Fire & Brimstone (Neighbor from Hell 8)

Chapter 13

“Do you ever stop talking, woman?” he snapped, wondering how it was humanly possible for one person to talk so God damn much.

Instead of getting insulted or bursting into tears like most women would, Rebecca simply pursed her lips up in thought while he laid there, wondering why he hadn’t left when she’d given him a chance.

“Probably not,” she admitted with a shrug as she lay there, absently tapping her fingertips against the back of his hand as he continued to provide light pressure against her stomach.

Despite the fact that he wanted to strangle her, his lips twitched.

“You should probably give it a try,” he said, absently noting that the annoying woman was a blanket hog.

“I have,” she said, sighing heavily as though her inability to stop talking somehow pained her.

God, she would fit so well in his family, he realized with something close to terror before he managed to push that horrifying thought aside and just focus on how soft her skin was since he couldn’t help but notice how pretty she was when she wasn’t purposely trying to piss him off.

“You didn’t answer my question,” she pointed out as he shifted more comfortably on his side, careful not to put any weight on his left hand.

“Yet, you keep asking,” he murmured softly while he watched as the small, lightly tanned hand came to rest on top of his.

“How else am I supposed to entertain myself?” she asked with a mischievous little smile.

“By sleeping?” he suggested, still wondering why he was here when he could be in his own bedroom, enjoying the only downtime that he usually allowed himself.

“I’m not really tired,” she admitted with a sigh, sounding bored while he lay there frowning, because he wasn’t tired either.

He was always fucking exhausted.

When he wasn’t at the restaurant, he was going over paperwork, trying to make the numbers work, trying to make schedules work, testing new recipes for the restaurant and reading everything that he could get his hands on about business, marketing and anything he could to make his business better. Everything in his life was about the Fire & Brimstone.

Absolutely everything.

No matter where he was, or what he was doing, he was focused on his business. It was the main reason that none of his relationships lasted more than a month and why his mother kept an extra fork by her side when he visited just in case she needed to discretely stab him beneath the table if it looked like he was reaching for his phone.

He hadn’t really used anything that he’d learned yet, but he would. He just wanted to make sure that everything was perfect, but in order to do that he needed to have a plan and that was going to take time.

“So?”

“So, what?” he asked, suddenly feeling uncomfortable about lying here when there was about a million other things that he should be doing.

“Why does everyone call you Lucifer?” she asked, shifting more comfortably against him. If it had been any other woman snuggling up next to him he would have just assumed that she wanted to be closer to him, but since this was the blanket hog, he knew that she was only trying to push him over so that she could hog the pillow.

“Because they don’t want to die,” he answered, refusing to move over since he was comfortable right where he was.

“So, you gave yourself that nickname?” she asked in a teasing tone that he refused to find adorable.

“No,” he said with the glare that he found most effective in shutting someone up.

Unfortunately for him, he was trying to use it on the only person in the world who could care less that he was seriously contemplating her death. Maybe he should gag her? he idly wondered as she shifted so that she could look at him during her interrogation.

“So, then how did you get it?” she asked, folding her arm beneath her head to get more comfortable.

Since it was obvious that she wasn’t going to give up until she got her answers, he decided that it was time to call it a night. Only thing was, he didn’t want to leave. For the first time since he could remember he wasn’t in a rush to get back to work. He didn’t want to go finish that article on time saving scheduling that he’d started this morning or test out the recipes that he’d been working on all week.

The only thing that he wanted to do was to lay here with the adorable demon, hog the pillow just to piss her off and pretend that the only job that he had was to keep his hand on her stomach and keep her safe.

*-*-*-*

“Are you going to tell me?” she asked as Lucifer shifted to mimic her position, but careful to keep his hand on her stomach.

“No,” he said flatly, but he didn’t have that homicidal glimmer in his eyes that he normally had when someone asked him about his nickname.

“Then what are we going to do to pass the time?” she asked as she shifted closer to him until their knees and elbows almost touched and she could see that scowl marring that handsome face of his.

Sighing, she reached up and gently ran the pad of her finger over the crease between his eyes, smoothing it away. “If you’re not going to tell me how you got your nickname then tell me something else about yourself,” she said, placing her hand beneath her head since he refused to let her have the whole pillow to herself.

“Like how many people I’ve killed?” he drawled lazily, but the scowl didn’t return, she noted with satisfaction.

“Thirty-five,” she said with a teasing smile, hoping to coax a smile from him, but the stubborn bastard refused to play along.

Still…

He answered so she took that as a win.

“Thirty-six,” he said and she would swear to the day that she died that the corner of his mouth started to pull up into a smile.

“What else you got?” she asked, happy to have something else to focus on for once instead of her own problems.

“What else do you want to know?” he asked, honestly surprising her because the man was not known for his conversational skills.

He was known more for glaring…shouting…and making grown men cry…and many other things that probably gave people nightmares.

“Well, since you won’t tell me how you got your nickname, maybe you can tell me about those men that hang out in the parking lot every day calling you over a hundred different combinations of bastard?” she asked, biting her lip as she waited impatiently for him to answer, because that was one question that she’d been dying to know for the last five years.

“Pass.”

“Can you do that?” she asked with a frown.

“Yes,” he answered with a mocking frown of his own, further surprising her, because she honestly never would have thought that he could be playful.

She was definitely learning a lot about him lately, she inwardly mused as she tried to come up with something else to talk about, but it was proving difficult now that the pain in her stomach was starting to subside and the timber of his voice was lulling her to sleep.

“Go to sleep,” he said softly as he removed his hand from her stomach and pulled the blanket up to her chin.

“I’m not tired,” she argued even as her eyes began to close, calling her a liar and making it difficult to wrangle more answers out of him.

Maybe just a few minutes of sleep, she thought as she reached over and placed a hand on his arm, hoping that he would stay just until she was asleep. She felt the slight hes

itation and then with a sigh he was pulling her closer and wrapping his arm back around her.

She considered telling him to keep his hand off her ass this time, but given the circumstances that seemed kind of rude. So, instead she stopped fighting sleep, prayed that Melanie didn’t come in here to get more photos for her Facebook page and let everything go, knowing that for once, she didn’t have anything to worry about.

Chapter 14

Thirty-Six Hours Later