Fire Me Up
Page 17

"My name is Piotr. I am here to pleasure you."
I stared at the man. "I beg your pardon?"
"I am here to pleasure you. I will bring you many delights if you allow me."
Oh, great. I had a Slavic gigolo in my bed. I glanced at the clock. It was only 02:14 P.M. Could this day possibly get any worse?
"Don't believe it, Aisling. That's not a man. Doesn't smell like one."
I made a tentative sniff in Piotr's direction. Jim was right. He didn't smell like any man I'd ever met. He smelted smoky, as if he'd been standing around a bonfire. "Look, I don't know you, and I don't want you in my bed, and I certainly don't want you giving me any delights, so why don't you just get the many expletives deleted out of here and don't ever come back!"
Piotr drew a finger down my uninjured arm. "I will bring you the most erotic pleasure you have ever known, Aisling."
I jumped out of the bed, taking the sheet with me. "Right. That's it. You have three seconds to get the hell out of here, and then I'm calling hotel security. One!"
Piotr stood up slowly, allowing me to get a good long look at his attributes. Which, I had to admit, were worth admiring.
"Two!"
He smiled again and spread his hands wide in a gesture of obedience, "If you wish for me, all you need do is call."
I wrapped the sheet more securely around me, marched over to the door, and flung it open. "Three!" I shouted as I pointed out the door.
Piotr was gone.
I stood openmouthed by the door for a few seconds, then closed both before spinning around to face Jim.
"Where'd he go?"He made a thoughtful face. "Disappeared in a puff of smoke."
"He what?"
"Disappeared in a puff of smoke. You know, kind of like that Barbara Eden babe on Dream of Jeannie, only without the blond wig and wiggle hips."
I didn't believe Jim. Men—naked, aroused men— didn't just appear and disappear in a cloud of smoke. I searched the room, examining the side of the hotel immediately outside my open window (no ledge and a twelve-floor drop to the glass ceiling of one of the thermal pools) before finally conceding that maybe Jim was right after all.
"OK, so what sort of creature appears and disappears on smoke?" I asked the demon as we settled down in our respective beds.
"Lots. You're not asking the right question."
I peered over the edge of the bed to where Jim was flaked out on its blankies. "You know, you could just volunteer the information for once. I could do with a lot less aggravation in my life right now."
"I told you before, that's against the demon-demon lord rules. You have to ask the right question in order for me to answer."
I sighed and lay back down on the bed, irritably readjusting the sheets so they weren't twisted around me. Although my nightwear was not heavy—a pair of thin cotton sleeping shorts and tank top—I was hot and sweaty lying in bed, the air-conditioning unit having been deemed earlier in the evening more or less worthless. There was more of a breeze coming in from the open window than I had with the AC cranked up high. "I hate demon rules. You know that, right?"
"Yup."
"Good. So. What sort of a being shows up naked and wanting to play bed games and later disappears without a sign?"
"Would that be a male or a female being?"
I slapped both hands on the bed. "For heaven's sake, Jim—"
"Incubus or succubus, depending on the gender. Incubi are men, succubi are women. Unless you're gay, and then they're vice versa. I think. I'm not too sure. I haven't had a chat with a succubus in a long time, so I'm not hip with where they all are on the alternative-life style issues."
"Incubus?" I sat up and stared at the demon. "Incubus? The ... the ..." My hands waved wildly as I tried to think of a description of an incubus.
'The nudie boy toy spirits who come to women in the night and want to jump their bones? Yes. That sort of incubus."
"But they aren't real!" I sputtered, finally able to articulate again. "They're just a myth, aren't they?"
Jim shot me a knowing look. "Kind of like dragons and ghosts?"
I slumped against the headboard. "Good point. Incubus. I've never seen one before. It wasn't quite what I expected. He looked perfectly normal, and he certainly felt real."
"He was real, at least in that form he was. Incubi are dream lovers. They can turn to smoke, entering a room through the tiniest crack, then take a more substantial form. I've heard that some of them, the really old ones, can carry their mortal lovers away with them. A couple hundred years ago in the north of Italy, there was a rumor going around that women were being spirited off on clouds of dense smoke, never to be seen again."
"Good lord! What on earth did this one want with me?"
Jim sniggered.
"Get your mind out of the gutter. I know what he wanted. He almost put my eye out with his manly bits. I meant why me? I’ve never had an incubus visit me before. Do they hang around hotels and stuff?"
"Not that I know of."
"Huh." I mused on the question of why a spirit bent on engaging in sexual relations would pay me a visit, toyed with the idea that I was suddenly irresistible to men, but sadly discounted that theory. No one but the male wyverns seemed to find me anything but barely interesting, and that was because I evidently had some sort of genetic wyvern mate marker that made me look like hot stuff to them.
Some of them. Mostly just Drake, Although Gabriel seemed to like me ...
Despite the jet lag, it took me an hour to fall asleep again, even with the bedside lamp on to keep the monsters away. To my surprise, Drake didn't visit me in my dreams, as I had half hoped, half feared he would, but I did have one of the most erotic dreams of my life. It started with my dream version of Drake licking my ankles, slowly working his way up my legs to my thighs. Just as he gently parted my legs, I woke up.
To find it wasn't a dream after all.
"Gawk!" I squealed, the sight of a man's blond head lounging around my crotch area more than enough to leave me momentarily without the power of coherent speech. "What? Get off!"
"I am Gregory. I will bring you—"
I brought both knees up and kicked the man as hard as I could in his noogies. He grunted and rolled oft' the side of the bed, clutching his privates. I jumped to my feel right there on the bed and screamed at Jim, the bed springs squeaking as I did a little dance of fury, "Incubus! Incubus! Incubus! Jim, I command you to wake up!"