Immortal (Fallen Angels #6)(2)
Author: J.R. Ward

The man wheezed and threw a hand out to catch himself on the Leiber display, knocking a couple of the hard sparklies off their posts.

“Now,” she barked, flashing her eyes at him.

Cue the shuffling across that rug. And the instant he was behind the silk curtain, the round of coughing and wheezing was like an asthmatic in a greenhouse. But he did emerge with a beige-colored box about two minutes and thirty-nine seconds later. Not that she was counting.

She didn’t hear a word he said as he approached, her eyes locked on what was in his hands. There was a temptation to snatch the shit out of his grip, but she wanted to see the shoes on her feet, even if they didn’t go with her outfit.

Although, dayum, Swarovski and black leather was classic.

Devina hit the row of three damask-covered chairs and kicked off her black Guccis. “Give them to me now.”

The box came to her on command and her hands shook as she popped the top and sighed. The pair of red bags with Louboutin’s black signature on them were a sight to behold and her hands shook as she took one out and pulled open the drawstring. Then … oh, what a beauty.

The gem-like twinkling was better than those little purses. Better than what she’d seen out in the lobby through the display case. And the color was that of Caucasian flesh.

Jim’s flesh.

She closed her eyes reverently and sent up a prayer for the salesman to keep quiet—if he said one thing about her feet being too big, she was going to take his head off, and not verbally.

With care, she un-bagged the other one and lined up both shoes side by side on the floor. Then she released the structure of her feet so that as she slid her tootsies into the works of art, her bones and skin were like water filling a vase, nothing but accommodation.

The salesman seemed a little surprised as she stood up and walked around all comfy-comfy, but he wasn’t going to say boo, and how lucky for him. Plus, come on, the Loubous were what, like nearly five grand? And he had to be on commission.

Devina smiled as she stared down at her feet, a flush of giddy relief wiping away all the angst about Jim and the war and that fucking Sissy. All at once she was glowing from the inside out, as if she’d had a rip-roaring orgasm, a hot-fudge sundae, and a deep tissue massage all at once.

These were the most perfect shoes in the entire world, and they were hers and nobody else’s, and she was taking them to her wardrobe right now—

That bell in the back of her head rang again, the one that told her when she was backsliding. But screw that.

The stillies were epic, and she couldn’t wait for Jim to see her in ’em. Preferably while the rest of her was nakey.

Yup, these she would save for him.

Popping them off her feet, she put them back into the box just as they’d been presented to her and double-checked to make sure the little red bag with the extra heel tips was in there. Then she glanced over at the salesman—who was taking a discreet puff from an inhaler.

“Put them on my tab,” she said triumphantly. “I’m in the penthouse.”

When your man went home to another, retail therapy was the only way to go.

Chapter Two

Standing over a white-and-blue bowl, Sissy Barten cracked an egg so hard, the shell didn’t just shatter but vaporized. “Oh, come on.”

Turning to the sink, she cranked on the water and cleaned off her hand. Which was shaking. Actually, her whole body was shaking, like her spine was a fault line and everything else was in danger of going the way of that egg.

As she cranked off the faucet, the old mansion got way too quiet, and with a jerk, she looked over her shoulder. Hairs prickled across the back of her neck, warning her of … what? There were no footfalls, no screams, nobody with a knife or a gun stalking her.

Great. Guess immortals could lose their minds. And wasn’t that a happy future to look forward to.

You couldn’t kill yourself if you were already dead.

“Damn it,” she whispered.

Drying her hands, she grabbed the bowl and washed the thing out. Then she went back to the carton and …

Stalled completely. She didn’t want to make scrambled eggs for herself. She didn’t want to be stuck in this house. She didn’t want to be dead and separated from her family …

And while she was at it? She really, totally, absolutely did not want to have that image of Jim Heron half-naked in her head. The sight of him coming out of that bathroom in the wee hours of the night, a towel around his waist, a wasted expression on his face, was like a billboard in front of her brain. She saw every nuance of his body, those huge shoulders, the tight abs, the tops of his hip bones, and that little line of hair beneath his belly button.

Mostly, though, she saw the scratches in his smooth skin. There had been three sets of them, and there was only one thing that could have made—

Abruptly, her shaking got worse, and she tried to do something about it by cracking each one of her knuckles.

Okay, this was ridiculous. You’d think, given her current résumé of being a sacrificial dead-ass virgin resurrected from Hell into a war between a pair of fallen angels and a real, live, honest-to-God demon, that the main thing on her mind would not be some guy. Then again, reality had gone wonky on her weeks ago, so could she really be surprised—

She wheeled around.

No one was there. Again. No one was moving in the house or outside on the scruffy grounds. Adrian, the other fallen angel, had gone up to sleep in the attic where he stayed. And Jim? Jim was on the second floor, doing REM recovery from his night of pneumatic sex.

“Damn it…”

Bracing her hands on either side of the bowl, she leaned into her arms. In spite of her rising paranoia, fear wasn’t responsible for her case of the paint mixers.

The urge to kill was.

And that was only a liiiiittle hyperbole. Because her half-naked, towel-wrapped savior had gotten those scratches on his body from a woman’s fingernails. And his mouth had been swollen not from getting coldcocked in a fight, but because he’d been kissing someone. A lot. And his walk-of-shame expression?

Well, that was on account of his clearly having banged someone for hours instead of doing his job. Which just made her furious. Angels responsible for making sure good prevailed over evil? In a war like this? Generally speaking, keeping their eye on the ball was a better idea than being with some whore for hours.

Or, God, maybe she was a nice woman. Who, like, cooked for him as well as gave him great blow jobs.

The more she thought about it, the angrier she got.

Did he have a girlfriend? Well, obviously … although maybe that was naive of her. Did men have girlfriends? College students did—but Jim was faaaaaar from one of those—