Page 27 of Hate Mates

“I’m not talking about tonight. How’s she going to react to this…?” I wave a hand between us.

“Who says she has to know anything?” he says, calmly and casually, as if we aren’t tiptoeing around a landmine. “What you and I do is our business. If we ever decide to redefine the terms of what we are, then we’ll find a way to tell her.”

I don’t know if it’s him, the attic, or my post-coital haze, but what he’s saying makes more sense than it should. It means I get to have Lucifer on the surface and Lennox in the dark.

We can have the best of both worlds, and nobody has to know.

“Do you think she’ll be mad?”

For the first time, I see Lennox Carver smile. “I think she wants to see us both happy.”

It’s not a definitive no, but I’ll take it.

“So, what happens now?”

“Whatever we want.” He gives me a hard stare, a lethal gleam brewing in those bright blue eyes. “What does your heart desire, Izzy?”

Everything. It desires the light and the dark, the good and the bad, the allowed and the forbidden. I want my mind free to wander to a wildly dangerous place where I’m draped on a massive onyx throne with the prince of darkness at my feet. Aplace where there are no rules and no judgment. A place where our secret fantasy world comes to life in a dusty attic.

Lennox was right when he said my true self has always lurked in shadows and danced in flames. All it needed was a push in the wrong direction…

And a deal with the Devil.

I lick my lips and offer my most innocent smile. “What else would you expect, sir? Your soul.”

The End

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