Everlasting Bad Boys (23 page)

Forever was a very,
very
long time for him.

Behind him, two coyote shifters snarled over a pool table. He didn’t spare them a glance. He was far too focused on memories of his witch.

Would she have considered staying with him? Tying her soul to his so that she could share his life?

No
.

Shit. Had he really been arrogant enough to think that he could force her into his life? Back at the beginning, for a wild moment,
he had.
He’d taken one look at her, fallen as hard and fast as his father had for his mother all those centuries before, and he’d thought, simply—

Mine.

But no matter how much he craved her, he couldn’t force her into his world.

He brought the glass to his lips. Drained the fiery liquid in one swallow.

A soul bond with someone like him—that was no easy undertaking. Serena would have been forced to give up her home. Her coven. His witch deserved happiness, and she wouldn’t find that battling demons every day of her life.

She deserved more. So much more.

So he’d given her the only gift that he could.

He’d walked away to let her live a real life with someone else.

Some utterly lucky asshole who would never,
ever
deserve her and—

The air began to swirl around him. A small tornado that separated him from the others.

Luis stilled. This had happened before. Actually, just seconds before Serena had—

He disappeared and his empty glass fell to the floor, shattering.

He didn’t look pissed.

Serena slowly lowered her arms and gazed at Luis’s face. Such a handsome face, really. Not hard at all. Strong. Determined.

Perfect.

His eyes narrowed. He stepped out of her circle. “You can’t keep playing with dark magic.”

“I’m not playing.” The whispers in her mind as she’d performed the spell had been louder this time—but she hadn’t been the least bit tempted by their lures.

She’d done the spell for one reason.
Love.
The dark powers in this world—and the next—couldn’t touch that.

“Why, Serena?” Stark. “Why risk the danger?”

“Why did you leave me without a good-bye?” The rose was on the ground near his left foot. Another part of her spell.

“To spare you.” He lifted his right hand, and she saw his claws. His left, and she saw a ball of flames. “Tell me, witch, did you really want to wake to this in your bed every day?”

No hesitation. Besides, she now understood that he’d know when she lied. “Yes.”

His nostrils flared.

“That was a truth, wasn’t it,
cazador?
”

His head jerked.

“Want to hear a few more?”

He didn’t move.

“I didn’t expect you—oh, I knew I was getting the big, bad,
cazador
—but I didn’t expect
you.
You touched me, and I hungered. Pleasured me, and I wanted more. You held me—” By the blood, she was stripping her pride bare before him, but she wasn’t letting him go without a fight! “And I wanted to stay in your arms forever.”

Truth.
She saw the knowledge in his eyes.

“I told you I cared, and that was a lie.”

So easy to see the lies now. Waking up alone with hope gone had a tendency to make things crystal clear for a witch.

Or any woman.

“My body aches for you and so does…
shit
! So does my heart, Luis. I feel like I’ve been waiting for you to come into my life for years, and I didn’t even know it until I woke up without you.” She sounded sappy, and she wasn’t the sappy type.

She was the desperate type. “If you don’t want me, tell
me.
I’m a big girl. I can take it.” Yeah, it would hurt like hell, and she’d miss him for the rest of her days, but she wouldn’t stop him from leaving her. “But do
not
just walk away, without telling me good-bye. Give me that much and—”

And Luis had her in his arms, his hold too tight. “I can’t walk away again.
I won’t.
”

Truth, even she could sense that.

“I need you, witch. More than I need the night. More than breath. More than magic.”

Oh, hell, her knees went weak.

“I left you once, because I didn’t want to force you into my world.” He drew in a ragged breath. “Because if I think you’re mine, if I claim you and cross that line, I’ll never let you go and—”

“I am yours.” Her mother had told her once that souls recognized their mates. Luis was the mate of her soul. “I’ve been from the beginning.” Understanding had just taken some time.

“If I bind us,” he whispered, “there will be no going back, don’t you see that? I’ll lock you to me, forever. Chain your soul to mine—”

“
Cazador
, it already is.” That wrenching emptiness she’d felt upon waking—her soul had missed his.

No more. The binding he spoke of—it wasn’t something she feared. No loss of powers, only a joining of spirits.

“Tell me, Luis, tell me how you feel—”

“I feel like you’re my world.
My damn world
.”

She didn’t try to stop the smile that stretched across her face. “Then I think you’re going to be stuck with me.”

“Sweetheart, forever is a very long time for me—for
us
—if I bind our souls—”

“Good.” She’d never sought immortality and, had forever not promised her life with Luis, well, she probably never would have chosen it. But as long as she had him…“Then I’ll fight by your side. Love by your side. My magic’s back and I can help you. We can make this world better—”

“You already have.” He kissed her, the touch of his lips so sweet that she nearly cried out. “You already have.”

Air swirled around them. Magic warmed the night.

“Luis?”

“Hold onto me, witch. This ride might get rough…”

She laughed and held on tighter. “Just the kind of ride that I like.”

He kissed her again and the power bloomed between them.

Serena realized that her mother had been right, about so many things.
If only she’d gotten the chance to tell her so.

Souls did touch others in this world. They looked for their mates.

The big, bad monsters that waited in the dark—they
did
come after the bad witches.

And sometimes, well, sometimes, it was just good to be a little bit bad…

And under love’s sweet and sexy spell.

Noelle Mack

“S
pectraSign,” the receptionist said automatically, continuing to type as she talked into the microphone of a headset. “Our creative concepts light up your—whoops, I have to put you on hold for a sec, okay?”

Beth Danforth, who was waiting to be interviewed, watched as the receptionist corrected something on the computer screen, saved it with a tap on the keyboard, and punched the flashing hold button on the phone console, multitasking for all she was worth.

“Sorry about that,” the receptionist was saying. “Of course you don’t want your whoops to light up. Yes, sir. I can hear how upset you are.” She listened to whoever was screaming at her for another minute. Beth, who was sitting on a padded bench not far away from the reception desk, heard a threat to have the receptionist fired come through loud and clear, peppered with curse words.

It was a weird world and getting weirder every day. Nobody could wait five seconds anymore without tempers being lost and rank being pulled.

“Of course, sir,” the receptionist said politely. “Yes. Let me transfer your call.” She punched a glowing button on a brushed-aluminum console and the faint yelling stopped. “You are now in voicemail hell, sir,” she said to the air and took off her headset.

Then she swiveled in her chair, away from the console and her monitor, to face Beth Danforth. “Justin’s expecting you,” the receptionist said. “Go on in. First door you come to.”

Beth stood up and looked into the corridor that led away from the reception area, seeing only seamless walls. She opened her mouth to ask where the door was, but the other woman seemed to have read her mind.

The receptionist winked. “Trust me, there is a door, but it’s closed. Right that way.” She pointed with a candy-striped pen that she took out of the straggly but pretty arrangement of cobalt-blue hair piled high on her head. Beth would not go so far as to call the arrangement a bun. There were several other items stuck into the blue hair: a painted butterfly trembling on a spring, a striped feather, and what seemed to be a pair of chopsticks.

“Okay. Thanks very much.” Beth picked up the laptop, her presentation for the interview safely snuggled inside its hard drive, and headed right that way, wondering a little.

The CEO was referred to as just…Justin? Not Mr. Watts? Looked like SpectraSign was a really laid-back place, even by the freewheeling standards of ad agencies and graphic design companies.

She’d already gotten out of the elevator and gotten lost on the floor below before she made her way up here for her interview. The company was bigger than she’d thought. Judging by the drop-dead funky decor and buzz of activity, it was on the cutting edge of its very competitive field. The receptionist returned to whatever she’d been doing again. In back of her, Beth could hear fingertips clicking lightly on the keyboard. The receptionist answered an internal ring on the phone console and Beth heard her talk to someone she assumed was Justin Watts. “She should be at your door in a second. Uh-huh. Yes, the Times Square pedestrian pattern report’s almost done.”

There was a door with a recessed latch at the end of the long, white, sun-filled corridor, but it was invisible until you stood in front of it. Beth reached out a finger and traced a few inches of the infinitesimally thin crack that separated the door from the wall. Even with that light pressure, she could feel a hum coming from inside, an electronic kind of hum.

Computers, probably. Lots of them.

She wondered what Justin Watts looked like, mentally running through the possibilities at warp speed. Tall or short? Lean or chunky? Cute or not? Cool cat or dirty dawg?

Beth took a calming breath, told herself she could ace this, added a silent rah-rah and threw in a couple of Hail Marys as a nod to her Catholic grandmother. For good measure, she summoned up her comic-book alter ego, Graphic Design Girl, who could rock a website and simplify a layout in a single bound. She was good at what she did, even if she was starting from scratch all over again, beginning with this interview.

Visionary, her former employer, had closed up shop two months ago, leaving nothing behind in their downtown loft but crumpled sandwich bags and broadband wiring sprouting from a lot of holes in the drywall.

She had brushed up her resumé, posted it every place she could, and hit the hiring trail immediately. So far, no takers. Unfortunately, no one, whether they were in corporate HR or an independent client, seemed to care one way or another about the way her creativity had been praised to the skies. By her friends. On their arty blogs. There were not enough adjectives to describe her talent, according to them. Her marketing concepts had been touted as unique, outstanding, and fantastic.

It was just too bad that Visionary, the video game company whose national advertising she’d created, had tanked so fast. The two geek gods who’d founded the company, college pals whose entire wardrobe consisted of sweatpants and funny, funny T-shirts, had burned through a million dollars of start-up capital and gone back to live with their parents.

Shortly after her search for meaningful employment began, Beth had hustled up a few freelance jobs—one for table lamps, one for pickled beets, one for kitty litter—and given each her all, but the money, at least for the first two, was almost gone. Number three, the kitty litter account, had gone up in smoke when the Whizzy Whizkers king ran off to Boca Raton with his mistress and cleaned out the company account. So the company check had bounced, boing boing, and her bank had socked her with a $35 fee just for letting her know. Nice of them.

No, freelancing wasn’t going to cut it. She needed a steady job and she needed health insurance and she needed to pay the exorbitant rent on her dreary little studio apartment in lower Manhattan.

So far, there hadn’t been one response to her posts, except from SpectraSign. Would she fit in here? The voice who’d called her cell and made the appointment for today belonged to the receptionist she’d just met, who seemed nice enough, but not like the kind of person who was easily wowed. Beth had no idea what anyone at SpectraSign thought of her credentials and she hadn’t been able to find out too much about the company or its CEO. Justin Watts didn’t even have a picture on Google Images.

She looked around again, stalling just a little bit longer. For a media-biz company, it definitely seemed to be prospering. The corridor—unlike those at the Visionary—did not bear the sneaker marks of postgrad dudes playing foam-football and colliding bodily with the walls. There was no eviction notice posted on a dartboard, either. No, this space was spectacular in an austere way. Every surface was pure white or brushed aluminum; every piece of furniture was high-end modern design.

She put her hand on the recessed latch to turn it, letting it stay there for a second or two. The latch was pleasantly warm and Beth didn’t want to give Justin Watts a chilly-fingered handshake.

“C’mon in,” a friendly voice said. A nice, deep, male voice.

Beth took a deep breath. She wanted to make a favorable impression from the second she walked in. Confidence was key. Her ex-boyfriends had always told her she was pretty and the reflection in the mirror this morning hadn’t been too scary. Eyeliner and lipgloss and a touch of blush had done the trick today. Her skin had cooperated, for once, not presenting her with an evil little surprise on her nose the way it sometimes did when she was stressed. So she looked okay. There was nothing to distract him from her creative genius and her portfolio. And then there were…she searched her mind for irresistible physical attributes and drew a blank.

She did have nice knees, she thought desperately and a little irrationally, and the skirt she had on showed them. Above the knees things got a little plump, below the knees were legs that were okay but not great. Work the knees, she told herself. Beth felt like she was picking up a mysterious charge from this place. Her skirt clung to her thighs, even edged up slightly. She tugged it down. In the store the skirt had been just right. Not demure and not too revealing, either. It didn’t wrinkle. That was why she’d worn it. But material that didn’t wrinkle had a slithery side, betraying its origin in Satan’s Little Tailor Shop, she thought.

“Anyone out there?” The voice from inside sounded even deeper and more male.

Rah rah rah. He was waiting for her. She turned the latch and went in.

“Hello.” Beth took a look at the man working away on one of two monitors and her poor, unemployed heart beat faster.

“Hey…be right with you. Hold on a sec,” he murmured.

The glow from the screen made his face look faintly luminous, which was an interesting effect. His features were on the rugged side, and there was a dimple involved on the left side of his mouth. Melt me fucking down, she thought. Justin Watts was hot.

“Sorry,” he said without looking up just yet. “I don’t want to lose this thought and I don’t mean to be rude but—”

“You’re not,” she said. “I understand.” How many seconds had she dawdled on the other side of the closed door?
Way to go on making a good first impression,
she scolded herself. He continued to study the screen, and she continued to study him.

“Thanks. Okay. That’ll do it. Let me just input these changes—” he tapped at the keyboard—“and I’ll be right with you.”

“No problem. Take your time.”

She took the opportunity to flat-out stare at what she could see of him while he concentrated on finishing what he was doing. Justin Watts had thick, dark hair that was the opposite of styled. It stuck up every which way and looked like he had been running his hands through it while he pondered layouts on the drafting table he sat at.

“Done.” He tapped another couple of keys and glanced up at her at last. The glance turned into a look that turned into a stare. His gaze was intense, but for some reason Beth didn’t feel intimidated. Probably because he had nice, really nice, eyes. Supersexy. And beach-glass blue, shadowed by lashes that were as thick and dark as his hair. His smile made his eyes crinkle at the corners.

Save me, she thought weakly. He rose from the drafting table and walked around it to meet her, giving her a warm, strong, almost electrifying handshake that chased away her nervousness. Mmm. On second thought, she didn’t want to be saved.

“Okay,” he said. “So you’re Beth. I’m Justin.” He laughed a little self-consciously. “That’s obvious, I guess.”

She was charmed. Justin Watts might be a big deal, but he didn’t act like one. For one thing, he wasn’t sitting behind a typical, CEO-style fortress of a desk made of bleached titanium or whatever, but at a real, old-style, honey-pine drafting table with a state-of-the-art double monitor setup, plus scrap paper and layouts and art stuff all over it. He was clearly a hands-on kind of guy.

“It’s really nice to meet you,” he was saying. She returned her gaze to his face. “I checked out some of your work on your website—I was impressed.”

“Oh. Ah, thanks.” Now that he had let go of her hand, her nervousness returned. She clutched the handles of her laptop case like it was her third-grade lunchbox and she was guarding the cupcakes in it from the Table Five death squad, then told herself not to be so twitchy. “Which ones?”

“You can set the laptop right here,” Justin said, pointing to the drafting table. “Um, the lamp ads were great. And that animated campaign you did with the dancing beets? Even better—genius, in fact.”

She gave him what she hoped was a cool, totally professional nod of acknowledgment. “Thanks,” she said, thrilled inside that he’d looked at more than just her resume. “I worked really hard on those.”

The lamp assignment had involved nothing more than a good layout using the company’s photos, but the stop-motion process of putting tap shoes on pickled beets and making them shuffle off to Buffalo had been a bitch. But she wasn’t going to say that. Let him chalk it up to pure genius if he wanted to. And she wasn’t going to mention the kitty litter gig at all. He hadn’t. Anyway, it didn’t count, since she hadn’t been paid, the way guys said a date didn’t count if they hadn’t been laid.

She suspected Justin Watts would never say anything so crude. But no doubt there were women waiting in line just to do him.

She imagined him beckoning and her going to the head of that line and smiled inwardly. No, no, no. She needed this job more than she needed sex right now.

Justin leaned over the drafting table and pushed the layouts to one side. She couldn’t help looking. One atmospheric, faux Depression-era photo showed a half-naked guy in faded jeans leaning on a 1930s pickup truck out in a field somewhere. Waving wheat. Hay fork propped on the truck. And the faux farmboy was to die for—it was classic prairie porn, all the way.

The model had quite a manly bulge, she noted. Almost as big as the bale of hay his battered workboot was resting on. Then she looked at the model’s face. Oh, yeah. He was famous, even if she couldn’t remember his name at the moment. Who he was didn’t matter, because a well-known logo was splashed across the bottom of the photo. Blue Blaze Jeans. That was a huge company. She breathed an inward sigh of relief. So SpectraSign had at least one major client to pay their bills. Her paycheck wouldn’t bounce.

You’re not hired yet, she told herself, setting down her laptop case. Quit ogling manly bulges and get back to convincing Justin Watts that he needs you and only you, on staff, with benefits, as a designer.

Beth unzipped the case and took out the laptop, bending down a little to raise the screen and angle it up while she went through the beep-and-boop ritual of starting it.

“Sorry. You need something to sit down in.” He brought over a chair that matched his own—gleaming curves of aluminum formed the legs and seat and back.

Beth settled herself into it and put on her best interview smile as she looked up at him. It made her face feel stretched.

“Did you bring a portfolio?”

She shook her head. “Everything’s on my laptop. It just seemed like an easier way of giving you a comprehensive overview.”

True and not true. Her ancient cat, who did not take kindly to sudden awakenings, had been sleeping on her actual portfolio. Moving him meant a revenge hairball on the bathmat sooner or later. Usually sooner. She hadn’t been willing to risk it when she’d been rushing to get here as it was. Besides that, the contents of the portfolio were disorganized and she had a lot of personal stuff—letters and photos and old comic books—mixed in with her project layouts. It needed winnowing and she hadn’t had time.