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  The Devil You Want

  Sam Cheever

  Book five in the Dancin’ With the Devil series.

  Astra Q. Phelps gave her boyfriend a magic hickey. Usually not a world-changing issue. But her boyfriend is king of the Royal Devils. And Royals have always thought that only males could mark their mates. So how did she do it? Even Astra doesn’t know. That’s the first of her problems.

  Now somebody’s trying to kill the naturally curious Astra, which is always a problem.

  Thirdly, there’s Slayer. He’s shown up on Astra’s turf and wants her to hire him. Given their undeniable sexual chemistry, that’s probably not going to go over well with her boyfriend. Not to mention Slayer’s got some baggage that’s gonna come back to bite Astra big time.

  Add in the nearly constant sexual need caused by her Settling and you have a whole lot of stuff for Astra Q. Phelps to handle. But, as you probably know by now, she’s definitely up to the challenge.

  Ellora’s Cave Publishing

  www.ellorascave.com

  The Devil You Want

  ISBN 9781419939242

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  The Devil You Want Copyright © 2012 Sam Cheever

  Edited by Shannon Combs

  Cover design by Fiona Jayde

  Photos: Mark Stout, Artix Studio/Shutterstock.com

  Electronic book publication April 2012

  The terms Romantica® and Quickies® are registered trademarks of Ellora’s Cave Publishing.

  With the exception of quotes used in reviews, this book may not be reproduced or used in whole or in part by any means existing without written permission from the publisher, Ellora’s Cave Publishing, Inc.® 1056 Home Avenue, Akron OH 44310-3502.

  Warning: The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. No part of this book may be scanned, uploaded or distributed via the Internet or any other means, electronic or print, without the publisher’s permission. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to 5 years in federal prison and a fine of $250,000. (http://www.fbi.gov/ipr/). Please purchase only authorized electronic or print editions and do not participate in or encourage the electronic piracy of copyrighted material. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is purely coincidental. The characters are productions of the author’s imagination and used fictitiously.

  The publisher and author(s) acknowledge the trademark status and trademark ownership of all trademarks, service marks and word marks mentioned in this book.

  The publisher does not have any control over, and does not assume any responsibility for, author or third-party websites or their content.

  The Devil You Want

  Sam Cheever

  The Devil You Know

  The Devil you know may break your heart, be cold and without soul.

  But acquaintance makes the Devil you know, more friend than deadly foe.

  The Devil you know might stain your soul, its motives ne’r do well.

  But comfort lies with the Devil you know, tho’ it damn your soul to Hell.

  The Devil You Want

  The Devil you want is sometimes slow, to recognize your heart.

  But the Devil you want is sure to know, that he can tear your world apart.

  The Devil you want can warm your bed, and promise he will stay.

  But the Devil you want may turn your head, then push your love away.

  Prologue

  The Devil you want may stoke your fire, and set your loins ablaze.

  The Devil you want could love inspire, or lives and continents raze.

  My name is Astra Q. Phelps. Don’t ask me what the Q stands for because that little piece of info will go with me to the crematorium. I’ve had all printed documentation of the name destroyed and, though a lot of my enemies have tried to dig it out, no one will ever know what it stands for. A girl has to have some secrets. Especially when the truth would cause her some serious embarrassment.

  I run a business called the Angel Network, which is the only devil- and demon-locating and -destroying business in the universe. In other words, I kick serious evil butt for a living. I am a Tweener. What exactly is a Tweener you ask? A Tweener is a non-human. We have neither wings nor horns, but generally have both angel and devil in our family forests. Which is probably why we enjoy a higher sensitivity to spectral influence than regular human people.

  Recently, the Celestial Army has been keeping me pretty busy saving the world. Over and over and over and…well, you get what I’m saying. The human world just has trouble staying saved.

  It’s been a busy and confusing time. But it’s about to get much worse.

  My twenty-fifth birthday is just a few months away.

  The thing about that twenty-fifth birthday is…well…for Tweeners it’s kind of make-or-break time. It’s called our Settling and it’s the culmination of our growth period. The time when we become what we will be in life. It’s also the time when the dark side of our nature has the greatest pull.

  It is on our twenty-fifth birthday that we decide which way we’re gonna go. Good or bad. Black or white. Gray usually isn’t an option. And outside influences have a lot to do with the outcome. In my case, my influence pool is decidedly murky, given the fact that I hang out a lot with devils.

  Lately, my life has taken a turn toward the complex. Dialle, King of the Royal Devils on Earth and my steady boyfriend, is really mad at me because I marked him with a Daemon hickey.

  I guess females aren’t supposed to be able to mark males.

  How would I know that? Nobody told me that little piece of devil trivia, thank you very much. And apparently it isn’t true anyway…since I did manage to put that cute little power mark on his sexy throat.

  But now he’s all embarrassed and mad and threatened in a male way, and I’m dancing the romance two-step trying to win back his love.

  Bleurgh!

  To make things even more complex, somebody’s trying really hard to kill me. And they’re doing a bang up job of it too. Staying alive is becoming increasingly difficult.

  And my longtime friend and partner Emo is in celestial anger management, dealing with his own Settling.

  Forget doing my job slaying demons.

  The one place I can go for help isn’t really a good option at all, since the helpful and sexy Slayer represents mucho temptation to me and my stupid Settling.

  Any minute now my slut-monkey side might just take him up on one of those offers he likes to present during a moment of weakness.

  My weakness…not his.

  So anyway, those are the high points of my life at the moment.

  Ugly, huh?

  What? Oh, you wanted the dirty details? Well, all right, it’s your brain cells that are at risk. Not mine.

  Here we go…

  Chapter One

  Flick the Dick

  Our heroine has gone too far, and done the dirty deed.

  The devil got a pretty mark, and now he’s very teed.

  I was having trouble concentrating on work. All I could think about was how pissed Dialle was. Just because I gave him that one little hickey. Come on…it was a moment of passion. He should feel flattered that I got that carried away, right?

  Not.

  All right, I could admit it had made him kind of a laughingstock in the Royal Court. But it had been even worse for me. I’d noticed the lower devils were giving me a wider berth, their beady eyes filled with terror when they looked at me.

  That was okay.

  But the Roya
ls…well…let’s just say they didn’t like me before I did the impossible and marked Dialle.

  Now they really hated me.

  I could feel the hate vibrating through the court halls and throbbing against my brain. The Royals couldn’t go after me directly because of Dialle, but the number of “accidents” and “near accidents” had escalated to the point where I walked around with a power bubble wrapped around me whenever I visited the court.

  Apparently, I’d really rocked their world. For good or bad depended on your perspective. The females in the Devil Court, seeing that a female could mark a male, were energized by Dialle’s little hickey. Even if nobody knew how I did it, including me. And they wanted some of that power for themselves.

  The males were understandably displeased about the turn of events. The power base had definitely shifted out from under them.

  What can I say? It sucketh to be them.

  But there was nothing I could do about all that at the moment. So I shook my head, pushing the problem out of my mind, and forced myself to focus on the job at hand. Saving my sagging business. With my best friend and partner Emo in celestial counseling for the foreseeable future, I was short a demon slayer and my business was starting to suffer.

  There were just too many demons running around terrorizing people and not enough time in the day for me to handle them all. Especially given the fact that dealing with my Settling was becoming an almost full-time task.

  I’d been toying with the idea of hiring my neighbors the werewolves to help me on a contract basis.

  Bob Gleason and Ralph Peters owned a business called Werever…Whatever, which specialized in shapeshifter justice. In other words, they were thugs for hire for the magical world, a perfect resume for what I needed.

  The televisual on my desk bleeped and a fat face with a bald head blinked onto my screen. “Mx. Phelps?”

  “That’s me.”

  “My name is Arch Magnus. I need your help with a dragon.”

  I swallowed hard. My track record with dragons wasn’t great. I tended to make friends and allies with them rather than defeat them.

  Or else they ate my car.

  “What type of dragon is it?”

  “A green. I’ve never seen a green dragon around here before. But I have one living in my garage. Actually more than one.”

  I frowned, thinking about the green dragons I’d seen recently. “Must be a frunkin’ big garage.”

  “It is. I repair air vehicles and will have several of them in there at any given time.” The man frowned. “There were five vehicles up on blocks when the dragons moved in. I don’t know what’s left of them. I’ve heard a lot of crunching and smashing in there.”

  I sighed. I’d need to get help with this particular assignment. “Give me your location and I’ll come out.”

  “Oh thank Him! I was afraid you’d refuse to help.”

  That little statement should have been all the warning I needed. But in my defense, I was distracted that morning.

  On my best days my life is complex.

  I punched his coordinates into the televisual and followed up with some personal information and as much as he could tell me about his dragon problem. Then I headed toward the Red Knight, my sleek and sexy air vehicle.

  I’d get the lay of the land and then decide whom I needed to call in to help.

  An hour later I was hovering over the building in question. The windows were all broken out and scorch marks painted the walls around them. The area around the building was thick with debris and all of the vegetation within a half mile of the place was cooked.

  A cloud of gray smoke hovered over a roof that looked like somebody’d stuck a large pole into it from inside.

  Interesting.

  As the Red Knight slid silently overhead, fire sprayed from three of the windows at once, on three different walls.

  Alrighty then. We had the potential for lots of dragons inside.

  Goody.

  I opened my mouth to have the televisual call Emo and then closed it, remembering. “Shit!”

  I thought about it for a moment and then said, “Werever…Whatever.”

  A series of bleeps ended with Bob Gleason’s pleasant face appearing on the screen. “Hey, Astra.”

  “Bob. Can you and Ralph help me with an extraction and extermination?”

  “Sure. We have an opening next week. Will Thursday at two work?”

  I just sat there blinking.

  “Astra?”

  A column of fire rose up in front of my view port and the Knight surged upward, out of range. I looked down and saw a massive green head with beady red eyes and several rows of deadly teeth. Smoke streamed from the dragon’s nostrils in thick ribbons.

  “Yeah. I don’t think that’s gonna work. Thanks anyway. End call.”

  The televisual went black.

  I shuffled my mental drawers. Dialle, I need you. He materialized beneath me on the seat almost before I finished the thought. In the blink of an eye I went from piloting my air vehicle on a dangerous mission to being a lap dance for my favorite sexy devil.

  “Hello, my love.” His hot lips found the side of my neck and branded me there, sending pleasure spiraling through me.

  Immediately my Settling kicked in and my body tightened with need. His hands skimmed the quivering skin of my belly, sliding down to the moist vee between my thighs. I moaned, opening my legs like a space harlot to give him ready access.

  Somewhere in the back of my mind my responsible side was screaming at me to stay on task. But my slut-monkey side coldcocked the stupid prig into silence and embraced the moment…as well as the randy devil whose sexy mouth had followed the open neckline of my businesslike shirt and was nuzzling aside my lacy bra.

  Heat rolled over me in waves. Stars sparked behind my closed eyelids as the blood surged through my body, propelled toward my sexual hot spots by a wildly beating heart.

  My mind all but shut down as Dialle tugged my snug black slacks down my hips and slid a long, thick finger between the moist folds of my sex.

  “Oh god, Dialle, yes, right there.” He slid the finger deep inside my body. “And there, oh yeah, that’s frunkin’ perfect.”

  Beneath my writhing buttocks I felt the long, impossibly hard ridge of his shaft. He was wearing his usual outfit of form-fitting black leather pants and filmy white shirt, unbuttoned halfway down his chest. I loved those shirts because nothing stood between me and his heated skin. I skimmed my hand over smooth, golden pecs and tweaked a small, brown nipple.

  Sliding my hand down his hard torso, I slipped it across his flat belly and past the waistband of his leather pants. The fat head of his thick cock was just under the band of soft leather. My fingers closed over it and pushed past the barrier of buttery leather to enclose it in my fist.

  He groaned and scooted down in the seat to allow me better access. I happily matched the pace of his hand on my body, bringing a growl from deep in his throat as his pleasure built with mine.

  Dialle’s finger increased its rhythm inside my channel and my muscles clenched around it, bathing his hand in warm cream. His mouth closed over my nipple, covering the stiff black lace of my bra. Heat infused my tingling flesh as he bit down around the blush-colored skin that was barely visible through the lace.

  Pain, sharp and delicious, shot through me and my heat level surged upward immediately. My back arched under a wave of pleasure. Dialle rubbed my throbbing clit with his thumb as he finger-fucked me with increasing speed and covered the tear-shaped mark on my throat with his hot mouth. Sucking my hickey hard, he sent arrows of delight spearing through me. My toes curled, my mind melted and my limbs stiffened as delicious release rolled over me, bringing a scream of pleasure from my throat. Heat infused my face and stars burst before my eyes as I went over. I murmured his name as his combined ministrations made my body quiver under one wave of pleasure after another.

  Before my body stopped throbbing, Dialle was pulling away from me. His power tingl
ed against my skin as he brought it forward. “I have to go.”

  My mind was still muzzy with residual lust, my eyes lidded. I tried to grab his hand. “Wait, what? I need your help.”

  He kissed me on the end of my nose. “I can’t stay. I have dignitaries from several dimensions meeting in my office in five minutes.”

  Desperate, I reached toward his neck, intending to rub a finger over his new daemon hickey. A tiny spark of power pulsed into that hickey would send him into paroxysms of lust. He’d be helpless against it, as I was against the one he gave me.

  Dialle grabbed my hand and something cold and dark entered his pretty black eyes. “Don’t!” And then he was gone.

  I lay back on the leather seat, which still retained his incredible heat and scent. My body was all melty and soft, but my heart felt as if it had a small fracture in it, and my mind still crackled with problems I needed to solve.

  Dialle had been like that since I’d given him the mark. He was really pissed and he was treating me like an obligation he had to fulfill. When my body craved sex, he gave it to me. Sometimes he took his own pleasure. Sometimes he didn’t. But he was always there and gone with minimal interaction.

  It was the ultimate dichotomy. In the midst of blazing heat and fire he was freezing me out.

  Sighing, I pushed myself upright and straightened my clothes. Looking out of the view port toward the building below, I saw a smaller green head peering out the window at me. As I watched, a second small head emerged. Both dragons turned their gazes upward, staring at the Knight with curious red eyes. The dying sun sparked in the bright gazes and smoke puffed from their tiny snouts.

  My heart sank. “Frunk me,” I murmured. “It’s a flippin’ nest. I can’t extinguish a bunch of babies.” I dropped my head into my hands and whimpered. I would have to find a way to move them out without hurting any of them.