Demon Bound

mud and salt, drying now, the battered leather stained. “I can’t,” he whispered. “I can’t, Pete.”
    Her touch went away. “If that’s how it is then we can’t be anything, Jack. We’ll do the job and we’ll collect the pay but if you can’t tell me something even when it’s eating you up, then this can’t go on.”
    She mounted the stairs and she was out of sight before Jack found his voice. “I’m sorry, Petunia,” he murmured. “I am so, so sorry.”

Chapter Eighteen
    He followed her after a time, found her stripped down to her undershirt and denim. Her muddy clothes were in a heap on the carpet and she’d lit a small fire in the smoky grate.
    Jack held out a mouse-nibbled pink towel. “Peace offering?”
    Pete sighed and then snatched it from him, using it on her face and hair. “Only because I’m like a drowned rat.”
    “No,” Jack said, using his own manky towel to dry his hair. “You’re never that, luv.”
    “Jack,” Pete sighed. “Do me a favor and don’t try and make this better by coming on to me. It’s just horrid and confusing at this point.”
    He turned his back so Pete wouldn’t see him looking gut-punched, because what sort of a hard and wicked mage would he be if he got sour over a girl shooting him down?
    “My apologies,” Jack said. “In a platonic and boring fashion, is it all right if I share your fire until me clothes dry out? I have a feeling if I fall asleep damp I’ll wake up with some horrid Victorian disease.”
    “That’s fine,” Pete said. Her posture unwound when she realized he wasn’t going to push her.
    How he wanted to push her. He wanted to touch cool milky skin with his fingers, feel hot breath on his neck, crush her with the desperate pressure he felt whenever she came within a meter of him.
    Jack stripped off his shirt, the sodden thing landing with Pete’s clothes, and unlaced his boots, setting them on the hob. His tattoos licked up the firelight, and he was surprised when Pete sat next to him on the edge of the bed, blocking the dancing shadows.
    “I trusted you, you know,” she said. “When we met again. I trusted you even though it nearly killed me.”
    Jack lifted his shoulder. “Trust isn’t a commodity that has any value in this life, Pete.”
    “But it does between us,” she said. “And the fact that you won’t trust me speaks buckets.”
    He stayed silent. There was nothing to be said, and Jack valued silence, always had. When one grew up with screaming, crying, and soft whimpering day and night, silence was worth more than gold. And when there was nothing to be said that didn’t bring fury on your head, you shut the fuck up and you took your lumps.
    “And the real pisser of it is that I like you,” Pete said. “If this were some bloke at work, or a regular, normal, dull-as-dishwater boyfriend, I wouldn’t care. I’d move on. But you, Jack. You had to make me take the plunge into
this life
with you, and now you won’t trust me and that’s just bloody shit of you, isn’t it?”
    “Can’t,” Jack corrected her, voice barely more than a cigarette rasp. “Not won’t. Can’t trust you.”
    Pete’s lip curled. “Well, Jack Winter, tell me: what
can
you do?”
    Jack felt the weight of the secret, in his gut like a stone.He felt the demon’s secret as mercury on his tongue, cold and slippery and begging to be spilled.
    Instead, he grabbed Pete by the nape of her neck and pressed their lips together.
    She let out a small sound, her cheek going flush and warm against his as their bodies met, and her hands searched up his bare chest for his shoulders, finger pads digging in and holding fast.
    As he slid his tongue between her lips, and they parted warm and willing for his advance, Jack thought to himself that he should stop. If he had any kind of decency left, he’d stop. He’d remove himself from temptation then and there, and never see Petunia Caldecott again.
    But Jack knew the story of him and temptation, knew it by rote. The bright, hot, shining things always tempted him. And sooner or later, Jack always gave in.
    Pete climbed into his lap, slim strong thighs pressing against his legs, breaking the kiss long enough to tangle her hand in his hair, dig the other into the flesh of his back, press her tits against his chest and her core against the swell of his cock, which grew harder, nearly painful, at even the hint of her touch.
    Jack wasn’t naive enough to think he held any control over himself any