Tempt Me by R. G. Alexander Page A

to embrace him, to bring him oblivion. One way or another.
    It wasn’t enough anymore. Not now. He slid his tongue along the roof of his mouth. Her taste filled his senses. The scent of her arousal lingered around him, keeping his cock rock hard and his mind filled with images of her body spread out beneath him.
    He’d felt more than lust when he touched her. And when she came . . . Gabriel had felt charged. Energized. As if he could take on anything. Even the man who appeared beside him, looking decidedly out of sorts.
    “Hey, Manny,” he teased, “have fun tonight?”
    Emmanuel shoved his hands in the pockets of his long trench coat and frowned. “Don’t call me that. And I could ask the same of you, couldn’t I? I didn’t bring you back here to cause a family feud by fiddling with Rousseau’s baby sister.”
    Gabriel smirked. “I know, I know. You’re on a very mysterious mission to be my own personal Peeping Tom. Do your bosses know what you do with your downtime? Or maybe you want to be the one doing the fiddling. Since I’m not sure what you are, I don’t know—can you even do that kind of thing?”
    “Smart-ass.” Emmanuel sounded agitated. “I’ll apologize if you want. I didn’t realize you would be . . . It won’t happen again.”
    “I can’t blame you.” Gabriel was no longer smiling. “I didn’t realize it, either.” And he would be wise to make sure it didn’t happen again. Though every inch of him apart from his brain rejected that thought. “She’s a force of nature, isn’t she?”
    “You don’t even know what you actually did to her. What you could do.”
    What he did to her? “What are you talking about now? I’ve done nothing to her.”
    Except make her angry. Make her come. And then leave her to deal with the uncomfortable fallout alone because he thought he saw something moving in the shadows.
    He was a piece of work.
    Emmanuel scuffed a pebble with his boot. “If you’d listened to me and talked to the Mambo about what you’ve been experiencing, you wouldn’t need to ask me that. I’m here to make sure you don’t lose your way. Your mother can help you.”
    Gabriel stopped down the dark side street that was the shortcut home. “This is bullshit. I don’t give a flying fuck what you are, but just what the hell is your purpose here? All you’ve done so far is make dire predictions and harass me.”
    “I’m trying to protect you from—”
    “Losing myself to the darkness,” Gabriel snarled. “So you keep saying. It’s nothing I haven’t heard before. But what you don’t understand is if there is a darkness coming for me, the last thing I want to do is bring my mother into this. Don’t you get it? You were alive once; you had a family. Don’t you fucking get it?”
    Gabriel remembered the stories Michelle had told him when they were young. The ghost child whose family had lived in the big white house a century before. Emmanuel’s memories of his beautiful sister. He should know all about protecting family.
    Gabriel scrubbed his face with his hands, feeling the stubble scrape his palms. “I’m not so blind that I can’t see I’ve caused her enough suffering. All of them. Can’t you just tell me what’s going on?”
    Emmanuel placed a hand on his shoulder. It wasn’t solid, but Gabriel sensed it like a cool, steady breeze. “You think I don’t understand? I do. It would be easier to just tell you everything. Gabe, I—” He stopped speaking suddenly, his body tensed. Alert. “I wasn’t expecting this. Maybe the powers that be would rather show than tell.”
    “What’s that supposed to mean? What powers that be?”
    “Check this fool out. Talkin’ to himself. Crazy, drunk, or just plain stupid; either way, you picked the wrong street tonight.”
    Gabriel eyed the group of five young toughs who were spreading out in front of him. Twentysomethings covered in tattoos and attitude, their aggressive posturing unmistakable.
    Also unmistakable was