Free Truth or Demon by Kathy Love Page B

dismay, all of her musings seemed always to return to one place. How good looking he was. His tall muscular build. His broad shoulders. His amazing golden eyes. His disheveled hair. His mouth, how it looked when he smiled, when he’d been eating that cinnamon roll.
    She moaned in frustration as, yet again, his lips appeared in her mind, but this time, to her utter consternation she found herself imagining how those lips would feel against hers. Smooth and strong, moving over her.
    She jumped as a clattering sound of something, many things, falling on the floor rained down behind her. She turned from the pantry and her heated imaginings to see lentils scattered all over the vinyl checkerboard floor.
    “Satan is not pleased.”
    Killian stepped farther into the room, skirting the cat, which was still perched on the back of the reclining chair, but this time not because he was afraid the animal would attack. But because it was talking. With his coworker’s voice.
    “Vepar?”
    The cat actually rolled its one yellow eye. “I thought we’d already established that.”
    “What … what are you doing here?”
    “What are you doing here?” Vepar countered, the movement of the cat’s lips somehow looking remarkably like the expression of the demon himself. Although, in his normal form, he was tall, lanky and had two eyes. But he did have bad teeth—so maybe that was it.
    “It’s a long story,” Killian said.
    The cat/Vepar lay down, arranging himself in a sphinxlike position. “Well, I’m here via a cat. I think I have time to hear it.”
    Killian nodded, then much to his humiliation shared the story of how he’d been conjured by a group of teenage girls and was stuck here until he could find Poppy a boyfriend.
    Vepar sighed, which sounded remarkably like a purr. Although Killian didn’t think in this case it was a sound of pleasure.
    “So get this female mortal a boyfriend ASAP. And get your ass back to Hell. You’ve got damned souls backing up, and frankly I’m sick of picking up your slack. You know how Satan gets when his business isn’t running smoothly.”
    Yes, Killian did. And there was a reason Satan was known as, well … Satan.
    “I’ll have this finished right away,” he assured the possessed cat. Even though he wasn’t sure how exactly he would accomplish it.
    “Darn it,” Poppy grumbled, realizing that in her preoccupied state she must have set the bag of legumes too close to the counter’s edge.
    Proof that she did not need to be letting her thoughts go in such ridiculous and inappropriate directions as the attractiveness of one Killian O’Brien.
    She’d just reached for the broom when a knock on the apartment door stopped her. Picking her way through the mess, she went to answer it.
    “You forgot it again, huh?” she said as she opened the door, expecting to see Daisy. Her sister was terrible about remembering her key.
    But instead of Daisy, she was greeted by a tall, muscular male. The object of her recent fantasy. And, she added, a wee bit irrationally, the cause of the current mess in her kitchen.
    “I must have,” Killian said with a slight smile, “because I don’t seem to recall what you’re talking about.”
    “Oh, I’m sorry. I just assumed you were Daisy.”
    He nodded and neither spoke. Then he seemed to realize he should probably say something just at the same time she did too.
    “I was—”
    “Did you—”
    They both snapped their mouths shut. After a moment, they both laughed.
    Poppy couldn’t help noticing how deep and musical his laughter was. As attractive as the rest of him.
    “I’m sorry,” he finally said, “I just couldn’t hang out in that apartment anymore. So I thought I’d come see what you’re doing.”
    “Ah,” she said. “The girls getting to you with their practicing?”
    She suspected there was more giggling than practicing. Three teenage girls—there had to be lots and lots of giggling. And boy talk. And fashion talk. And hair