Chapter
7
Chloe
One week later…
Chloe looked at her newly manicured nails as she listened to Kent snarl over the phone line, “I’ve just come out of a three-hour council meeting that was a complete waste of my fucking time. That’s what I have to look forward to once a week for the rest of my life, Amazon. Three hours or more a week, talking bullshit with people I can’t stand. The terms of our original agreement are no longer sufficient. We need to renegotiate.”
She snorted at the demand. The demon must have thought she had been born yesterday. “Wrong, Kent. Our agreement stands as it is. If you don’t like losing, perhaps you shouldn’t make bets.”
A smooth growl came over the phone. “You scammed me, and you know it.”
She laughed at the accusation. “Wrong again. I didn’t scam you. I schooled you. And if you don’t like learning hard lessons, then don’t play games with me.”
“Do you realize what you’ve done to my life? Do you honestly fucking grasp what I’ve had to do to cover my marker from this ridiculous goddamned bet?”
Little did the people in her life realize how Chloe felt regretful over some of the things she had done. This particular situation was one of them. Because Kent was right. She had turned his whole life upside down over a bet. It hadn’t started out that way for her. No, Chloe would have never guessed she would walk away owning a marker from the demon that night. Nevertheless, he had challenged her, dammit. And she had won fair and square.
“Are you fucking listening to me, Chloe?” Kent snapped through the phone line. “You and I both know that I had to go above and beyond walking into that meeting and accepting my family’s seat. If it weren’t for me, your brother-in-law’s sister would have probably already had her death sentence handed down. You have to admit that my debt has more than been paid, and now I’m stuck in the very situation I’ve been avoiding for decades, dealing with uptight, sniveling politicians. You owe me for this, Amazon, and you owe me big.”
He was right, but that didn’t mean she was going to admit it.
Heaving a bored sigh, she asked, “First of all, is Gage really my brother-in-law? How does that work, exactly? Second of all, what exactly do you want to even the score, demon? Depending on what it is, I’ll consider it, even though I technically don’t owe you a damn thing.”
She waited for Kent’s response. He didn’t say anything right away. Thinking perhaps he had gotten mad and hung up on her, she pulled the phone away to check the screen. The call was still active, so she called out his name.
When he answered, his voice was a seductive croon that sent tingles down her spine. “I want a night with you. Dinner, wine … and more.”
Chloe felt the sting of disappointment once again. She didn’t know why she kept hoping Kent would be different, yet she had for some odd reason.
Why did all men think that, just because she had a pretty face, paired with a body that had all the right curves, that she would just fall into bed with them? She was sick and tired of men thinking she didn’t have anything to offer besides what was between her legs.
And she wasn’t a whore. She had never once slept with a man to get something, and she never would. Mr. Douchebag had learned that the hard way when his stilted date had driven his Ferrari back after dropping Chloe off at her house. Chloe had asked the girl to pass on the message that neither him, nor his car, had been hot enough to get her excited at all. Then Chloe had firmly told the woman that she was young, beautiful, and intelligent, and she didn’t have to settle for dickwads like him. If she didn’t treat herself with respect, no one else ever would.
Reeling in her disappointment over Kent’s request, Chloe mentally placed him in the “Just Another Jerk” list in her head.
“Not happening, demon. You come up with a reasonable request that doesn’t involve trying to get me on my back, and I might consider it. Till then, keep Lulu’s ass off the Ninth Circle Council’s radar. Elena and Gage are still working on getting the evidence they need to fully clear her. Besides that, we have nothing else to talk about.”
Chloe hung up and tossed her phone on the bed with a discouraged sigh. One day she would meet a man who was good-looking and had a heart of gold; someone who would see her for who she really was and not what the outer package looked like.
It would be nice if that one day would hurry the hell up and get there.
~~~
Kent
He stared at the screen of his cell phone in disbelief. The words “call ended” mocked him in a way that he had thought only his stuck-up, pompous, and pretentious family were capable of doing.
She had hung up on him.
He couldn’t remember the last time a woman had hung up on him. Usually they were begging for his company, or his cock, and he had to hang up on them because, while he liked begging in the bedroom, he wasn’t too keen on it anytime else.
Not to mention, he had a three-strike rule. After the third time he fucked a woman, he was done. That might seem like a sleazy move to others, but it kept emotional attachments at bay. With his family and their blue blood reputation in the Other community, he had been dodging nefarious women who thought they could tame him and talk him into marrying them for his family’s connections his whole life. Hell would freeze over before that happened, and he was pretty sure that the eternal wonder that was the fiery down under was still roasting at a steady thousand degrees or so, so he was safe on that account.
The screen on his phone went blank and that brought his thoughts back to the sultry Amazon who was haunting all his thoughts. Never had a woman commanded his attention the way this one did, and the sad thing was that she wasn’t even trying. Nope.
The first time his eyes had landed on the bombshell strutting her stuff into McPhee’s bar, his dick had gone rock-hard in his pants, damn near strangling itself. A man wanted to get hard for a woman so he could get his rocks off. What he didn’t want was his goods trying to commit sexual suicide over some broad. Therefore, his reaction to her had been more than a bit disconcerting.
People might think because he liked to party with women that he was ruled by his dick. That was far from the truth. When you grew up in a world where the women of your society would roast your nuts over an open fire to get themselves whatever it was they wanted, you learned to think with your big head instead of your very vulnerable little head rather quickly.
You really took those kinds of lessons to heart when, as an impressionable fifteen-year-old, you accidentally walked in on your father being tied down to a chair naked while your mother was attaching clothespins to his nuts until he agreed to give her that jewel encrusted handbag she wanted.
Kent had walked out of that room wishing he could pluck his own eyes out of his head, knowing no woman would ever tie him down like that.
Literally or metaphorically.
That meant that his unusual and over-the-top reactions he had to the seemingly high maintenance Amazon made him not only wary, but damn near scared for his dick’s sake. All the woman had to do was walk into the room and his cock was suddenly pointing in her direction like it was a divining rod and she was his eternal well of sinfully delicious water.
What was worse than that reaction? Now Chloe’s face kept popping up in his mind whenever he tried to have sex with another woman. It was like she had become some sort of newfound conscience popping up to ruin all his fun! That was completely unacceptable.
He had tried to talk to both his dick and that newfound conscience and set them both straight. He was a man, and he wanted to go out and blow off steam by strenuous cardiovascular exercise in the form of fucking. However, his dick and his newfound conscience weren’t listening. And it was all that Amazon’s fault!
Everything about her was driving him insane to the point that she was becoming all he could think about. No woman should have that kind of power over a man. Because, when she did, next thing you knew, that man being tied down and having his nuts clothes pinned to death was you!
If only the sultry Amazon didn’t trip all his triggers.
There was a time when Kent dreamed about being in an unending room with every available weapon there was to shoot, endless ammunition at his disposal, and naked women there to serve his every need. Now he was dreaming about brown eyes all but laughing at him and bee stung lips in a smirk as the high-handed hellion gave him a finger wave as she walked away.
Even that dream made him wake up hard as a rock, and she wasn’t even naked in it! It was a goddamn travesty in his opinion and utterly ridiculous! She could at least be reasonable enough to be naked while she walked away from him in his own damn dreams.
It was getting to the point where he was starting to think he was going to be the first man on the planet to die from a perpetual hard-on and blue balls. That pissed him off because he knew that the longer this went on, the more he was in danger of becoming a pushover to a woman like his father had been. He had to do something about this, and he had to do it soon. If only the sassy little Amazon wasn’t so damn close to being his dream girl.
Kent didn’t believe in the perfect woman, but the moment he had seen Chloe Demos, he had known she was as close to physically ideal as he would ever get. She had an hourglass figure many a porn star paid high dollar for, and plump, bee stung lips that he could easily imagine kissing the perpetual zipper imprint on the underside of his dick that he got when thinking of her. And when she used one of her dainty hands to flick back some of that long, curly, golden-brown hair over her shoulder, he had to physically stop himself from walking over, fisting that hair in his hands and kissing her senseless.
With her, it was as if every cell in his one hundred-and-two-year-old body screamed that he needed her like he needed air, which was just fucking ridiculous. He didn’t need anybody, especially not a high maintenance woman who seemed to get her jollies off by making his life a living hell.
Still … he wanted the Amazon more than anything he had ever wanted in his entire life. More than his Major League Baseball television subscription where he could watch his team anytime they were playing. More than his prized Daniel Defense M4 V1 L carbine rifle, which was the cream of the crop in any avid gun collector’s arsenal. Hell, he even wanted her more than his BMW Z4, which was akin to his baby. His motherfucking precious.
He rode that car harder than he had ever ridden any woman. It was his escape from all the bullshit in his life. When he was hugging the curves and accelerating to two hundred miles per hour down an empty stretch of highway, he was at peace. Total Zen. In the damn zone. All the annoying shit in his life—aka, his family—disappeared, and he could breathe.
To want a woman more than he wanted that?
Disastrous.
As in, so epically disastrous that a mega-quake could hit, a volcano could explode, and a damn tsunami could hit at the same time, and he would still be more worried about Chloe fucking Demos.
He had known she was going to cause him trouble from the moment she had strutted that tight ass of hers into the bar and it felt like his world had tilted on its axis. As a matter of fact, he had damn near fallen on his ass for it. Did that stop him from wanting her?
HELL NO.
The feisty little Amazon might think she had escaped him, but he would get her one way or another. She had no idea how patient he could be when he wanted something. Nevertheless, she was damn sure about to find out.
His phone rang, pulling him from his thoughts. He looked down to see Captain Nelson’s name across his screen.
A phone call on his day off meant one thing: shit had hit the fan somewhere and it was time to call in the SWAT team.
He pushed the button and answered with, “Yes, sir.”
“We got a bank robbery in progress downtown. Get your ass to the station now.”
Kent forced his mind off the Amazon as he grabbed his keys and headed out of his house toward his car. When you worked SWAT, it was dangerous to have your mind preoccupied while on a scene. He had to be one hundred percent on the job so he didn’t get himself, or someone else, killed. That didn’t mean the Amazon had won this battle between them. No, he would find a way to get what he wanted one way or another.
He was starting to worry his obsession with Chloe was more than an unnatural lust. Like, perhaps Mother Nature was giving him the proverbial kick in the balls because he had finally met a potential mate.
Now he just had to prove Mother Nature wrong.