hurt the hand that held the neck of his guitar.

      “Purely selfish. I was protecting myself,” he said.

      She didn’t have the heart to tell him that it was probably only the daemon king’s presence that had dampened the Brimstone pull and the affinity’s call between them so that he could resist. She didn’t want to mention Ezekiel. Not while Michael’s hand was on her face. Not while his warm gaze searched hers. It was the daemon king’s manifestation that had drained her to the point of collapse. Summoning the devil himself took a lot out of a girl. Especially a girl with an affinity for Brimstone already strained by kisses from the future Prince of Darkness.

      “Where are my clothes?” she asked instead.

      “On the chair behind you. They were cold and damp,” Michael explained.

      “I’m warm now,” Lily said. She was on her knees between his jean-clad legs. Warm was an understatement. The fire behind him was meaningless. The fire in his blood called to her and the daemon king was long gone.

      Heat rose in her cheeks and spread down to her chest. His gaze tracked the movement as her skin flushed. Or did the track of his gaze cause the flush with its intensity? The sheet was a pristine contrast to the way her skin revealed her way-less-than-pristine thoughts.

      His hand slid from her jaw to the nape of her neck beneath her hair. When the move tilted her face up, she didn’t fight it. She should have. She should have pulled away. Stood. Put distance between them. There was no buffer here. Allowing the heat to build between them was suicide.

      Her affinity was a beacon for Rogue daemons.

      She both feared immolation and craved it. Feared it from Rogues. Craved it from Michael. When he leaned down to give her the burn she wordlessly begged for, on her knees and as supplicant as she could allow herself to be, the thought of Rogues was scorched away.

      For the first time in her life she was free.

      His lips were hot from Brimstone and dusky sweet from exquisite wine. They were also perfect. Full and masculine and so familiar she could close her eyes and explore with impunity. He gasped when she boldly traced their carved curves and swells with the tip of her tongue. Then he urged her closer until her stomach was pressed to the intimate swell of the erection between his legs. He curled down to deepen the kiss.

      Suddenly, he was the royal. He would claim her. He would take control. She might be caught in a devil’s bargain that would lead him all the way to hell, but in this—kissing, touching, claiming—he had the upper hand.

      Lily held tight to his muscled legs, but his heat called and she allowed her palms to press and slide. Closer and closer along his thighs to find him, and measure the length of his penis caught and contained away from her by his jeans.

      He growled against her mouth and moved his hands to her shoulders to urge her back. She went with his urgings. She made room for him to leave the hearth and join her, on his knees. Now they were both supplicant. Both begging. Distantly, Lily heard Grim whine, but she could only focus on getting closer to Michael’s heat. All rational strategy was forgotten. Her vision of the Colorado River boiled away to nothing. The daemon king’s manipulations paled in comparison to the demands of her and Michael’s bodies.

      Her sheet had fallen away.

      She was naked for her Brimstone prince and when his lips left hers to trail down and claim her breasts with his mouth and hot, wet suction, she thought she would die. Her heart raced. Her lungs hitched. Her body burned.

      Lily reached for him and even through his clothes his rising body heat transferred to her fingers. When she stroked her palms down from his shoulders to his bare arms, his skin was feverish to her touch. Impossibly hot. She brushed down the slightly roughened skin of his scars anyway. Learning, exploring and burning all the while.

      But Grim’s whine erupted into growls and Michael pulled away before she had even begun to know him as well as her affinity drove her to. He rose and went toward the hellhound.

      Once their bodies were separated, she could feel the Brimstone burn of the intruders that were causing Grim such concern. Rogues. Here. No doubt called by her affinity that sang with an almost audible hum in her body when Michael touched her.

      “We’ve got trouble,” Michael said. He’d moved to the front window to place his hand on Grim’s head and look outside.

      “More than you can possibly know,” Lily replied. She was already shrugging into her clothes, which were stiff and warm from drying by the fire. The fire’s heat paled in comparison to Michael’s Brimstone burn. She shivered at the loss of his touch in spite of the warmed clothes. Her fingers fumbled on the buttons while Michael turned from the window where he’d shrugged into his jacket to grab up his guitar. She hadn’t noticed it leaning by the hearth. It was such a part of him. Like a shadow that moved when he moved and stilled when he stilled. He placed his arm through the tooled leather strap and settled the instrument against his back, where it fit perfectly as if made to match his planes and curves.

      “How many?” she continued. Her own pack settled against her back with a weight that had become familiar over the past few months. Her affinity didn’t tell her the odds. It was only a magnet that drew her toward daemons and their Brimstone blood. In the past, her father’s affinity had been used to hunt and destroy daemons until he’d decided to fight the violence and hate. He’d split with the hunters. And his decision had led to his death at their hands.

      “Too many to fight. Too many to face. We’ll have to take the back way out,” Michael said.

      As if Grim understood his master’s words, he turned from the window and ran toward the back of the earth-bermed home.

      “I thought