Free Deals With Demons by Victoria Davies Page B

first time.
    Promise.”
    “What mistakes?”
    Am I really going to do this? she wondered, panicked. Was she going to bare her heart to him and explain why she’d run the first time? He had a valid point. They needed everything in the open if they had any chance of navigating the turbulent waters of their relationship. And she wanted to. This time she was older and wiser. She wanted to fight for him instead of running the way she had when she was younger.
    “All right,” she capitulated. “Fine. Let’s do this. I promise this time round I won’t be as foolish as I once was. I won’t look for more to our relationship than there is. I’ll accept what we have and enjoy it while it lasts.”
    “What do you mean, more than there is?” he asked carefully.
    She kept her gaze firmly on her painted red toenails. “I won’t hope for you to love me the way I did when I was younger. Maybe I was rash to act the way I did,” she acknowledged for the first time. “But when I woke up that morning and went to get a change of clothes your women were waiting for me. They

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    had the decency to explain what the rose on my neck meant, and after learning I was such a thorough disappointment to you I couldn’t bear to stay. The pride of the young and stupid.”
    Unable to stay beside him any longer, Talia threw herself from the bed, dragging the sheet with her.
    “I’m taking a shower,” she said, her back to him.
    “Wait.” It was only one word but Talia felt the dark rage in it.
    Stunned, she turned around to see Devlin in all his demonic glory. Very rarely had she seen this side of Devlin and now he’d changed twice in one night. His other self only showed through in the face of a rage so consuming he lost all control.
    Slowly, she backed away, treating him the way she would a wild animal.
    “I said wait,” he snarled, watching her with black eyes.
    She froze.
    “What did the women tell you?”
    “What?” She frowned. Of all the things to be angry at, she hadn’t expected it to be her words about her rivals.
    “Tell me exactly what they said.”
    Talia swallowed, recalling what had happened six years ago. “Merilyn pulled me into her room where the others were waiting. You had quite the harem.” She couldn’t keep the bitterness from her voice. “They tried to welcome me into their ranks. They gave me tips on how to hold your interest and told me I could expect to be invited to your bed once every ten days or so until you grew bored with me.” She hadn’t meant to say that. Her bitterness and hurt were too obvious. Conjuring the memory had torn her heart again, ripping into the wound she’d thought long since healed. Talia drew a shuddering breath, trying to get it together. She had to deal with this logically, be detached. Just pretend it was someone else’s humiliation.
    “They were playing with my hair when they saw the rose,” she said in a cool voice. “The room was silent until Merilyn was finally kind enough to tell me what it meant.”
    “What did she say?” he demanded darkly.
    Talia didn’t want to remember this part. It had hurt unlike anything she’d ever experienced before or since. “She told me,” she said, trying desperately to remain aloof, “the mark was a sign you’d fed on me, which I acknowledged. Those women looked at me as if I were the most pitiable creature they’d ever seen.
    I noticed no one else had the same mark and I asked why. Merilyn told me you’d never fed on them. They weren’t your meals.” Talia cringed as she said the hated word. “She told me you only needed to feed on blood when the…” She laughed bitterly, revisiting the painful memories of her younger self. “When the sex was so unsatisfying you had to sate yourself with food instead. The fact that no other woman in that room had the mark meant I was the only one clumsy enough in bed to reduce you to feeding.”
    “Finish it,” Devlin said harshly when she stopped