Awaken the Devil Read online

  He wanted to forget the club, forget the dinner. He wanted to hike that sleek black skirt around her waist, push her against the wall, and get her out of his mind forever. The need was momentarily overwhelming. He hadn't even touched her, and he was so hard he ached just at the idea of it. He had to work so desperately to get a handle on his abruptly lost control that he grew light headed. He gripped the handle harder for support.

  When he failed to move or speak, she cocked her head to the side. "Are you okay?" Her voice was throaty and cautious.

  Good Lord, he needed a drink.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The club, called Calor Profundo, was buried deep in the least favorable section of Queens. The ancient brick building that housed it could have been a grocery store, a dry cleaners, or a chop shop. The only things marking it for what it was were the lopsided sign over the door and the thumping music pouring out. The ride over had not been the best one that Fielding had ever had. It was obvious that Chandler was mad at her and didn't want to go, yet for some reason felt compelled to anyway. Fielding couldn't imagine why he'd agreed to accompany her and then sat like a hostile lump in the seat beside her.

  His mood did not improve when he looked over the building, his lips tightening. For a moment she had forgotten he was a Duke. He'd probably never even been to Queens, let alone a place like Calor Profundo. She should have been tipped off by his glare at the theater that the night would not go well, but she had ignored him and pushed forward anyway. Well, not him so much as his expression. She had proven herself incapable over the last weeks of ignoring the man himself despite her most valiant efforts.

  Especially tonight—the way he looked in his superbly tailored, flat-front black slacks and his clearly finely woven cotton button up with its sharply creased collar. The top two buttons had been left undone allowing for just the slightest peek of wheat colored chest hair. She knew that asking him to unbutton it more so she could get a better look was not an option. The man looked like he had murder on his mind. Then she shuddered at the inappropriate analogy her mind had produced.

  Just inside the door, they were greeted by an incredibly beautiful woman who wore her plumpness well in her obscenely small and tight black skirt and four-inch leopard print heels that encouraged men to take advantage of her. Her liquid brown eyes were disdainful as she looked them over. The message that they did not belong and were not welcome could not have been more obvious if the senorita had shouted it from the rooftops.

  "Viene usted a Calor Profundo para bailar?" Fielding had the distinct impression that even if the senorita had spoken perfect English, she would not have done so just to see them at a disadvantage.

  But as it turned out Chandler was, as ever, full of surprises. "Sí. Pero también nos gustaria tener la cena y bebidas, por lo que necesitamos una mesa." His Spanish sounded flawless to Fielding despite his obvious English accent.

  The sultry greeter's smile was sudden and undeniably provocative. She looked Chandler up and down and smiled wider. She ran her red-painted fingernail along the inside of Chandler's shirt while Fielding watched gape-mouthed. He, on the other hand, was amused, one of his rare smiles appearing.

  "Aquí." She purred then led them through the crowd, hips swinging like a pendulum. "Beidas?" She requested, seating them at a table that could literally only be for two. And only if those two were very thin or very friendly.

  "Si, otra vez." His voice was smooth like silk as he slid into the seat. "Whiskey, un grande uno."

  The waitress turned a disgusted gaze on Fielding. "¿Qué?"" Guessing the woman was waiting for her order, or for her to leave so that she could slide into the booth with Chandler, Fielding shrugged. "Beer, I guess."

  The woman rolled her eyes, gave Chandler another baldly sexual once over and then swayed off to the kitchen. He laughed delightedly at her retreating J-Lo behind encased in its undeniably flattering spandex home.

  "You speak Spanish." The words sounded like an accusation so she added, "And your accent was really good, too. I'm impressed." And she was.

  She was also intensely uncomfortable with the close proximity of his body. The lengths of their bodies were, of a necessity, touching. She could smell his woodsy soap, and she didn't think it was her imagination that she could feel the heat of his skin through his clothes and hers.

  She wished desperately that she could move away from him before she made an idiot of herself, ruined everything that she had worked so hard to protect. But there was no bench on the other side of the table. Only a wall painted an intense red and adorned with a 3-D picture of Jesus watching over 3-D sheep. She was trapped.

  There was a brief flash of dimples and perfectly straight, white teeth—the obvious product of orthodontia. "Spanish, French, Portuguese, German, and a fair bit of Latin. My parents were quite insistent."

  "Again, impressed." An awkward silence fell, and Fielding looked around the room desperate for anything to look at besides him or Jesus, neither of which she felt particularly comfortable facing at that moment.

  She had been right. No one that she knew would ever have set foot in this place. All of the sophistication that they valued so much had been stripped away leaving only the most primitive state of every activity there. Those fighting were doing so with fervor, those dancing did so with abandon, and those loving were uncomfortably intimate, heedless of anyone else's eyes on them.

  The music was thumping, elemental and undeniably erotic. Those who intended to limit the night's activities to just dancing did so with an easy sexuality and lack of self-consciousness that she could never hope to achieve even with her comfort in her own skin. This was something different, a passion she didn't have. Both the men and the women were almost painfully beautiful, dark and sultry. She could not help but be uncomfortable just watching such blatant eroticism, especially when she was practically sitting in Chandler's lap.

  Desperate for anything to break her rising tension, she tried again for conversation. "I don't speak a word of Spanish. What does Calor Profundo mean?"

  He leaned in to avoid shouting, and she could feel the tickle of his breath against her neck. It took amazing force of will to prevent her eyes from fluttering closed. "It means 'deep heat,' Fielding. What sort of place have you taken me to?"

  She could hear the dry amusement that he sometimes exhibited tinting his voice. His mood had apparently improved no doubt in large part to the attentions of Senorita Spandex. The humor fell short for her. Both words, from his mouth hot against her neck, brought back with violence the kinds of things she was trying to avoid thinking about when it came to him. Deep heat indeed.

  A flair of warmth grew in her belly and traveled rapidly downward. She forced herself to breathe deeply. Now was not the time to lose herself in fantasies of activities she longed to engage in with Chandler that might be both hot and deep. Now was the time to work. "I heard two guys talking about it on the subway. How was I supposed to know?"

  "Relax, Fielding. I like it. I've been to Cuba you know."

  A man, slick with sweat, bulging with muscles and wearing only low-slung jeans and a large gold necklace brought the drinks to the table. His appraisal of Fielding was as frank and appraising as Senorita Spandex's had been of Chandler. Apparently his opinion was just as positive since he winked at her before sauntering away.

  Chandler downed his drink in one swallow and signaled for another. She had never seen him consume so much as a cup of coffee before and was slightly alarmed. Then again, he didn't look at all like it had affected him when he turned back to face her. "The people there were so…" He seemed to search for the right word. "Unrestrained. In Cuba I mean. They dance and sing and live like they're breathing in the essence of the world in every breath."

  She wondered how someone like him, so naturally restrained, had stood it. "That sounds lovely and scary."

  Chandler stared at her. Her words had so clearly described how he had felt about Havana that he was momentarily struck dumb. It had been both lovely and scary
. He had been both frightened and deeply envious of the obvious depths of everyone's emotions. The dichotomy had eventually chased him away. He had simply been unable to handle their intensity. Not only was he deeply repressed as a general rule, he was also deeply English. The combination had been lethal to a comfortable life in Havana.

  Suddenly, he could feel the warm buzz of the whiskey start to hit him. The very inherent repression that had chased him out of Cuba was the same that had borne his love/hate relationship with alcohol. Whiskey in particular.

  On the plus side, it dulled both his senses and his emotions. And with Fielding beside him looking so delectably shaggable that seemed like a necessity. He always appreciated a little extra edge in his quest to never feel a single emotion ever again.

  On the other hand, however, alcohol, especially whiskey, also made him ridiculously talkative. With a few glasses in him, he would chat up a complete stranger and likely never remember the bulk of what he'd said. In the end, he had decided that being chatty was more detrimental than being a rock was beneficial. He rarely drank.

  But tonight, he certainly planned to do plenty of it. He could not imagine what he could say to her that could be in any way worse than reaching under the table and allowing his fingers to travel up that filmy skirt the way that they were itching to. He slammed his second glass with something akin to violence, trying to kill the image of how silky her inner thigh would feel under his fingers, how easy it would be to breach the barrier of her panties and reach for something warmer still. He signaled their Herculean waiter for another.

  "What were you doing in Cuba?" She had to lean in close to be heard, and he wondered what she would do if he turned his head so that their mouths were touching. Would she open up for him and let him taste her? He groaned. This whiskey was not working nearly fast enough.

  "To dance of course. They dance the same way they live, like it was born in their souls." He realized that he sounded like some half-cocked poet so he knew at least some of the liquor had taken effect.

  A thoughtful frown caused wrinkles to mar her little nose, and an absurd laugh bubbled inside him, but he managed to squelch it.

  "You and I. That's the way that we tap," she said. "Like it was inside us all along just waiting to get out."

  She was right of course. It was why he enjoyed dancing with her. She felt the moves as he did, as instinctive as breathing. "I ran away when I was seventeen and joined the line of a terrible folly in Piccadilly." He admitted suddenly.

  As opposed to what he might have expected, she seemed to find his dreadful admission amusing. "Are you serious?" There was a husky laugh in the question.

  "Yes. It was truly hideous, too. It was the first theater that I came upon after springing myself from Eton."

  "You just ran away one day?"

  Actually the plan had been almost a year in the making. The year that his parents refused to let him dance anymore. Suddenly fearing that he had gone homosexual and would not produce the obligatory heir, or at the very least that his prancing around was making them look bad in front of their mates, they drew the line.

  No more dancing.

  He was the heir apparent. He would be the Duke some day, and he had to start acting like one. Dukes didn't dance, at least not like that.

  "I took the train to London, only about thirty miles, and lived there for six months under the name Everett. Until my parent's found me and dragged me back to Herefordshire."

  "Everett?"

  "My middle name and also the Christian name of the fourth Duke of Moreland. Did I ever mention that I'm the thirteenth Duke of Moreland? No, I expect not." He didn't allow her to answer. Of course he hadn't mentioned it. He would never have admitted such a thing without at least three whiskeys under his belt. "What utter rot. Duke of Moreland. Doesn't mean one bloody thing."

  She smiled slightly. He loved the curve of her lips. Sweet. She was sweet like crystallized sugar—meant to be savored, meant to be licked off one's lips with a slow lazy tongue. "Nothing at all?"

  He snapped back to the comment he had made and back from the near trance he'd fallen into at the thought of her lips. He ought to go. He really ought to. She was dangerous, terribly dangerous. And Lord knew that he was dangerous to her. She…she could kill him in a million ways if he let her. And her…well, there would only be one way that he would end up killing her, but it would be enough. Just ask Helena, Elizabeth, Dora, and Lisa. It would be enough.

  Chandler felt suddenly like throwing up. The music made it feel like his head was going to cave in. He pressed the palms of his hands against his eyes and struggled for normalcy. He tried to remember her question. Did it mean anything?

  "It means I was raised from birth with every hope of being a stiff, pretentious ass. It also means that if a great many people died all at once I would be king."

  Her throaty laugh was like fingers on the base of his spine, and he shivered. "So what did your parents do when they got you back?"

  "What did they do? Nothing at all. Having left my entire upbringing to nannies and boarding schools, they lacked even the most basic capability to parent. They just gave me the requisite speech in Noblesse Obligée and told me that even if I was a homosexual, which they assumed every man who dances must be, I was still required to produce the fourteenth Duke of Moreland."

  Then they had spent the next six months before graduation staring at him like they had just realized that they had never known him at all. It had been no surprise to him. Even at seventeen, he had known that everyone who looked at him either looked right past or saw things that weren't really there.

  For a while, he had maintained the dream that someday someone would look at him and really see. But then there was Helena, and he had understood with a kind of sick clarity that dreams were for children and the best thing of all was not to be seen.

  He looked at the dance floor and thought he would have liked to ask her to dance, but he felt distinctly, even after whiskey number three, that he could not touch Fielding, and he certainly couldn't dance with her. At least not in any way that would allow their bodies to touch like the salsa would. It was simply an impossibility.

  He was saved from having to debate the matter anymore by the arrival of a young man in dark jeans and a tight black sweater. He dimpled at Fielding, and Chandler forced down a sharp stab of irritation.

  "¿Queires bailar?" Although the boy addressed Fielding, she turned questioning eyes to him. Of course she didn't understand him.

  "He wants to know if you want to dance. Well, of course you want to dance. I know what you are." She gave him another hesitant glance then allowed the boy to take her hand and lead her out to the floor.

  Although there was clearly a language barrier, Fielding was a fine dancer and a fast learner. She was all smiles, charming her partner, probably because she was so pleased to be learning new moves. They were moves just like these that he himself had learned in Havana and that Armand was using in his stupid special number that he favored so much. Chandler didn't feel the affinity for the number, ironically called Profundo, that Armand did, but if he was going to do it, he was going to do it right.

  By the end of the song, she had mastered the mechanics of the moves, but she lacked the level of sensuality achieved by her fellow dancers. Alas, wait until she saw Armand's dance. She would start to feel that she was nearly as repressed as he was.

  When the boy led her back to the table with his hand on the small of her back, Chandler stood as a reflex. A lady was returning to the table, and he had been raised, after all, to have exceedingly good manners. But instead of sitting, she excused herself and headed for the bathroom.

  He watched her cross the floor the fabric of her skirt allowing him to see just how much of her behind he would have been able to fit in each hand if she just happened to be sitting spread eagle on his lap and kissing him mindless. The whiskey haze allowed him to merely sigh and shake his head rather than having to call on four decades of carefully cultivated control to av
oid following her to see how secluded the dark bathroom hallway was.

  "She's not what you think she is."

  It took him a moment to realize that the words were directed at him. He turned to the voice. "Pardon me?"

  "Fielding. She's not what you think she is." The man on the bar stool looked vaguely familiar and heavily inebriated.

  Then he realized that as a cap to the irony-heavy evening, this was the man they had come all the way to Queens to avoid. "You're the man from the restaurant."

  "And so are you so that makes at least twice that you've gone out with her, but it's not going to turn out the way you think it will."

  He'd had just enough whiskey to be mildly amused by the wanker. "And how did I think it would turn out exactly?"

  "Oh, come on man, she looks like sex on two legs. And the way she moves, seriously dude, I thought I'd hit the jackpot. But it's just an illusion, man. I've had Guinness that's hotter than her. I'm telling you, she's freaking frigid."

  "Perhaps she was not the problem?" His suggestion was all politeness.

  Dale the stockbroker was not too drunk to miss the insult, just too drunk to do anything about it. "The problem is that Fielding cares about one thing. I would have gotten more action from her if I was a freaking tap shoe. The only thing she's got any passion for is Gilbert and freaking Sullivan."

  He took another shot of whatever he favored, the smell suggested tequila, and leaned forward. "Take my advice while you still can, Mr.…what's your name anyway?"

  Chandler smiled slightly. "Gilbert Sullivan." He turned on his heel and headed back to the table for number four and maybe number five if it came quickly enough.

  Fielding found herself sharing the filthy two-stalled restroom with three other women. Two scantily clad middle-aged women with hair that defied gravity and imagination and a glaring Long Islander who stood out even more than she did. Her white-blonde hair was Red Door cut and styled, and her fingernails and absurdly bared toenails were identically manicured French.