Sunday, February 10, 2013

Checkmate by Azure Boone

Checkmate

An Erotic Romance to be featured in online Muse Magazine March 1, 2013
By: Azure Boone.

Web-sites: www.azureboone.com
www.archangelscreed.com 
Technical Adviser: Gavril Mikhailovich Pryedveshation.

Chapter One

Raven sucked down half of her beer. He was late. Why hadn't she found out if he was a punctual man in their yearlong online conversations? Far too practical for her. She was having too much fun exploring the logic of illogic, the order of chaos, Heaven and Hell, good and evil. Passion and desire.  

She signaled the bartender with a small wag of her empty beer bottle. Hopefully one more would finally take the edge off. Her nerves screamed straight up whisky was in order, but she didn't want to risk cracking her engine block.

The pub’s appeal sure as hell didn't help to curb the need, either. Reminded her of a social facade at a mental ward where broken people pretended to live in their fast retiring existences. She didn't want to be among the walking dead. And yet there she sat, three thousand miles from her old life in some shitty little Hong Kong tavern, or bar, or whatever the hell they called it. Funny how the alternate reality still retained the ruined aspect, like it was the main theme of the universe. 

She took a deep breath around the dread in her chest, filling up on the smoky, skanky beer flavored air, getting a dose of nausea instead of the extra oxygen she needed. She glanced over at the antiquated jukebox in the center of one wall that spewed foreign lyrics. Oh but the tune was the same, waltzing you into yesterdays never to be regained, and tomorrows never to be realized, effectively stealing the here and now. 

 Her gut twisted with nervous energy and she again contemplated a shot of whisky. Her temper tantrum that had her ass on that barstool waiting for the Mr. Amazing Dante Grayson waned at such close proximity.
 
Her heart stopped in her chest when a man came through the rectangular cavity in the antique colored wall. Since Dante had no clue what she actually looked like, staring was permitted. 

It was him. Finally. 

The butterflies in her stomach whipped out chainsaws and went to work taking apart her spine. Should’ve had that whisky. He sat maybe three seats away from the far end of the bar, still close enough for her to observe. And observe she did. God, look at him. The bastard was cuter in real life. And he was clean shaven! Fate was such a bastard prick. Probably Dante’s first cousin. Her hands tingled with the urge to touch him. Everywhere. All at once.

She wiggled in her seat, only adding to the sudden frustration between her thighs. How many times had she experienced that sweet torment with him? And now that the man sat in walking distance, she had an oh shit, what am I doing moment. She was such a fool to pretend she’d ever had some kind of power over her heart with him, all while pain bled her soul with the brutal indifference of…Dante fucking Grayson.
 
The mocking echo, how could you let this happen, how could you let this happenhummed through her head. She avoided the question of how could he? That one, she’d reserved to ask in person. If she were able to gain an audience beyond the exterior of the man.   

Dumb bitch. That’s what he made her feel like. With no effort whatsoever, he just made her feel feel feel like a dumb stupid bitch. She had to finish this with him. She couldn’t dangle like a loose tooth by a string of bleeding flesh, she had to fucking end this and how else but to confront him. In person. She would make him say it. That he had no interest in her beyond intellectual frolicking.

He glanced her way and she held her breath. Her heart throbbed in her chest in that painful rhythm. That was his rhythm. He’d put it there. Anytime she thought of him, every buried passion she’d possessed, bloomed and bled to its tune.

She released a light gasp when his gaze pin-balled back to home base—the counter and all things opposite her. First test passed. Well sort of. He’d claimed he wasn’t swayed by women’s beauty. Not that she was gorgeous, but surely worth a lingering stare, or second glance. 

Her heart raced with each passing minute. She gripped her beer bottle and watched him light up one of those strange looking cigarettes. Her eyes zeroed in on his lips as they parted to cradle the cancer device. All those fantasies of him kissing her surfaced like the mad cow disease. She swallowed the raw passion and hunger, hardening her jaw. She didn’t need his kiss. She wouldn’t pretend she didn’t want it. Maybe she should take it. Just to show him she could. 

A scenario of pressing her mouth to his ensued from the hellish passion. She bit her lower lip. Could she? Dare she?

She spent the next minute working up the nerve to kick off the first play. The play that bypassed his own game of sifting women before saying yes to bringing them home. And the golden key was using other means besides sex. Her heart ached at remembering how utterly beautiful he was inside. His heart, his brain. God his brain. Talking to him had been like foreplay for her. How many times had she considered touching herself while engaging him in paragraphs of orgasmic smartness?

Shame burned her cheeks at what he'd reduced her to. It wouldn’t have been so bad if the fire had burned both ways.  But his emotions toward her were dead as a dead end street
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