Demon Marked

body. “I see.”
    She probably did. Too much. And Nicholas probably shouldn’t have offered her such a clear view, but fuck it. She’d already gotten to him. He’d let his guard down, and giving her a little more ammunition at this point didn’t matter so much.
    What mattered was that he still knew what she was, what she might do with the info he gave to her. She hadn’t done it yet, but he had to believe she would, eventually.
    “I still want to see you naked,” she added.
    God, and he wanted to be naked. With her. But that was a step he didn’t dare take. Now, he could remember what she was: a demon. The second he believed that she could physically want him would be the second he started forgetting that.
    “Then I’ll make a point not to let you.” He reached for his gloves. “You don’t need to sleep or bathe. The bedroom is mine, and you’ll stay out.”
    Her brows lifted. “So I’m stuck in this one room?”
    “Not stuck.” He gestured to the windows. “There’s a lot of space out there.”
    God knew he’d be out as much as possible. Training, as they’d planned. And any other damn excuse he could think of.
    “And a lot of cold.”
    “Oh, that matters to a demon?” Jesus Christ. He shook his head, and found a damn excuse. “I’m going to put the snowmobile in the shed. There are books and other shit in the storage upstairs if you want to look through them. Just knock yourself out.”
    Her expression remained impassive through his tirade, but now another little smile curved her gorgeous mouth. “All right. I will.”
    Uneasy, Nicholas waited for her to say more, but she didn’t. So why did he have the feeling that he’d just exposed another bit of himself to her?
    Fuck it. He pulled on his gloves, headed for the door. He’d go crazy trying to figure her out.
    If he didn’t go crazy with wanting her first.

    Nicholas obviously didn’t handle sexual frustration well.
    Sitting opposite from him at the small table, Ash watched him sort through boxes of ammunition by the light of a kerosene lamp. In jeans and black cable-knit sweater, he didn’t bother with the tailored perfection from the city. Out here, there was no point—and it would have been ridiculous. A man couldn’t trot around snowdrifts in handmade Italian shoes, and he’d been working steadily since they’d arrived. All but ignoring her, but she didn’t mind. She liked watching him, studying him—and she already knew that retreat was his favored way of dealing with his attraction to her.
    Had he never been frustrated before, had no experience with it? She thought it was possible. With his money and looks, and as long as that need wasn’t directed at a specific person, he could easily scratch a sexual itch with anyone. And if there’d been anyone he did want, but for some reason couldn’t have, he’d probably have quickly moved on if the emotion—or the woman—didn’t prove useful.
    Ash didn’t have any experience with it, either—not that she remembered—but she also wouldn’t have called the desire she felt frustration . She wanted him so much that she ached, but there was no conflict. She liked him, she wanted him, but she didn’t feel impatience. It was simple. On the other hand, although Nicholas desired her, he didn’t want to. And although they had both begun treating her plots and any discussion of her demonic nature in a lighthearted manner, Nicholas became much more serious about it when sex entered the picture. It had become a recognizable pattern: He reminded himself that she was a demon and put physical space between them. Or he put a table between them.
    But he was apparently finished with ignoring her. He glanced up, saw her watching him, but didn’t look away. Instead, he reached into his weapons bag and set a sawed-off shotgun between them.
    “All right. You can’t fight yet, but you can pull a trigger—and for now, this will work best for you. Your aim won’t have to be as good, and you can aim fast enough that it’ll shoot in the right direction.” He opened one of the ammunition shells, showed her the pellets inside. “And the birdshot will scatter, do the most damage.”
    Ash wasn’t so sure. “I healed from a broken neck. Are those little bits of metal going to slow them down?”
    “No. The hellhound venom is.” He set a vial of golden liquid next to the shotgun barrel. “A trace amount of this will slow a demon down. A little more will paralyze one. I’ve got darts,