Nick did not surrender his possessions lightly.
A tendency he applied to the water witch bound to his bed. The more she picked and poked at him with those made-for-sin lips, the more he wanted to shove something between them to silence her. Several options suggested themselves simultaneously, and an ache settled at the root of his cock.
Even with his hulking form dripping over her, Moira did not flinch. Didn’t attempt to widen the distance he’d narrowed. Not she.
“What I need?” Nick repeated the word with a good measure more sarcasm than it had been spoken to him. “What I need isn’t in your hillbilly head. It’s in your skirt.”
Moira raised her head from the pillow until her lips actually brushed his before whispering between them, “Fuck off, Conquest.”
Nick clanged the manacles against the broad wooden headboard flanked by massive oak bedposts carved into replicas of the Column of Trajan in Rome, a battle he still harbored a lingering fondness for.
The spark of fear he waited for in her fathomless aqua eyes did not appear. Instead, he found pleasure there. Her pleasure at twisting him this way and that. Knowledge of her power to wring anger from him with a few carefully chosen words.
With effort greater than required to marshal the Imperial Roman Army, Nick arranged his features into a mask of vulnerability. Dark eyes widening, chest deflating, his very best down-turned, half-hurt frown.
“At least admit you want me as much as I want you,” Nick pleaded. Moira’s face shimmered into an impressionistic painting through the scrim of tears welling up in his own eyes. Damn. He was better at this sensitive male shit than he remembered.
For a split second, the water witch’s gaze grew luminous, and if she’d had a free arm, Nick was positive she would have reached out to place it on his shoulder.
“Sure I want you,” she said gently. “To get the hell out of here and see about fixing me some breakfast. Grits if you’ve got ‘em. And I wouldn’t turn my nose up if some butter and cheese hitched a ride as well.”
Nick dropped the act and allowed a more natural, wolfish grin to occupy his face. “You may be a great healer, Moira, but you’re a shitty liar.”
He released her wrist and yanked up her skirt to expose her panties. Even from her vantage, she could see the dark moisture blooming on the light blue fabric. Nick traced the patch with a lazy finger, fighting the sudden rush of adrenaline. The edges of his vision rimmed red and the capacity for conscious thought retreated under the surge of sweet, drugging power. He was winning. Controlling the reactions of her body to his presence.
At that moment, he would have gutted a million men just to allow himself the pleasure of tearing the silky scrap from her and planting his cock in her velvet depths like a flag of possession.
No. Not yet. To do so would only be half a victory. She had not yet relinquished her will. She had not yet surrendered.
His eyes fell closed as he battled for higher brain function.
“For a water witch, you don’t seem to have much control over the moisture between your legs.” He let his damp fingers trail down the sloping muscle of her outer thigh. Nick liked this about his water witch—liked the way he could see how the hauling of nets heavy with fish had shaped her. Hardened her.
And now she hardened him. Painfully so.
Moira squeezed against her chains, fruitlessly trying to bring her thighs together, fighting the bonds as much as the traitorous body Nick felt boiling beneath his touch. Her stomach shuddered as he skimmed the edge of her panties, teasing the elastic with a finger. Lifting it, dipping beneath it, venturing upward to circle the bellybutton exposed by her short tank top.
“And these,” he said, fingers brushing over the hardening buds of her nipples. He settled over her like a great, lazy cat, allowing his naked abdominals the bliss of contact with her bare midriff. “Might as well be a billboard.” He pinched one lightly between thumb and forefinger and quickly brought his mouth to it, sucking her through the fabric while letting his teeth gently test it through the cotton fragrant with her wild scent.
Her hips arched off the bed, and Conquest could no longer refrain from sliding his hand under her skirt, pushing her soaking panties to the side.
“Water witch indeed.” He explored her at his leisure, letting his finger stray just shy of her aching bud until she was twisting, writhing, squirming…but not begging.
“Tell me you want me,” he ordered, thumb hovering, ready to grant her entrance into the abyss.
“No,” she panted. Perspiration rose on her brow, dampening the rich burgundy of her hair to spilled wine on his gray pillows.
“Three little words, Moira.” He brought two fingers to his lips and licked them, returning them to her slick and sudden. Her gasp echoed among the masks and armaments. “I. Want. You.” For a brief moment, Nick Kingswood wished the water witch beneath him shared his age, his knowledge, so he could make her utter these words in every language spoken by the tongues of men. He would make her come over and over, one descent into paradise for each admission.
How the delicate muscles in her jaw worked then, her teeth grinding beneath them against her will, treacherous as the sea. “Fuck you!” She bucked her hips away from him, but could not escape her bonds.
“No? Perhaps you require more direct methods of convincing.” Nick moved between her thighs, running his hands up the firm flesh to pull her panties down to her calves. He brushed his lips on the inner flesh of her knee, and sudden pain shot through his head. Terrific pressure digging into his temples. Bright white blinding his vision. After a stunned moment, he reached up to feel his head and found that Moira had clamped him between her knees and was squeezing with enough pressure to crush a brick.
His fingers grasped her knees, expecting to pry her legs apart as easy as tearing fresh-baked bread. Not an inch could he move them, his biceps bulging with the effort.
A new sensation tightened in Nick’s chest. Panic? Surely not. Not he, who made potholders from the bears killed with his own hands.
“Eight time watermelon bustin’ champion of Terrebonne Parish,” Moira grunted. “You happen to know how much of the human body is made of water, Punkin?”
Nick searched for the number, wanting at least the satisfaction of knowledge to combat the sickening feeling of helplessness churning like a blade in his gut.
“Sixty percent,” Moira provided for him. “Only I’d say you’re at about a 52 on account of all the booze you swill. Alcohol is awful dehydrating, you know. Might want to lay off the martinis, Honeybuns.”
“I. Am. Immortal.” Exactly whom was he saying these words for?
“An immortal wearing a skin suit, in case you’d forgotten. Which means, 52 percent of that body is under my control now, Sugarbritches. And unless you back the fuck off, I’m like to splatter your immortal brains all over these here fancy sheets.”
“Damn you, woman,” Nick growled between clenched teeth and lips artificially pooched out, fish-like by the compression between her thighs. “You will surrender to me.”
“When Hell freezes over. But hey,” she shrugged as much as her restraints would allow, “maybe you can talk to that blond bitch, Satan who’s leading you around by the dick. Maybe, if you begged her good and hard, she might do you a little favor. Throw you a table scrap.”
“She doesn’t own me,” Nick insisted, the words somewhat garbled as they worked through puckered lips. Not at all the authority he had hoped to conjure.
“Oh, I beg to differ,” a silky female voice interjected.
Nick didn’t have to turn his head—not that he could have—to know Lucifer had arrived. The sudden infusion of her cloying, exotic perfume along with the gooseflesh riding the length of his spine and the sudden wilting of his cock was as reliable a predictor as an atomic clock.
Lucy slithered into his peripheral vision, clad head to toe in black leather and a boned bustier, looking every inch the dominatrix. Her blond hair brushed the tops of her mounded breasts in
silky waves, her plump lips painted the color of drying blood.
“If it ain’t Old Funbags McPeroxide,” Moira said. Nick squeezed her ankle, trying in vain to signal the folly of this course. “I figured you’d show up at some point.”
“Of course you did,” Lucy said, a dangerous smile revealing even white teeth. “You’re smarter than people give you credit for, that hideous mudbug-eating accent notwithstanding. And since you’re smart, I’ll give you a little piece of advice.”
Lucy approached the side of the bed, petting Nick’s head as if it were a puppy pinned between Moira’s thighs.
“You really ought to let him go down on you, love. It’s just about the only thing that mouth of his is good for.”
The Devil strolled over to the chair next to the bed and seated herself with a squeak of leather and the regal posture of a queen.
“Mind if I watch?”
Chapter Three
Moira jerked her knees to the left, sending Nick Kingswood sprawling off the edge of the bed. He landed naked on the floor at Ol’ Scratch’s leather platform spiked heels. “He’s all yours, Beelzeboobs.”
“You couldn’t be more correct,” Lucy said, reaching down to drag a long, red nail down the length of Nick’s chin. “He has been for ages, haven’t you, Conquest? Speaking of, have you told Little Miss Moira who was your first?”
Nick shoved himself to his feet and retrieved his towel as Lucy settled further into the armchair, suggestively dropping one long leg over the arm.
“I don’t recall asking.” Moira yawned. “In fact, I don’t recall giving a furry rat’s ass where he chooses to dip his wick.”
“Taking Conquest’s virginity.” Lucy sighed, her ice-blue eyes rolling skyward in fond recollection. “Now there’s a night worth remembering.” She let her head loll to the side and slid Moira a slitty-eyed wink. “He was a quick study. And hung? I keep a bronze replica of Conquest’s cock in my boudoir for special occasions. It’s not often that I have trouble walking the morning after.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t imagine walkin’ on them cloven hooves of yours would be all that easy even if you weren’t spreadin’ your legs for every horny, humpbacked, eight-legged demon oozing around the fiery depths of Hell.” A little stab of victory spread warmth in Moira’s heart when white spots appeared at the corners of Lucy’s scarlet lips. She could swear she caught the flash of a grin on Nick’s face as he made his way over to a walk-in closet twice the size of her entire shack back in Stump. “While we’re on the subject,” Moira continued, “do you have to have them boots made special? What do they call them guys that shoe horses?”
“Ferriers,” Nick called from the closet. He leaned into view, a long, cut body clad in slacks that made his butt look like two scoops of ice cream and a white T-shirt that didn’t so much fit as worship his torso. “But shoeing cloven-hooved animals isn’t customary in many cultures.”
“Huh,” Moira wondered aloud. “I’d have thought—”
A metallic zip prefaced Lucy’s knee-length boot dropping to the floor. Her delicate, perfectly-shaped foot, toenails lacquered red to match her manicure, flexed at the cuff of her leather leggings. “Sorry to disappoint,” she said.
Smaller than her own feet, Moira noted with instant dislike. Purtier too, though she’d always liked what she saw when she happened to look down while she was ambling barefoot down the oyster-shell backroads nearest her shack. Maybe there was something to these pedicures Aerin was always jawing at her about.
Thinking her sister’s name awoke an ache deep around Moira’s heart. They’d just started getting used to each other. Bonding over fried chicken and decapitatin’ zombies and such. It had been weeks since Moira thought about sawing all the heels off Aerin’s shoes or using one of them fancy suits she liked to make a patchwork quilt.
And now…Now she saw Aerin only through a shifting mist. The kind of dark, damp wall of fog the bayou would throw off sometimes in winters. And it was growin’, this thing. Taking a little more and more of Aerin and Claire every day.
Moira was pretty damn sure the fair-haired minx admiring her own foot like it was the Mona Lisa had something to do with it.
“Well sure they look normal now,” Moira said with exaggerated speculation. “But I bet if you shed that skin suit you’ve got aholt of, you’d be just as ugly as sin itself. Big old horns, fur, little black goatee, one of them chins looks like a ballsack…”
For a split second, flame flickered in Lucy’s blue eyes, doused just as quickly by the sight of Nick Kingswood swaggering out of his closet, tightening his tie.
A small movement, but carried out with the same unstudied precision Uncle Sal used baitin’ a hook. Something he could do with both eyes closed and one hand curled around the neck of a moonshine bottle.
She felt Nicholas Kingswood’s age then. The dizzying sense that long before tightening his tie and picking up his briefcase, he’d closed the helmet on his suit of armor and hefted an axe.
“He’s fun to look at, isn’t he?” Lucy asked, her voice dreamy with admiration.
“Can’t disagree with you on that point I s’pose,” Moira admitted. Or, she could, but she’d be outright lying, something she tried not to do as a general rule. She remembered her first encounter with him within the confines of the airplane’s first class cabin. Stealing glances at his long, powerful thighs and patrician profile from beneath her dark lashes as she’d feigned sleep. They sure didn’t make men like that where she’d come from. Not Stump Bayou, where dentistry on long fishing trips as often as not involved a pair of pliers still smudged with engine grease and an extra slug of whiskey for the pain.
“But then, you’ve never seen him the way I’ve seen him.” Lucy unzipped her other boot and let it fall to the floor before rising from her chair. Without her six-inch slut-boots, she looked diminutive next to Conquest’s towering body and had to reach up to run her claws down the length of Nick’s tie.
“Should we tell her about some of our more daring, exploits, darling?” Lucy suggested. “How I fucked you to victory in the Austrian-Ottoman wars? Or about the evenings we spent demonstrating every sexual position we’d invented for that Vātsyāyana fellow? Lovely little book he wrote about it, the Kama Sutra. Or perhaps how after the Iberian war, you bent me over a pile of the defeated and—”
“Is this the part where I’m s’posed to get jealous?” Moira asked. “Cause I got to tell you, all that yakkin’ of yours ain’t giving me much more than a headache.”
Lucy’s knuckles whitened as her grip tightened on Nick’s tie.
“I think perhaps you ought to leave us for a chat, Nicky darling. A little…girl talk.”
“These are my quarters,” Nick insisted, brushing Lucy’s hands from his tie. “I will not—”
“You will do exactly as I say, or I will make chitlins from this water witch’s intestines before you’ve had the chance to break her will.”
Nick’s eyes drank darkness from the burnished cherry wood around him. Muscles bunched at his jaw. He looked to Moira, hoping—she suspected—for some kind of pleading don’t leave me alone with her glance. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction, as much as her mind might be repeating that very thing.
So much for that.
He turned on the heel of his loafer and slammed the door on the way out.
“There now.” Lucy sauntered over to the bed and seated herself cross-legged in the indentation at Moira’s hip, casual as a college co-ed at a dorm slumber party. “You and I can really get to know one another.”
Moira raised an eyebrow at her. “All I need to know about you I learned from Reverend Dupuis over the Sunday service pulpit. And just for future reference, girl talk don’t usually start with threats of disembowelment. I ain’t sure if you’re aware, but the reason it’s called girl talk in the first place is on account that the ones talking are girls. Not a prisoner chained to someone’s bed and the Evil One acting like we’re besties or BFFs or whatever the hell y’all call
friends in these parts.”
Lucy’s delicate brows drew together in surprise. “Out of all your sisters, I had hoped that you and I might be able to understand each other best.”
“How do you figure?”
“Well, we both know what it’s like to be persecuted by other women, for one. You were born with the power to heal. I was created to maintain balance in the world. And yet, the very world we try to protect scorns us for the method we employ in trying to achieve our purpose.”
Moira snorted. “Having your goons kidnap me and that back-stabbing Judas Justine ain’t quite the same as humping the hurt out of somebody.”
“Perhaps.” Lucy looked down at the pointed tip of one nail. “If you have the luxury of not knowing what I know. Your sister now carries within her an abomination that could be the ruin of not only this world, but countless others. As much as you and your sisters would like to ignore that fact, I cannot.”
“Getting knocked up ain’t the end of the world. Hell, where I come from, they have a maternity line of the caps and gowns on account of half the graduatin’ class being—”
“Tierra’s being pregnant isn’t the problem,” Lucy said. Four inches of smooth cleavage just about pressed against Moira’s cheek as Lucifer leaned in to adjust the pillows behind her shoulders. The extra support released a spot that had been gathering tension, and a pleasant burning slid down Moira’s arm. “Men.” Lucy’s pale gold curls tossed as she shook her head. “Sometimes I think they haven’t the slightest idea how to make a woman feel comfortable.”
On this too, Moira felt herself agree, though she wasn’t about to admit it.
“As I was saying,” Lucy continued. “It’s not Tierra being pregnant that’s the issue. It’s what she’s carrying.”
“I think they call them babies,” Moira said. “And I s’pose they can be a kind of nuisance what with the spittin’ up and the poopin’ all the damn time and the hollerin’ for a tit at all hours of the night. I sure seen some rough-lookin’ offspring in my day too. When Skunky knocked up Ruby Lee, I swear I damn near peeked in its diaper to look for a tail—”
Which Witch is Wicked? (The Witches of Port Townsend Book 2) Page 27