The Five Deaths of Roxanne Love (18 page)

While Louisa pulled him aside, Roxanne eyed the big cross hanging over the headboard, hearing Santo’s voice in her head.

Jesus wouldn’t make you blush.

No, she doubted he would. But evidently the man who waited in death for her did.

“She is your lady friend,
mijo
?” Roxanne heard Louisa whisper. “This is good. It’s past time for you.”

Roxanne’s face grew hot. She peeped over her shoulder, waiting for Santo to contradict Louisa’s assumption, and found herself looking straight into his eyes. He answered Louisa in Spanish, and whatever he said made the older woman beam.

“
Bueno!
” she murmured. “
Muy bueno.
”

The old woman left them alone in the bedroom together, promising to be right back. Roxanne and Santo avoided each other’s eyes almost as diligently as they did the bed looming beside them. But Santo filled the room, crowding her. Taking more than his share of the air. Even dirty, banged up, and tired to the bone, he looked good.

With a determined sniff, she dug in the bags for the cell phone, fought the plastic casing until Santo took it and pried it open for her, then plugged it into a charger.

When she turned around again, Louisa stood in the doorway with a stack of clothes in her arms. “These were Jorge’s,” she told Santo. “They should fit.” She pulled a gray and black jogging suit and shirt from the top and handed them to him before turning to Roxanne. “These are mine, when I was . . .” She trailed off, searching for the words. She squared her shoulders, sucked in her stomach, and thrust out her chest. “
Muy bonita, s
í
?
”

Despite everything, Roxanne smiled. “
Sí,
” she answered, taking the clothes. “
Gracias.
”

Louisa had brought her clingy pink velour warm-ups that had the words
Hot Mama
in glitter across the
butt. Roxanne laughed when she saw them, and Louisa grinned broadly before hurrying off to the kitchen with a promise of a delicious dinner to come.

“You should let me look at those bites and scratches now,” Santo said quietly.

He took her hand and pulled her into the bathroom, where the lighting was better. His palm felt warm and gentle against hers, his touch a low-frequency hum in her system. She sat on the closed toilet while he shut the door and pulled out the bandages and antiseptic.

“Which ones hurt the worst?” he asked as he lined up the supplies on the sink.

“All of them.” And they did, even though they’d been healing at the usual rapid rate. Being hard to kill didn’t mean she was immune to pain, though. She felt it just like the next guy, and right now not an inch of her didn’t ache, burn, or throb.

Santo doused a gauze pad with disinfectant, cut his gaze to hers, and held it for a moment. Waiting. Embarrassed, breathless, and irritated with herself for the tension she felt, she turned away and pulled her shirt over her head, holding it in front of her breasts before she faced him again. He kept his eyes lowered as he began to clean her wounds, but she couldn’t stop thinking about his dark head bent to her breasts, his hands against her skin, and his mouth . . .

She winced as the disinfectant seeped into a raw wound, and the erotic pictures in her head ceased.

“I’m sorry,” Santo said with a worried glance.

“Don’t be. I want them cleaned all the way down to the bone. I can’t think of their breath, their saliva on my skin.”

He took her at her word, tolerating her flinches and wet eyes as he cleaned each angry furrow. He worked his way down her shoulder and arms, and across the bones of her chest to the other side.

“You fought like a warrior today, Roxanne.”

“I felt like a coward.”

Startled, he looked up. “You hid it well.”

She shouldn’t have been so pleased by that, but she’d fast learned that where Santo was concerned, she had a hard time faking anything. She’d never told anyone the things she’d confided in him today. Not even her sister. But once she’d started, she hadn’t been able to stop. And he’d listened. The kind of listening that left her feeling
heard
and better for it.

Santo finished cleaning and bandaging the bites where the hellhound had sunk in its teeth when it pulled her from the window. “You can put your shirt back on now,” he said in a rough voice. “But let me look at your hands.”

After finding tweezers in the medicine cabinet, he perched on the side of the tub next to her and began the painstaking task of removing the tiny shards of glass from her palms. She wanted to thank him for taking care of her. For putting himself between her and the
hellhounds. For volunteering to be the one to help her out of this nightmare. But the words lodged behind her tongue and she couldn’t set them free.

He paused and lifted that enigmatic gaze to her face, searching it for a moment before returning his attention to her hand.

“Why are you alone,
angelita
?” he asked in a deep voice.

She frowned at his bent head. “I’m not alone.”

“You don’t have a husband. Not even a boyfriend.”

“You don’t know that.”

He gave her a questioning look. “I assumed.”

Of course he did. And why not? She’d been ready to strip bare on a table in his hotel room just hours ago.

“You only wanted to call your brother and sister,” he went on, a flicker of amusement in his expression when he noted her flaming face. “If there was someone else, you would want to talk to them, too.”

She shrugged.

“But even before that I knew.”

He reached up and brushed her cheek with the back of his hand. “You touch your face. All the time. When you think no one sees you.”

“I touch my face?”

He nodded. “Like you’re making sure your disguise hasn’t slipped.”

She didn’t know why his words injured her,
but they did. She’d never considered the gesture that she made every day of her life. Never thought to attribute a meaning to the simple motion. But he’d hit a truth she hadn’t realized, and it felt as if he’d attacked.

Her eyes stung, but she lifted her chin. “If you see me touching my face, it’s because there’s been blood on it. And I’m not
alone
. I’m single. By choice. There’s a difference.”

She could tell that he didn’t believe a word she said. It was there in that half-amused, half-brooding look he gave her.

“A strange choice for a woman who dreams of baking cakes for the kids she doesn’t have.”

She called herself a fool for revealing so much to him, but she didn’t say more. He would only find a way to use it against her. He finished with her palms, capped the antiseptic, and tossed the gauze in the trash by the sink. But he didn’t get up and he didn’t move away. Instead he put both of his hands on her thighs and rotated her with a gentle pressure until she sat facing him, knees trapped between his spread legs. He kept his hands where they were, wide and warm over her thighs as he imprisoned her gaze with his. She’d have to knock him back into the tub to stand, but to remain so close felt dangerous.

“Why?” he asked, features drawn. Intent.

Why what?
she could quip and evade answering.
And she considered it, but to what end? He liked questions. She’d figured that one out early. He’d keep asking.

“I snore,” she said dispassionately. “It drives them away.”

He didn’t even smile. “No, you don’t. I’ve watched you sleep.”

His fingers curled around behind her knees and he pulled her closer still. Off balance, her hands fluttered above his thighs, looking for a place to brace. He made the decision for her, guiding them down to his legs, letting them rest intimately close to his hips.

The position made her lean forward, on eye level with him. He cupped her face between his hands. “Why are you alone, Roxanne?”

She tried to push away, but it was like pushing against a stone wall. He held on to her. Gentle, but unyielding. Her lips parted and he shifted that focus and attention to the small gesture. He moved closer so that his nose lightly brushed against her cheek.

“I’m not alone,” she said, tilting her head so he had better access, when she should have stood up and gotten the hell out of there. She felt like a traitor to herself, but Santo seemed to have some mysterious power over her body. It had been reacting to him with its own agenda since the moment they’d met.

His lips grazed her jaw. “Bullshit,” he murmured against her skin. “You say you want to be like
everyone else.
Normal.
But if that’s what you really wanted, you’d be married. You’d have those cake-eating children already.”

She managed to pull back, stung. Undeterred, his mouth moved to her throat, hot and wet and so enticing she wanted to melt into him. She twisted away, stumbling over his legs as she stood. Unbalanced, Santo caught himself on the faucet to keep from falling into the tub. She didn’t stop until she reached the door.

“Who I marry and when I do it isn’t your business,” she said in a low, angry voice.

“
You
are my business, Roxanne. Haven’t you figured that out yet?”

She wanted to turn around and glare at him. Show him that he hadn’t hurt her. That he hadn’t even pricked the surface of her feelings. But he had. He’d done more than prick it, and she knew she wouldn’t be able to hide it from him.

“I don’t care if that’s what you think,” she said, voice trembling with emotion. “Because you are not my business.”

She turned the doorknob feeling justified and vindicated. His hands pressed against the door, blocking it from opening. Bracketing her as the warmth of his body burned down her back. She cursed the weakness that closed her eyes in surrender, even for just an instant.

“Is that what you do?” he asked, his lips by her ear, his breath a seductive lure meant to coax her into
turning. “Push them away when they get too close? Tell them to fuck off?”

Damn him.

She spun around, but he didn’t back away. He was there, filling her vision, overwhelming her senses. Muscled and broad, dark and dangerous. Gentle and protective. She didn’t know how to deal with him. She fought the urge to touch him, but she
felt
him in every cell in her body.

“I didn’t say fuck off.”

“Only because you’re too polite. Too worried about saying something you’ll regret. Hurting someone’s feelings.”

Another killing blow that emptied her lungs. He was right again. Where was the point in denying it? In pretending he was wrong?

She was a polite, lonely woman who guarded every word and locked every door behind her. She said that she wanted to be normal, but inside she knew that wasn’t possible. Normal women didn’t die over and over again. Normal women didn’t have to check their masks for fear someone would see too much inside them. Normal women didn’t have six-and-a-half-foot guardian angels they wanted to touch more than they wanted to breathe.

She was the woman who tried to jump into a pack of ravenous creatures to save someone she’d never met but was too afraid to reach out to someone she wanted
to know. Wanted to know very badly. Wasn’t that the opposite of normal?

And why did she act this way? Because she feared she was more than just a freak who didn’t die? In the darkest corner of her heart lived the fear that she was like the monsters who’d broken out of the Beyond. Unfit. Unnatural. Offensive.

She fixed her gaze on a point just below his chin and spoke to it. “Are you finished?”

“Why? Is it time to run away? Is that what you do,
angelita
?”

She turned and yanked open the door, forcing him to step back or get hit in the face. “Don’t call me that. And while you’re at it? Fuck off.”

R
eece waited on the back porch dressed like GI Joe, feeling like a dick. Beside him, Gary stood a head taller and looked like he’d been born to kick ass. He’d dressed in black from the cap to the boots, and acted like it was a Batsuit. Only his face remained uncovered, and his skin glowed, so pasty it appeared phosphorescent. He’d picked up a rash or a bad case of adult acne, and angry sores crowded around his hairline, making a mottled halo on his face. His eyes glittered eerily, like blue diamonds.

Reece had only ever seen the hours before dawn from the other side of midnight, when the rising sun meant the end of a good night. He’d never awakened early to watch it evict the stars and muscle down the moon like he did now.

Scattered in the yard stood a couple dozen of Gary’s
minions, dressed in similar commando garb. Everyone held a weapon. Most had more than one, and the sweet scent of pending violence perfumed the air.

It made Reece’s heart throb and sent a dark thrill through him. Blood would be shed this morning.

Yesterday had been filled with training. Shooting on the range. Lessons in tracking. Information about what to look for. Hard, cold facts that almost made him believe the unbelievable. Gary wasn’t just fucking around. He thought demons were having their own little party on earth. He blamed them for the rise in crime, for the surge of brutality that seemed to be ever escalating. Every child who was molested, every woman who was raped. Even the goddamn war—all of it he attributed to the demons out there stirring the pot, cranking up the heat.