Blazed Page 2

  Jonathan was good for him, and maybe my third favourite person in the world because he was the embodiment of everything I loved about the city. He was a sweet Asian cartoon aficionado wrapped up in a suit, topped with purple tipped spikes and the smell of dirty business and cigarettes— diversity capped professionalism with a penchant for the unusual and a flagrant disregard for anyone with a shred of an orthodox lifestyle. He encapsulated the modest snobbery and paradoxical individuality I lived for. He was so liberal and yet so disciplined— nothing ever seemed to phase him. He was everything I envied in almost plush toy form, and he loved Daniel just the way he was. Even better.

  What strange company I kept. When you looked at the five of us— the dowdy billionaire's daughter, the relative supermodel, the mismatched Brokeback Mountain replicas and... Chris, it hardly seemed likely that we'd be friends, let alone that we'd be united by the one quirk that made us compatible...

  We were all nerdy by nature. Beyond the bar, Esme was a voice actress for numerous video games and cartoons, and had an obvious extensive knowledge of everything she'd starred in. Daniel and Jonathan were computer programmers, Jonathan a little less 'legitimately' so, and considered a Star Trek marathon to be a date night. Chris was a writer for an international nerd-based website and reviewed all manner of obscure media with one eye firmly on everything zombie.

  And me... well I was just the little nerd who could. I'd dabbled here and there, working in character design within the same company as Daniel, chasing comic conventions around the country with my sketches and occasionally bingeing on video games when the right one came along. But now I was the odd one out, the one with no ambition. I was happy working by the Dewey Decimal System and doodling in my lunch break, not looking to make it big, just to comfortably exist. Still, we had some interesting conversations about teaming up to create some kind of geeky monstrosity.

  A piercing whistle from the bar forced me to look up and search for Chris' fuzzy silhouette. The suppressed violence in his wave and grim expression meant only one thing.

  "Your card bounced again," he hissed at me when I approached. Really, this happened far more often than it ought to. I sighed and mouthed an apology, knowing that he resented how I wouldn't dip into my Tudor fortune. He understood why, but that didn't mean he agreed. The way he glared at me was a challenge to let my principles go just once to make sure he didn't remember getting home. That was our routine, and he was damned if that was going to change, even if just for one night.

  Dismissing him with a scowl, I stared into the meagre contents of my purse and debated just how much of my soul was hard wired into that credit card. Henry would know the minute I used it and that would be just one slip that led me into his own privately purchased sector of Hell. Was one night of inebriation worth it? Really?

  "Don't do it, don't jump." Esme's voice snuck up behind me in a whisper, knowing that using that credit card was like throwing myself off a jagged cliff face. Her eyes were bloodshot and shining with tears, a tell-tale sign that too much wine had made her ill, but somehow she was still austerely beautiful. She pulled the card from my purse and whined longingly; she too wished I'd indulge but was a little more accepting of my financial ethos.

  I tried to explain my empty bank account with a foolproof excuse; "We drink too much," which earned me a nod and a murmur of agreement.

  "I'll cover your rounds for the night if you do me a favour." I hated to admit it, but she had my attention riveted. I spent my life returning her favours, and with no pay day insight for another week, I'd be looking at seven more, at least. "I need a place to... hang out."

  "Again?"

  "Just for a few days. She's searching the area again, the woman just won't give up." I couldn't even begin to understand what Esme was going through. After running away from home and her abusive mother when she was fifteen, she'd made an impressive way up from the London gutters just by way of pure dumb luck. Even then, she had an irresistible, husky voice that turned the right heads. Now at twenty-one, just a year younger than me, she had this— her own speakeasy type establishment with a glass topped bar, war-time styled glass decanters lining the mirrored shelves, and deep seated red Chesterfield booths and armchairs circling the candle lit mahogany tables. It was her own romantic vision of perfection and she was in no hurry to share it with the woman who never stopped looking for her. Any news that she was in the area sent Esme into hiding and rightly so— the woman was a gargoyle who was only looking for a pay off.

  "Of course, 'misery loves company'." She half laughed and kissed my temple, waving a hand to one of the bartenders dressed in black braces and a bow tie to fit the theme. He smiled at her indulgently, far too blatantly displaying his soft spot for the self-made beauty, and put together our drink order without even really stopping to think about it. He might have been disgusting if his affection hadn't been so entirely justified.

  Then, for the first time, I saw something I'd never seen before. Esme whimpered an indignation and blushed as crimson as her hair, looking at something over my shoulder bashfully then coiling up into a spring of uncharacteristic nerves. When I opened my mouth, she shook her head severely and composed herself before stepping past me to address whatever issue had her crippled like a gawky teenager. I turned with her, mystified, and felt like I'd walked into a brick wall.

  I missed his name because I was too busy replicating her initial reaction, cringing in embarrassment at just the split second glimpse I caught of what definitely qualified as six foot three inches of screaming distraction. From behind my arm, I stole a better look of the man too beautiful to be human— a look I didn't feel worthy of stealing.

  Swept back dark hair framed a gorgeous bronze face that would have looked more at home on a god or an angel. Thick lashes edged eyes of the most intense emerald that shouldn't have been at all obvious in the dim light of Esme's, but all my attention centred on his lips. Lips that looked like they needed to be kissed and bitten— definitely bitten. He gave off the impression that he was a selfish lover who needed to be put in his place. I had to look away before I let my loosened inhibitions rule me and have me jumping up onto the bar, pouncing like a wolf-child.

  Too grateful for the silver tray that arrived on the glass bar, I refused the offer of table service from the smitten bartender and made a cautiously slow and unsteady way back to the three men. Just a small look at that man had knocked my mind back into sobriety, but my body didn't follow suit. I was jelly-legged, maybe more so for knowing I'd shared air with the demigod.

  "Stunning, isn't he?" Jonathan sighed dreamily and hooked an arm around Daniel's. "I wonder if he's gay. Bisexual would do." The idea of him being dragged into the gay entourage made both him slightly less attractive and me slightly pissy. With no good reason, I felt strangely territorial over the stranger and totally resistant to the idea of anyone else having him. That alone was a disaster waiting to happen, I felt exactly the same way about Hunter. Daniel caught the flicker of ire in my eye and pursed his lips. Whatever he thought, he didn't vocalise it. He probably knew it would cost him his life.

  I wrangled with my impulsive reaction to look back at the bar. The fact was I didn't feel worthy or deserving of the chance to stare disgracefully at a man so viscerally magnetic. No amount of connections to the wealth and popularity of the land could ever put me on par with him— he who exuded raw sex appeal and absolute recklessness. So I sought solace in seeking the bottom of my glass and swore blind that I wouldn't look up, knowing that there were another four rounds between me and having to face that bar again, by which time he would hopefully be gone.

  HE wasn't. I was fall-down-drunk the next time I reached the bar and used the excuse of being completely detached from my decency to shamelessly ogle him. Maybe it was the haze, but he looked even more edible than before. The low lights made it harder to distinguish any flaws that may have been hiding in that diamond of a face, so I made believe that he had none.

  His own level of intoxication brought t
o light new things I wouldn't have thought to notice before. He chatted animatedly with the bartender in a warm baritone purr that made all my nerves stand to attention. On occasion he laughed a satiny caress of a chuckle that was genuine and throaty, rumbling deep down from his stomach. I only wished I had a hint of his body to complete the mental image I was almost definitely taking to my dreams.

  "Wow," I breathed, biting my lip to contain a strangled giggle when I realised I'd said it out loud. I was aware of my cheeks being too rosy and eyes too bright, but stared blankly ahead as a denial that I'd spoken. But I heard him shift to face me, hyper aware of his gaze on me and the fact that his eyes were laughing.

  So I took the most brazenly illogical path by turning back to him and cocking my head. If I had his attention I would have been a fool not to try my luck, and I had needs— needs I hoped he'd volunteer himself to satisfy for just one night. Certain aspects of my life afforded a lazily relaxed attitude and I never went home alone, but then I never approached men so entirely out of my league. I usually knew how to pick my battles. Not tonight apparently.

  Enough raven hair had fallen loose of my drunkenly dishevelled chignon for me to look coyly from beneath it. Batted lashes and pouting lips aside, my approach was just sensual enough to not be embarrassing. I lifted my glass from the bar and locked eyes with him while I took small silent sips, hoping he might break the silence first.

  He leaned in towards my ear, surprisingly sweet breath breezing past my cheek, and purred, "you're on fire."

  Twisting just enough to make eye contact again, I arched a brow and said, "I haven't done anything yet."

  "No, you're literally on fire."

  The moment he spoke, the searing pain of being burnt registered in my elbow. Without noticing, I'd positioned myself over one of the mosaic glass candle holders and drooped slowly closer into the danger zone until the flame caught my shirt.

  In a flurry, the bartender had a damp towel over my arm and Esme had rushed me over to an ice bucket. It was obvious that she was trying not to laugh at my expense, but the rumble of titters around me suggested that I might have just unwittingly provided their entertainment for the evening. I laughed along with them and left early to change into something a little less singed, confident that my mishap would be old news in the morning and that at least I'd be memorable to the demigod as the woman who tried to win him by setting herself ablaze.

  I had no idea just how memorable.

  Two

  THE GREAT THING about the gargoyle sweeping the streets was that Esme attached herself to me like a barnacle. This invariably resulted in pleasant wake up calls with my morning coffee, hair almost professionally styled, clothes laid out and company to keep me sane. Hell, the woman even cleaned my glasses within an inch of their life when they looked a little murky from her perspective. By her way of thinking, my vision was imperative to my line of work, somewhere she insisted on following me to.

  That was the advantage of working in a book shop. Esme looked most like an immaculate marble sculpture when she was curled up in an armchair reading, and that really was the only option of entertainment in Double Booked. The Wi-Fi connection was atrocious, and the host computer nearly always in use by Mrs Reynolds, so it was read or work.

  Esme helped me with the work side of the day on occasion, pacing the aisles of books and noting where the gaps and single copies stood, and ably playing the part of sexy tea lady. Too afraid to leave the shop without me, she was definitely what my mother would have called a 'trooper' when it came to the listless silences. Fortunately, Mrs Reynolds appeared to be her biggest fan, so when the suggestion of piping music directly into the shop was made, she rallied around and had her son come in to hook up a speaker system.

  That son? Chris.

  "There," he announced jubilantly, spinning a screwdriver artfully around his fingers "consider yourselves Chinese pan-pipe music ready."

  Scoffing, Esme rifled through the sparse in-house CD collection until she found what she considered to be gold dust. "I think not, Christopher." She brandished a Frank Sinatra CD and ignored his groaned protest. "Hush, metalhead. You don't have to work here."

  "Neither do you," he snapped in response, childishly plugging his ears with his fingers. The clash of preferences between them had been known to get ugly— Esme stuck on forties jazz and Chris a dedicated rocker. My own tastes were a little more liberal and eclectic, though maybe not stretching as far as repetitive pan-pipes.

  I left them to argue over the music, armed with a trolley of books to re-home on the shelves in the art section, my packed lunch courtesy of Esme and a dull throbbing hangover. The further away I was from the debate, the better. They would duke it out, settle it over the toss of a coin, Chris would leave to go trolling on some internet communities and we'd listen to Sinatra anyway. Like Mrs Reynolds, I knew how to pick my battles where her son was involved.

  Even though I could hear it clearly, I tuned out the argument and worked one handed while I ate. When the battle was eventually won and Ol' Blue Eyes began to croon, I hummed along quietly and danced between the shelves, enjoying the peaceful tranquillity of my surroundings. The place others might call stuffy and boring was somewhat of a utopia for me, guarded and almost segregated from the bustling metropolis just streets away. It was like my own Shell Island stood in the middle of London— my very own peninsula accessible by foot but cut off from the world when the tide rolled in.

  It wasn't until I heard the swell of an MP3 player breaking the lilt of Mack The Knife that I remembered, realistically, how public my peninsula really was. I made out strains of muffled Fallout Boy and my feet stilled beneath me, sure that whoever was visiting wouldn't sweep me up into a swing dance when they saw me prancing. The other three voices in the shop silenced, so figuring their conversation hadn't been appropriate for public spaces— Mrs Reynolds was definitely a cougar and had the dirty mouth to back it up— I chastised them with an eye roll they wouldn't see and felt my gaze fix on one, or two, books in particular.

  Syncretic Sciences razzed at me from it's shelf, the way it had every workday for two years. My pet project had become a fixation and a challenge— one I didn't really care to defeat. I liked to chase the unobtainable but drop the tail when I got too close to catching it. I didn't know what my life would become if I actually achieved something, and that uncertainty made me keep a safe distance between me and my aspirations. I had, after all, seen how success could make a person ugly. Henry hadn't been a prestigious business man when I was born— I saw exactly how to do it and how I could replicate it, but like GI Joe said, 'knowing is half the battle'. I wasn't a fighter, I was a dreamer. So much so my mother often called me 'Sleepy Jean.'

  The buzz of Thnks Fr Th Mmrs got closer and had me chuckling to myself at the thought of monkeys in directors chairs. The buzz became a roar the moment it was next to me.

  "Hi, sorry." I tried not to audibly groan at having to associate with the customers. "Can you point me to the direction of the graphic novels?"

  "Right in front of me." I plastered on my 'good employee' smile and side-stepped to look at the owner of the voice.

  My brain stuttered to a complete halt. It felt like I'd walked right onto a Hollywood movie set and ended up face to face with the sexy bad boy in some corny rom-com. With his hair falling down to his temples and skimming the tops of his thick dark brows, he looked like a fucking poster boy— the kind-hearted rebel who never found the love he always craved. The kind of man school girls wrote their names with in a heart and swore blind they'd marry him. A walking wet-dream.

  Him. The man from Esme's.

  And he looked almost as surprised to see me. His face broke into a mind-numbing smile mid-examination of me and his weight shifted onto one leg. With no visual impairment, I could fully appreciate the finer details I'd not been able to see in the dimly lit bar with an astigmatism handicap.

  The slight surprise in his eyes made them wider and greener, almost inhumanly vivid in emerald
hue. He wasn't cleanly shaven like he had been the night before, and the light muzzle of dark prickles spread up to his perfectly sculpted high cheek bones. A small scar marred his Cupid's bow— maybe a souvenir from a drunken battle over a lovelorn woman— one small flaw in the face I'd considered a diamond.

  Wow. I was careful not to outwardly express that opinion again. It hadn't been until I locked eyes with him I realised just how much I'd wanted to run into him again and apologise for my less than verbose greeting and unimpressive display of pyrotechnics.

  "Well," I damn near flinched when he finally spoke, "that's a much better reaction than last night's self-harm." Not knowing what he meant, I forced focus back onto myself and realised that I was grinning like a fool. Not my customer service smile, something genuine and deceptively soul exposing. And probably manic and shit eating. He was one of those people who exuded joy, who you just had to smile around. Just like Hunter.

  "Sorry, it's not intentional. The little man running auto-pilot in my head decided that was the appropriate response to your pheromones." I cringed and mouthed 'what?!' at myself, blushing violently as I turned back to the shelf in self-defence. What the hell had possessed me to say something so obtuse? "So, any graphic novel in particular?"