Read Online No Angel by Vivi Andrews - Free Book Online Page B

an appearance, and she’d discovered she rather liked dating Clark Kent.
    Until he started wigging out about meeting her parents.
    At first she thought he was intimidated by her celebrity family, but he’d never seemed to care about the fame game before. The more he had evaded, the more she had begun to wonder about the secrets he kept, the distance that was always between them. Dating the alter ego was only fun when she was in on his secret identity.
    Jay could play the role of devoted boyfriend beautifully, but when real commitment was involved the character fell away. What she’d thought was their relationship developing was just him playing house. This was why she didn’t date actors. They only wanted to perform their connections, not live them.
    But Jay was different. Or she’d thought he was. Now she didn’t know what to think.
    He was just a guy trapped in Hell. A mission to complete.
    He couldn’t be more to her. Not right now. She couldn’t worry about him. She needed to focus.
    Sasha stopped beside a beige wall, flooded by the sense Jay was behind it, but there were no doors in either direction for a hundred feet. Holding the Desert Eagle against her thigh, she put her free hand flat against the plaster, then jerked it back when the wall began to move beneath her fingers, rippling across her palm. “Jesus.”
    A low laugh reverberated at the end of the hallway, accompanied by skittering sounds. Sasha spun toward the noise, taking aim, but only caught a flicker of movement out of the corner of her vision. The hall stretched away from her, empty as far as she could see.
    “Note to self—Hell is creepy and you’re being watched by invisible hyenas.” Suck it up, Sasha. She turned back to the wall hiding Jay. “Things aren’t always as they seem,” she muttered to herself, drawing comfort from the familiarity of her own voice.
    She lifted one hand to the wall again, shuddering when it came alive under her fingers. It felt like wet stone—and as soon as she thought the word stone, the plaster and drywall flickered like a mirage and vanished, leaving the section of the wall directly in front of her a damp stone-and-mortar construction. This was her access point to Jay.
    The stone didn’t look very stable, so Sasha gave an experimental shove. Rumbling like an avalanche, the rocks tumbled away—but rather than down, they fell sideways, rippling away from her touch until a portal opened, wide enough for her to step through.
    “Jay?” She wrapped both hands around the Desert Eagle.
    There was nothing but shadows on the other side of the wall.
    And the sound of rattling chains. “Sasha?”
    Her breathing snagged at the sound of his voice. “Jay.” Sasha forgot about being watched, forgot about the quest, the creepy moving walls and Gerry’s ominous warnings. She rushed toward the sound of Jay’s voice, not realizing until she heard him speak, heard that he was still able to speak, how frightened she had been for him. Relieved tears pricked in her eyes, but she ignored them. There’s no crying in Hell.
    The avalanche reversed, sealing her in darkness, but Sasha didn’t look back. She groped forward through the pitch, toward where she thought she’d heard Jay. “Are you all right?”
    “Over here,” Jay called and Sasha whipped around.
    How could she have gotten so disoriented? She thought that was where the entrance was, but now her dark-adjusted eyes made out a flicker of candlelight on metal and flesh. What had they done to him?
    Sasha hurried toward him, knocking her shin hard on something solid, but not even looking down to see what it was. She couldn’t take her eyes away from Jay—filthy, bare-chested, nothing-had-ever-looked-better-to-her-in-her-entire-life Jay.
    “Oh God, is that blood?”
    She fell to her knees at his side, wanting to throw herself into his arms, just to feel his skin against hers and know he was all right, but not wanting to hurt him if there were injuries beneath the