Page 29 of Brimstone and Broomsticks
Chapter 10
Cassandra
We were just turning on Main Street when I saw a figure walking down the street—a figure that not only made my heart skip a beat but caused the coin in my pocket to warm to a level that gave me concerns as to the flammability of my silk-poly blend pants. I hoped the damned things didn’t catch on fire. Wouldn’t that be ironic?
“Pull over! Pull over!” I told Bronwyn. She shot me a perplexed look, then did as I demanded, barely bringing the truck to stop before I was out of it and jogging down the shoulder.
“Hey!” I panted in front of Lucien, not sure what exactly to accuse him of. Seeing the coin and the broken wards, I’d been convinced he’d paid some fairy to get him out of town. Him walking down the street was the last thing I’d expected to see.
“Hey yourself.” He grinned. “You here to offer me a ride back to the hotel? Because I won’t say ‘no’ to that. Actually, I won’t say ‘no’ to pretty much anything you’d like to propose.”
Good grief, had the almost full moon driven everyone in town sex crazy?
“Why are you here? Where did you go? You were supposed to stay in the hotel.” I still hadn’t quite caught my breath or my thoughts, and this sexy guy in front of me wasn’t making it any easier to think clearly. Maybe I was affected by the moon as well. I heard the slam of a truck door and realized that Bronwyn was making her way over to us, at a much slower pace than I’d done.
Lucien glanced over my shoulder, then back to me, pulling up the hem of his pants to show me the anklet. “This says I can’t leave town. Nobody said anything about having to stay in the hotel. What’s the use of getting out of jail with a monitoring device if I have to stay locked in a hotel room?”
“Where were you?” I demanded.
He folded his arms across his chest, shooting another quick glance over my shoulder before giving me what he probably thought was a panty-melting smile.
Okay, it was panty melting. And speaking of melting, that coin in my pocket was about ready to burn a hole through the fabric.
“Alberta and John asked me to join them for a happy hour drink.” He leaned toward me. “Jealous? Because I would have rather been with you.”
“Jealous?” I sputtered. “Of a troll and a cyclops? Please!”
“Hey, is this the hot hellboy?” Bronwyn stepped up beside me and stuck out her hand. “I’m her sister. Bronwyn.”
“Lucien. Is she always this grumpy?”
“Yes.”
“Traitor,” I told Bronwyn before turning back to the demon. “So drinks with Alberta and John where? When did you leave, and did you go anywhere else?”
He regarded me with raised brows. “Lawyers. It’s all questions with them. Although I’d thought since you weremylawyer, you wouldn’t be quite so antagonistic.”
“She’s antagonistic to everyone,” Bronwyn told him. “Don’t take it personal.”
I eyed him. He was disheveled, as if he’d rolled through a parking lot and a few bushes, but he wasn’t quite as mud-covered as Bronwyn was. But then again, if someone had flown him over top of the wards, he wouldn’t have had to scramble over a muddy, thorny deadfall.
But then why was he here and not halfway to Boston? Or hell? Or wherever home was? For some reason he’d left town and decided to come back while the wards were down, and had taken a less mud-filled path back than over the deadfall.
Had he forgotten something and needed to return? I felt the coin in my pocket and scowled. It wasn’t longing for me that had brought him back to town, it was a missing coin—a coin to call his infernal Uber driver.
“I need to know your exact whereabouts from when we left the meeting until right now.”
“Yes sir,” he teased. “I went to some watering hole with Alberta and John for a drink. Not the place I was at last night. This was at the other end of town. Red’s or something like that.”
“Red Brick Tavern,” I told him. “How did you pay for a drink when you have no money?”
He wiggled his eyebrows. “Demons don’t need money, well unless they’re trying to post bail it seems. But I didn’t need to stiff the tavern. Alberta paid.”
He had a thing for trolls? Alberta did have a sort of earthy appeal to some supernatural beings, especially those who were strong enough not to break in her embrace. Maybe demons enjoyed a night under the bridge with a troll. But he’d not seemed interested that way in Alberta at the meeting. No, he’d seemed interested inme. And besides, I knew that Alberta wasn’t a quickie kind of woman. If someone joined her under the bridge, they were there until dawn.
“So you had a drink. Then what?” I urged him to continue.
That smirk never left his face. “Then we had a few more. Then I got into a brawl. Then I had a few more drinks. They kicked me out and since the manager had one of those sticks, I decided not to raise a fuss about it. I started heading back to the hotel.”
