I Accidentally Seduced Hades novel · Chapter 3 of 32

Chapter 3: Attempt One

Clary's seduction plan goes hot and badly, Hades agrees to take her home at dawn so she can choose to come back, and Jody's apartment is empty except for a company email saying she retired early.

The wine cellar was very nice.

I sat on the bottom step for an hour with the keys in my lap and called myself names.

When I came back up, someone had laid out clothes on a bed in a room with my name on the door.

Black silk pants. A soft gray sweater. Socks.

Everything fit.

That was worse, somehow.

I slept in the sweater with the keys under my pillow, out of spite.

In the morning, or what passed for morning, I went looking for the front door.

I found it at the end of the long hall.

Black wood, twice my height, no handle and no keyhole.

I pushed it. I kicked it. I tried every key on the ring.

The dog watched me from the rug with all three chins on its paws.

"Don't look at me like that," I said.

"It only opens for my hand," Hades said behind me.

He was leaning in the doorway of the kitchen with a cup of coffee.

The smell nearly killed me.

"Coffee's food," I said.

"Coffee is very much food."

"Then drink it somewhere else."

He drank it right there, slowly, watching me over the rim.

So. His hand.

I could work with a hand.

Attempt one went like this.

I followed him into his study and sat on the corner of his desk while he read.

I knocked a pen onto the floor and bent to get it, slowly.

The sweater rode up my back.

"You've dropped my pen three times," he said, without looking up.

"I'm clumsy."

"You're starving."

"I'm seducing you. Keep up."

That made him look up.

He set the paper down. He looked at me for a long time.

"Go on, then," he said.

I hadn't planned past that part.

I slid off the desk and onto his lap.

His chair creaked.

I took his face in both hands, the beard rough under my palms, and kissed him like I was trying to prove a point.

He let me prove it.

Then his hand spread on my lower back, under the sweater, on bare skin.

I made a noise I'd never made for a client.

He kissed down my jaw to the side of my throat and stayed there, breathing.

My fingers were in his hair.

I couldn't remember when I'd put them there.

"The door," I said, against his ear.

"Mm."

"We should go to the door. It's very romantic, the door."

"Is it."

"Big. Black. Very you."

His thumb moved along the bottom of my ribs, slow, back and forth.

My whole body followed it.

I forgot the door.

I forgot my name, which was in a book somewhere.

I tipped my head and his mouth found my collarbone, and I pulled his hand higher, under the sweater, to my breast.

He went very still.

"Clary."

"What."

"Look at me."

I did.

His eyes were black and steady, and closer than anyone's eyes had ever been.

"You don't have to do this to leave," he said.

I sat back on his knees.

My face was hot to the ears.

"What does that mean?"

"I'll take you up at dawn."

"You'll just let me go."

"Yes."

"Why? You kidnapped me."

"I took you out of a room where she had her hand on your bow," he said. "That's different."

"Then why did you take me at all?"

"So you'd know where the door is."

I climbed off him.

I needed to be somewhere he wasn't, and the room wasn't big enough.

"You think I'll come back."

"I'd like you to," he said. "On your own feet. Not because a book says so."

"Arrow talk."

He didn't answer.

He just picked his paper back up, and I noticed it was upside down.

I spent the rest of the day in the orchard teaching the dog to sit.

The middle head learned it.

The other two learned that the middle head got its ears scratched, and sulked.

The ferryman brought me a glass of water from upstairs, in a plastic bottle with the seal on it.

"Bought," he said. "Not grown."

It was the nicest thing anyone had done for me in a week.

At dawn Hades stood at the end of my hall with his hand on an ordinary door.

"Where?" he said.

"Jody's."

"Not home?"

"Danny's used to me working all night. Jody's the one who saw me sink through a floor."

He opened the door.

Behind it was a yellow kitchen, a pizza oven smell coming up through the boards, and the yowling of three hungry cats.

I turned back to him.

"If I want you," I said, and heard how it sounded. "If I need you. How do I..."

"Knock three times on any door," he said. "Say my name."

"That's it?"

"That's it."

He didn't kiss me goodbye.

I almost asked him to.

I stepped through instead, and the door shut behind me like any door.

"Jody?"

Nothing but cats.

The fat orange one was trying to climb my leg.

All three bowls were licked dry.

Jody would sell a kidney before she'd let those cats skip breakfast.

Her laptop was open on the counter.

Her sun hat was on the hook by the door.

I touched the trackpad and the screen woke up on her inbox.

The top email was from Golden Hour's office, sent yesterday at 9:02 in the morning, to every cupid on the list.

"Please join us in congratulating Jody Vesey, who has retired early to the Isles. She wanted to slip away quietly. She is resting."

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