by Holley Trent
So why she suddenly made her posture exceedingly upright and obtrusive, she didn’t know.
Her breath came out slow as her eyes closed. His body was as hard as she remembered. Resilient and unyielding.
And warm. Always warm.
His fingers made unhurried drifts down her neck, slowing here and there to sketch half-formed circles. Each little swirl was an unspoken command, telling her body, “Softer, please. Now hold your breath for a bit. Ease back this way.” The strokes were hypnotizing, and she couldn’t blame magic. What she felt was desire, plain and simple.
She softened in his arms even as he hauled her up and set her atop the step stool she kept near the door. Carefully, he turned her and the stool around to face him and curled her fingers over the handle.
He stared at her in that searching, air-stealing way he always did, and she had to ask, finally, “Why do you look at me like that?”
“Because sometimes I need to convince myself that you’re not an illusion and that you’re not playing with my head.”
“I wouldn’t,” she confessed. She was losing every single advantage that she had over him, but she was tired of holding onto them. She was tired of resisting the pull. Tired of denying herself intimate pleasures. “Not again. I promised Angela I wouldn’t.”
“And you’re ever so good at keeping promises, hmm?” His thumb hooked beneath the edge of her collar and skimmed along the neck, teasing at her cleavage. “I’ve wanted to touch you so badly,” he said into her hair that had at some time since her arrival at home slipped loose from its plait. “You have no idea what that first glimpse of you again after so long did to me. It’s a form of torture to want someone who’s destroyed you so thoroughly before. I can’t help but wonder if it’s yet another punishment I have to bear for being too defiant an angel.”
“I will keep my promise,” she whispered as he tipped her chin up and kissed all over her neck. Every press of his lips left her skin feeling short-circuited. She wanted to be worshiped even if she didn’t deserve to be.
With one hand, he tugged her tightly against his body. His mouth crushed against hers, stealing whatever breath she’d been intending to take, and all she could do was let him have his way. When his tongue chased hers, hers didn’t run. When his other hand crept up the inside of her shirt and fingertips squeezed her nipple without mercy, her instinct wasn’t to push him back, but to be still. She feared that if she moved, he’d leave. He’d think his affection wasn’t something she’d wanted, when in truth, she’d been unable to think about little else since he’d found her fleeing to her car at the Foyes.
“Tarik.” She forced a swallow down her tight, dry throat and gasped at his frenetic tugs of her skirt. “Yes.”
“Hmm?”
“That. I want…that.”
They didn’t have time for that, but she wanted a taste of him anyway. Then, perhaps, they could figure things out. They just needed to connect first. All the other complications could wait until later.
“You want what, Butterfly?”
“You. Inside me. Now. Quickly!”
“You’re not a snack to be devoured in seconds. I want hours with you.”
“Later.” She strung her arms around his neck and wrapped her legs around his waist. Slowly, she sank lower down his hard body, grinding herself against the arousing bulge of his belt buckle, then his cock.
Hissing, he tried to hold her back from him, but she wouldn’t have it. She gripped tighter and slipped a hand between their bodies. “That casserole will be warm in fifteen minutes and Yaotl is always on time.”
Splaying his big hands over her ass, he narrowed his eyes as with consideration. And then in the next second, they were in her bedroom and she was being tossed onto her high, four-poster bed. With all the heavy curtains drawn, the room was dim, but that didn’t matter. They didn’t need bright light. They weren’t there to perform but to reconnect. Desperate acts could be done just fine in the dark.
He positioned her so her legs dangled over the edge of the bed and shimmed his hands up her inner legs inside her skirt. He quickly found the elastic waistband of her underwear and did away with them.
She hadn’t even taken her shoes off.
He hadn’t even stepped out of his pants.
It didn’t matter.
He tugged her hips to the edge and before she could register that the smooth warmth prodding her thigh was his hard flesh, he was inside her.
No warnings. No teasing. No gentle hesitation.
She hadn’t been ready, yet she was. She needed it so bad.
He stilled inside her. His bright eyes were closed, and he was notching his fingers painfully into her rear end, gritting his teeth.
“Do it,” she whispered. “Don’t wait. There’ll be other times, Tarik. Just—”
He silenced her with another kiss so yearning and insistent that she would have given him anything in the world, if she’d had it to give.
“What do you want?” she asked weakly as he pushed onto his forearms and thrust? “What…do you want?”
“From you?”
She could barely eke out the yes. All too quickly, her body was becoming overwhelmed by the sensations of him. His scent, like earth and tea and bergamot. He left it behind whenever he teleported. The aroma lingered at Angela’s house even when he wasn’t there, as though to tease and taunt her for her cowardice.
“Just love me,” he said and thrust. “In whatever way you can. Accept me.” Thrust. “Help me understand what you need and what you expect. I will adapt.” His fingers tangled into her hair. She kept her hips angled up for him and met each of his parries with a welcoming squeeze of his shaft. “Do you think you can, Butterfly?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t turn me away.” His thrusts were faster and were losing their rhythm, but so was she. She’d been doing her best to hang on and be an active participant, but for once, she gave in and decided to simply submit.
It was all she could do to keep herself from coming apart and to keep her magic at bay so there’d be no accidental disturbances in her adopted town.
If they were going to stay, they needed to behave…as much as two obstinate creatures like them could, anyway.
“I won’t turn you away. I’ll keep you here.” Her toes curled behind his back when a sharp burst of pleasure tightened low in her belly. “I’ll…retrain you.”
“Housebreak me?” He chuckled. He found one of her hands and kissed her fingers, her palm, her wrist, all the while landing deep inside her again and again. Then he stopped suddenly. “It’s been…more than a century. I’m not going to—”
She understood. He didn’t need to be ashamed. She dug her heels against his backside and brought him home again.
He caught on.
He landed once, twice, and withdrew as her body began to twist against the bed.
He propped himself up with one hand squeezed himself with the other, grimacing as he spent into his fist.
“I suppose we learned our lesson, hmm?” she whispered when they’d both caught their breath.
“Hmm.” The sound was noncommittal, but she tried not to read too much into the lack of emotion. Better than anyone, she knew there were other ways of showing that.
He bent, kissed her, and carefully untwined her legs from around her waist. “Remember, you promised me more,” he said as he ambled toward the attached bathroom. “I recall you saying something about training.”
She was limp and boneless with her legs dangling, body tingling, cheeks straining with the smile she couldn’t get off her face.
It felt unnatural, that smile, because her body hadn’t been created to have that kind of energy, but it was in her now and it wasn’t going to go away.
“Yes, we’ll start with a refresher course on basic etiquette, bird man,” she called after him.
He chuckled and ran water in the sink. “Etiquette?”
“Yes. To start, one should remove his coat before ravishing a woman or
else it looks as though he is in a hurry to leave.”
“Ah. So if I remove it, you assume I’m staying, then.”
She clawed herself into an upright position and smoothed her hair back for re-braiding. “No, I’ll assume you’re staying if you take off your shoes.”
“Where should I store them?”
Still smiling, she slid off the bed and found a hair elastic in the pile of clutter atop her dresser. “Nowhere for now. Go away. I need to explain this to Yaotl.”
“So you’re going to, then?” He stepped outside of the bathroom wiping his hands dry on one of her frilly lace-edged towels.
She caught his gaze in the mirror. “You think I shouldn’t?” she asked with hesitance.
“Butterfly, I love that you are.” He crossed the room in a few long strides and pulled her into an embrace. He gave her quick, soulful kiss on the lips and, smirking, set her back on her feet. “I shouldn’t be here. Yaotl can’t kill me, but I’d like for him to get the possibility of attempting to brutalize me out of his system before we come face-to-face again.”
“I’ll call you,” she said. “I suppose that is what normal people do. They make calls.”
“And send texts.” He bent for another kiss and tucked his shirt into his belted slacks. “I’d much rather hear your voice. Sooner rather than later, hmm? I’d like to get started on that training you mentioned tonight.”
He vanished.
“Making calls… Ha!” She righted herself. As if they’d ever be anything resembling normal. Normal people didn’t live in houses that had been repossessed from certain dirty sheriffs due to the “pain and suffering” he’d inflicted upon them. She’d hated that bastard, but he’d built himself a sturdy house. She was able to buy it for a steal years later when the economy had tanked and the only people with money were immortals and politicians.
Her phone rang.
She scoffed as she found her underwear. She needed to be telephone accessible for her many jobs, but she wasn’t the kind of woman who enjoyed shooting the breeze. She didn’t want to chat.
She righted her clothing, pondering where she’d left the device.
She considered ignoring the call. Yaotl would be there any minute and she needed to look like she hadn’t spent the past twenty minutes being reacquainted with an unruly fallen angel.
But that ringtone—the shrill siren sound set her on edge because her phone hadn’t been equipped with that one. She would have bet her car that there was magic in play.
She dashed down the stairs and rooted through her purse, finally finding the phone at the bottom. No name or number on the caller ID. She swiped the answer bar anyway. “Yes?”
“Would you allow me to cross your threshold briefly?” came the accented voice. Lola needed a moment to place the origin of the inflections. Greece. That could only be one person in Maria.
She went to the door and pulled the curtains back.
Sure enough, the goddess Artemis was standing on her front porch.
Lola disconnected the call and motioned for the woman to enter.
She didn’t actually know Artemis, except in passing. Artemis’s niece Willa lived in Maria. Lola worked with her at the middle school. In the six or so months since Artemis had first appeared in the small town, they hadn’t yet crossed paths. That didn’t mean anything, except that they respected each other enough not to waste each other’s time.
Artemis smiled and nodded in greeting as she closed the door behind her. “I won’t ask for hospitality. I only came to warn you. I know how quickly situations can escalate.”
“What are you referring to? What situations?”
Tarik?
If that angel had found himself trouble to get into just that quickly, she was going to smelt him into ore and use the bricks to shore up her sinking garage.
“One of the Coyotes had a run-in with some shifters at a state park,” Artemis said.
Lola’s brow furrowed. “The Coyotes? I have nothing to do with them.” She wondered if Artemis had gotten her wires crossed.
“Perhaps not, but you do have something to do with the shifters they met. Long story short, they’ve hinted at a connection to you.”
“Connected to me?” Lola shook her head, but her confusion cleared quickly and the sinking feeling in her gut made bile rise.
Surely, Artemis couldn’t have meant them.
She smoothed her expression into more of its typical blank and cleared her throat. “Why would that be unusual? I’m responsible for the existence of nearly every Cougar in the United States.”
“Not Cougars.” Artemis clasped her hands in front of her belly and lifted her dark brown eyebrows. “Jaguars.”
No. No possible way.
“Interesting,” Lola said in a neutral tone, even though on the inside, her brain was spinning and heart thrashing. The Jaguars shouldn’t have survived. Their endurance made no sense, and she’d been acquainted with nearly every sort of magical phenomenon there was.
“Are you denying that they exist or saying that they shouldn’t?”
Lola said nothing. That was what she always did when she hadn’t known a situation was possible. Words could dig holes. Silence couldn’t.
“I see.” Artemis notched her headband back further into her thick, curly hair and twined her fingers in front of her again. “Is your silence from shame or ignorance? Allow me to assist you in recovering from either.”
“Why would you wish to?”
Artemis turned her hands over. “I understand that you often choose not to interfere. I regret taking that stance when it came to my niece. I cannot erase what happened to her. If there is a way for you to minimize an ordeal for whoever stands to be affected by it, I am giving you the opportunity to do so. Tell me what not to say, and I will not repeat it. You have my word.”
Lola chose to believe her. Artemis’s reputation was one of honor.
“They did exist at one point,” Lola said. Pondering how much of the history she should reveal. “I created them, but they weren’t made to last more than a year or two.”
“Obviously, these aren’t the same Jaguars you made, but their descendants.”
“Still, being half dead, they shouldn’t have been able to have offspring. They wouldn’t have had the strength to bear—”
Damn it. Outsmarted.
She’d pinched her lips on the rest of her declaration because she’d forgotten certain variables.
She knew what she’d given those weak women, and it hadn’t been much. At the time, Lola had been half-dead herself.
But Tarik had burned hot that night.
He’d given them more than she’d known. He hadn’t just given them enough fire for them to find their ways home, but enough to stay put and make a legacy.
He’d left them there to raise hell before going off on his own to do the same.
“What did you do?” she spat through clenched teeth, dragging a hand down her face.
She heard the slam of a car door outside. She didn’t need to look outside to know it was Yaotl. She could sense his energy. Always familiar. Always hers.
“I will inform them that you find the circumstances curious, and that is all unless you tell me otherwise.” Artemis tilted her head expectantly toward the door and eased away from it. “The Coyote has been trying to phone you. I suppose, like me, you ignore most calls.”
“Yes.”
“They asked me what I could find out about the creatures. I knew little about your folklore, but I said I’d find out what I could. I figured I’d warn you.”
“I appreciate the warning.”
“Are they dangerous?”
Lola wasn’t going to lie. She knew what she’d given to those women, even if Tarik’s contribution was a mystery to her. She’d programmed their magic to make them skeptical of other groups, and like her Cougar women, they were naturally disinclined to trust men. “Possibly,” she confessed. “It depends.”
Yaotl climbed the stairs and turned the
knob.
When he stepped into the foyer, smiling wide as always, he furrowed his brow at the sight of the visitor. “Hey, Artemis. What’s up?”
Artemis cut Lola a look.
Lola sighed.
What a mess.
“Right now,” Artemis said to Lola, “the Coyotes are investigating. They’re looking for answers and they need to hear from you. They’re doing pack business at the park and can’t leave, even if they feel threatened. And they say those Cats have been searching for you for hundreds of years.”
“What Cats?” Yaotl asked.
“Who is down there?” Lola asked Artemis.
“Lance and Lily.”
“Lily Baxter?” Yaotl asked. “She’s not a Coyote. She’s human.”
Damn it.
Lola pinched the bridge of her nose and tapped her foot with impatience.
Lily was human and marked. Lola had touched her the way she did all women she’d vetted as “hers.” In a practiced she’d revived after many centuries, Lola put a little mark on her neck to keep other gods from harassing them or trying to recruit them to their packs or covens, the same way she had with those first Jaguars.
If the Jaguars had really been looking for her, they might have recognized that mark. She’d taught it to the first of them. She’d told them, “You see this? This means you can confide in whoever wears it. She will help you.”
“Shit,” Lola said.
“Oh, fuck. Ma’s swearing,” Yaotl said, and his energy suddenly flared hot in a way that even a human would have noticed. “What the hell happened?”
“I’ll be your go-between,” Artemis said. “Should I tell Willa that you’ll go meet with them at your discretion? She and her husband assume you don’t want those women finding you.”
“They assume correctly,” Lola said. “Yes, I will inform them further. For now, I ask that you be selective in what you relay.”
“Understood,” Artemis said. “Do you need directions to their whereabouts?”
“No. Lily is marked. I will always be able to go directly to her.”
Artemis nodded once more, then vanished.
Yaotl put himself into the path of Lola’s straight-ahead gaze and bent to her height. “Ma.”