Page 9 of Bitter Sweet Love

For six hours, we’d been in and out of the car and switching seats as Dez attempted to impart his driver’s education skills to me. We’d started in front of the manor, easing the SUV around the cul-de-sac and up and down the long driveway. It drew a lot of attention from the males and even more jests at Dez’s expense. He’d taken it in good stride and had been laughing up until the moment he’d deemed I was ready to take the SUV out on one of the many back roads that weren’t heavily traveled. We’d eaten a quick lunch and then hit the roads, and that’s when the real fun began.

Driving wasn’t so hard, I realized.

I straightened the wheel and smiled as he eased back in the seat, his legs stretched out, pushing against an imaginary brake. “It’s not that bad.”

He slid me a sideways glance. “You might want to ease off the gas pedal.”

My gaze dipped to the speedometer. Pushing sixty-five, I gripped the steering wheel as my smile spread to epic proportions. Trees blurred on either side of the narrow roads as I pressed down on the pedal, hitting seventy.

Dez braced a hand on the car door. “Remember, hands at the nine and three o’clock position.”

“I thought it was ten and two o’clock?”

“No.” He sucked in a breath. “Curve. Curve coming up. Slow down. Curve!”

I readjusted my hands and lessened the pressure on the gas, but my heart jumped in my chest as the SUV hugged the centerline. With the window down, wind blew through my hair and over my skin. “It’s like flying.”

“Except we’re in a several-ton death trap,” he muttered.

Laughing, I gunned it on the straightaway and giddiness swept through me. Driving for many Wardens wasn’t a big deal, not after they got their license and it became a method of getting from point A to point B, but there was something liberating in the tires eating away at the miles, in traveling almost as fast as we could fly. I was getting away from the house. I was escaping.

“You’re really enjoying this, aren’t you?”

I nodded. “It’s so... well, you’ll probably think it’s stupid.”

“I won’t. Tell me.”

“It’s freeing and it’s... normal and strange somehow.” I struggled to find the right words as we crested a hill. “Danika is the only girl close to my age and she’s always busy trailing after the guys, so she’s never been interested in this kind of thing or really anything I’m interested in.”

“She’s still trying to learn how to fight?” Amusement colored his tone.

My sister wanted to fight demons. That was never going to happen, but she’d manage to convince the males to train her for self-protection. “Yeah, and while that’s fun and passes the time, I like to...”

“Get out?”

I nodded again, silent as I remembered the past three years of being alone in so many ways. Dez had been my buddy, my partner in doing things I shouldn’t be doing, and when he left, a lot of things became impossible.

Dez shifted in the seat, his large body crammed into the spacious SUV. Seconds ticked by before he spoke. “Why didn’t you ask anyone else to teach you?”

“I did, but none of them had the patience or thought it was a good idea.” The constant irritation of being caged stoked to life like a fire. “They think that if we do this, then we’ll just run amok and get ourselves in trouble. That demons will find us and—”

“Demons will find you, Jasmine. They sense us just like we sense them. It isn’t safe for you to be out here without one of us.”

“I’m not weak.” I cut him a sharp look.

“I’m not saying that. You’ve never been weak. Not once.” His sincerity rang true. “But if you were ever to run into an Upper Level demon, you would not get away.”

I bit my lip. There were many types of demons. Most common were Fiends. They looked human and they were into general mayhem, breaking things down, starting fires, manipulating the emotions of large crowds. I’d heard they could be ferocious when cornered. Then there were Posers. They too looked human, but only for a short while, and they had one hell of an appetite, including the rare cannibalistic tendency. When they bit a human, things went downhill fast—like turning-into-a-zombie fast. There were dozens more, but most dangerous of all were the Upper Level ones—the princes and dukes of Hell—the very kind that had killed my mother and wiped out Dez’s clan. They were rare, but their threat was very real.

Suddenly, some of the fun was sucked right out of this experience.

“I’m sorry.”

His apology caught me off guard and I wanted to not be affected by it, but my chest spasmed.

“When I left, I knew it would impact you, but I didn’t realize all that it would change,” he continued quietly. “I didn’t think that you’d be alone, stuck there.”

“Stuck” was an accurate description. “Well, I guess in reality, you really didn’t owe me anything, right? You didn’t accept my father’s offer and you—”

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