Sheer Cupidity: A Standalone Cupidity Romance (Heart Hassle Book 5)

BELREN

I couldn’t touch her.

I was so sure that it would happen again—whatever it exactly is. When my hand touched her leg, it was like a memory. A manifestation of life. I was so close to becoming what I used to be, I could almost taste it. There’s something about her that makes me feel alive. And for a damn ghost, that feeling is dangerously addictive.

What is it about her?

I may not taste life, but I can taste the bitter disappointment that I wasn’t able to touch her again.

My hand went through hers. I felt absolutely nothing.

With a dark scowl, I stalk up the street, barely sparing a glance at the fae I pass by. This island is nothing special. Just another metropolis stuffed into a stone city. I walk off the road, past the storied homes and locked shops, drawn toward the outcropping of bedrock stacked above a grassy knoll.

The lined rock formation hitches up like a nature-made fence, and when I get past it, I see exactly why I was drawn in this direction. A fae burial site lies just ahead, with a few empty pyres erected, making up three points of a triangle. In the center, a massive slab of gray rock stands as high as four fae, one on top of the other.

As I get closer, I see that names of the dead have been engraved into the rock, of all the fae who must’ve died and were burned and then buried here, their smoke released to the skies and their ashes sunk into the ground.

Of course I’m drawn to another deathplace, even if it’s not mine. Even from here, I can feel exactly where my own deathplace is. I could return to it with my eyes closed, because it still calls to me.

I stop in front of the engraved stone, eyes skimming over the chiseled letters. With as many names as there are on that rock, there’s surprisingly very few ghosts hovering around. As I walk past them, not one of them looks in my direction. “Nice night for haunting, isn’t it?” I ask a male that floats by.

He doesn’t answer, though I do notice that his form seems more faded than mine. Actually, now that I’m really paying attention, all of the ghosts are duller and dimmer than I am. I practically glow in comparison. I can’t help but think that it has something to do with Lex.

Truly, I thought tonight I was going to be able to do more than simply touch her hand. Turns out, I couldn’t even do that.

The way she sat on the bed, her white nightgown luminous in the night, made her look like an angel rather than a cupid. Her eyes were so wide with timid nervousness, the race of her pulse thrumming along her neck…yet she swayed toward me and not away. I don’t even think she realized that she did it. Or that her gaze kept flicking down to my lips, as if that’s where she truly wanted us to touch.

Little did she know, I would’ve done far more than just kiss her.

Glaring down at my hands, I’m filled with resentment. Useless fucking ghost body. With a sigh, I sit down next to the stone, staring at the empty pyres, at the ghosts who meander around.

Idly, I wonder if the rebellion that everyone talks about had anything to do with me. Maybe it did. Although, I’m not dressed in armor. So maybe I just had a heart attack over that island and dropped down to the ground like a tossed rock. I’ll probably never know, but at least I was able to leave Ghost Island. I was fading there, in more ways than one.

Lex is my lifeline.

If I can’t touch her, then I can at least help her on her mission. But I worry that even that is going to be denied to me. Every day, I’ve been feeling the pull of my deathplace just a little bit more. The seer told us to search the islands where the hearth hobs live, and that’s where we’re going, but the distance has begun to strain.

I don’t want to tell Lex. She’s finally relaxed a little bit about the topic, and I don’t want to put that worry back in her eyes. I know she’ll insist that she bring me back, and that island is the last place I want to be. For the death of me, I can’t imagine why she lets me hang around her, but the last thing I want to do is remind her of my predicament. There’s a very real possibility that I’ll get yanked back, but I’m trying my damnedest not to let that happen.

Lost in my thoughts, I stay at the burial site for much longer than I anticipated.

By the time I stop brooding, I realize the sun is sprouting from the sky’s dark soil. Time to return. It doesn’t take me long to walk back into the city, where the laborers and merchants are already waking up to start their day. The inn is still relatively quiet, so I don’t even have to float through anyone, which is a win.

Yet when I make it to Lex’s room, I walk right in, only to find that it’s empty.

My head swivels around, but there’s absolutely nowhere my cupid could be hiding out of sight. The room is too small, and I realize with a sinking dread that her bow and arrow is gone, and the bed is already made up.

I stand there in shock. Did she leave?

But why? She doesn’t seem the type to just up and walk off without saying something.

Then again…maybe I wasn’t reading her correctly earlier when I tried to touch her. I knew she’d been avoiding the topic ever since the seer’s house, but I chalked it up to her innocent shyness. Yet maybe I had it all wrong. Perhaps I was seeing things as I was willfully misinterpreting them.

I scared her off.

A string of curses unravels from my mouth, just as dread and guilt fills me.

If I were a good ghost, I’d respect the fact that she left willfully. And I know without a doubt that she did, in fact, leave of her own accord, because she made the godsdamned bed. Who does that in an inn?

Her. Every time.

With a scowl, I turn on my heel and stalk out of the room, anger darkening my vision. I don’t care that she left. She’s my neurotic cupid, and I’m not going to just let her walk away.

I snarl at the yawning people downstairs who stumble into me before I make it back outside. The sky is already changing from light gray to a soft blue, and my eyes squint in all directions as I try to catch sight of her, but there’s nothing.

Yet just like I intuitively know where my deathplace is, I also get a certain pull toward her. Maybe it’s just my muck, but I close my eyes, focusing past my taut worry, and feel for her.

There.

Like a tug in my gut, it hooks me on a line. As soon as I latch onto the direction I need to go, I stride down the street, letting instinct guide me. My steps are so determined that the soles of my boots don’t even dare to go through the ground.

Down the road I go, cutting through the gathering crowd, swooping right past them like an irrational wind. And then, I see her.

Her wings are tucked tight against her back, and for once, her pink hair isn’t pulled back tight, but loose around her shoulders, tangled with the feathered ends of her arrows strung against her back. From this angle, I have a delectable view of her ass. It’s one of my favorite things when she wears trousers.

My long stride is quickly eating up the space between us as she continues to walk away from me. I’m half tempted to just stay behind her to see where she intends to go, but she suddenly stops dead in her tracks. As if she senses me too, she whips around, and her eyes go wide when they land on me.

I’m right up in front of her a moment later, a finger pointed at her gorgeous fucking face. “You brag about being Princess Polite, but then you try to just leave without saying goodbye?” I challenge, my scowl fastened into the grooves of my brow. “You left me behind awfully quick, though you sure as hell had time to make the damned bed, didn’t you? Who does that, anyway? It’s an inn!”

She rears back at the vehemence in my voice, mouth stuck open as she stares at me.

I lean down until we’re eye level and get pissed off all over again that I can’t feel that hitch in her breath against my skin, or smell her hair, or grip her chin to tilt her mouth up to mine. “We have unfinished business, and until that’s done, you’re stuck with me, Pinky,” I tell her, making her brows shoot up. “I will haunt your ass to the end of the world, with or without my damn muck,” I growl quietly. “So the next time you try to walk out on me, just remember that. You’re mine.”

The declaration slams down between us, but as soon as I say it, I know it’s true. She is mine.

Silence drips between us like honey, thickened with unmistakable tension, and there’s no doubting what kind. Her cheeks are flushed, her pupils slightly dilated, her nipples hardening to points through her tunic. And just seeing her like this, all breathless and a little dazed, makes me want to hook my fingers around her jaw and pull her in for a kiss.

Other fae walk around us, some of them shooting her curious glances, since I’ve no doubt she looks very peculiar, standing in the middle of the street, staring with her sex eyes at no one at all. But those eyes are for me, so if anyone so much as tries to approach her, I will figure out how to possess the fuckers and cut off their cocks.

The stilled moment shatters abruptly when Lex sucks in a breath and shakes her head. “Excuse me?” she asks, all the previous heat suddenly replaced with sharp irritation. “First of all, you can’t threaten to haunt me when you don’t even know that you’re a proper ghost who can properly haunt!”

I open my mouth to defend the fact that I’m quite certain I can fucking haunt, thank you very much, but she’s far too quick for me to get a word in edgewise.

“Secondly, I am a perfectly able-bodied person, and I’m not going to not make a bed that I sleep in! That’s just rude!”

I roll my eyes, but then she’s jamming a finger at my face, and fucking hell, her angry look is the sexiest thing I’ve ever seen.

“And thirdly, you promised me you’d be there when I woke up, and you weren’t! I wasn’t leaving you. I was looking for you! You big, sheer butthead!”

I blink at her.

Her words sink in, and all of my irritation at being left behind evaporates. I instantly start laughing my see-through ass off.

Bewildered, she watches me as I lose it, and then she seems to realize that while she’s staring at me, everyone else on the street is staring at her, probably thinking that she’s gone mad and is talking to thin air. Lex blushes so fiercely that it’s a wonder her hair doesn’t turn red.

Without another word, she spins around and starts hurrying off. “Wait up!”

“Go haunt a rock,” she mumbles, which just makes me laugh harder.

“Tried that, couldn’t stick it,” I tease as I catch up and start walking beside her.

“You made me look like a crazy person.”

I shrug, feeling a godsdamned pep in my step with the knowledge that she wasn’t leaving me. “Don’t worry, talking to yourself is one of the least crazy things the fae can do.”

She doesn’t argue with that. It’s only been a handful of days, and we’ve seen some things.

“I can’t believe you accused me of leaving you,” she snips. “And you were the one who broke your promise!”

“Yeah, I’m sorry about that,” I tell her genuinely. “I lost track of time. Won’t happen again.”

She rolls her eyes, but she stops stomping quite so aggressively.

“Anyway, we should talk about your bed-making obsession.”

Lex stops at the end of the road and glares at me, with her hands on her hips and everything. “It’s not an obsession, it’s common courtesy!”

She’s quite adorable.

“You also woke up at a very early hour.”

Lex huffs. “I couldn’t sleep well.”

That admission brings a grin to my face. “Couldn’t sleep without me, could you?”

She sighs but doesn’t deny it. “You seem to be in better spirits this morning,” she says, lips twitching.

“Maybe you should stick to making beds instead of jokes.”

Lex turns to look at me, loose hair slinging around her face. “Oh, come on. Spirits! It’s ghost humor.”

See? Adorable. “Sure. Ready to head to the next island?”

That pull to my deathplace is tugging at me as if it knows I intend to travel even further away, but I ignore it, burying it deep.

“Yes,” she says before she reaches up to gather her hair, ready to tie it up, but I stop her.

“Leave it.”

She freezes, gaze flicking over to me. “What?”

“Your hair. Leave it down. It looks nice.”

She looks torn. “But…I never leave my hair down.”

I just watch her to see what she’ll do. But nervousness wins out, and she pulls it up into a high ponytail, making me grin.

“That’s fine, Pinky,” I say, leaning in close to her ear just like I did last night, because even now, I’m craving her. “One of these days, I will touch you again, and the first thing I’ll do is tug that hair down myself and wrap it around my fist as I claim your mouth. That’s a fucking promise.”

And that’s one I intend to keep.