by Louisa West
“Do you think you could do something similar for Maggie?”
Declan didn’t even skip a beat. “Of course.”
Rosie offered him a broad smile, her relief beginning to pick at undoing the anxious knot in her stomach. “Thank you,” she said, then looked around at her better-than-before living room. “So... what happens next?”
“When we’re ready, you’ll have a coronation so that your people can revel in your presence and chant your name. “We don’t have to consummate our binding until you’re ready,” he added, a roguish smile tugging at his lips.”
It took a moment for the implication of his words to sink in. She thwacked him on the shoulder with the back of her hand.
“I was talking about dinner!” she cried. “Lord. Just because you helped me fix the window doesn’t mean you won’t still be sleeping in the swamp if the Queen commands it,” she warned him.
He laughed. She turned to leave, but he caught her by the hand and looked into her eyes.
“Well done, Rosie,” he said to her. He glanced at the window and then looked back to her, a tired smile on his face.
“You did most of it,” she said self-deprecatingly. “I don’t even know the basics of magic. I’ll—”
“Learn,” he said. Before she knew what he was doing, he had folded her into an enormous, warm hug.
Her first instinct was to stiffen. She couldn’t remember Randy ever hugging her—and she didn’t want to remember if he had. She resisted the temptation to tense up and instead let his body heat envelop her. Her hands rested on his brown leather belt on either side of his hips. His clean, wholesome aroma of cedar mixed with what she could only describe as a combination of sweet whiskey and butterscotch cookies surrounded her. It was delicious, and that was before he bent his head to press a quick, boundary-pushing kiss to the top of her long dark locks.
“C’mon,” he murmured into her hair.
“What?” she asked. C’mon what? Her heart was beating faster than it had in decades from just a hug and a head-kiss. If he made a move on her, she was sure that her lady-parts would explode into flames.
“You were asking about dinner,” he reminded her, his voice tinged with amusement that told her he had guessed her thoughts.
“Oh!” she said, straightening and stepping away from him. “Of course.”
She paused before leaving the room to look at the now glittering window in the front room. She shook her head.
Great. Now she'd have to wash the other windows to match.
Chapter 9
“You’re sure she’s asleep?” Rosie tried to peer past Declan to get a view of Maggie in her bed down the hall.
“Yes,” he declared, looking rather pleased with himself. “Out like a light. So, don’t be wakin’ her, mumma-bear. Let the cub sleep.”
Rosie smiled, ignoring the bone-tiredness that seeped in as soon as she stepped out of her shower.
True to his word, Declan had rustled up a simple dinner in the kitchen and laid it on the counter. She pulled up a stool as he served them both generous helpings of leftover mashed potatoes and gravy with a side of beans. She watched him set out their cutlery, his large hand surprisingly deft at sprinkling just the right amount of salt and pepper over their feast.
“Smells great,” Rosie said, smiling up at him as he rounded the counter to park himself beside her.
“Good,” he replied with a satisfied nod. “You need to eat. If you don’t clean ya bowl, there’ll be no dessert.”
“Dessert?” Rosie’s ears pricked up. What she wouldn’t give for a piece of angel cake. Or some plain, creamy chocolate. And then she deflated. “I don’t have anything sweet in the house,” she sighed.
“That’s not true,” Declan told her, scooping up a spoonful of mash. He blew on it for a second, and Rosie watched the soft pout his lips made until he spoke again. “You’re about the sweetest person I ever met,” he said, shoveling in his mash-and-beans.
The compliment caught her off guard. She felt a tiny flutter of something light and pleasant in her stomach. And then she realized that he had meant he’d like her for dessert. A blush bloomed across her cheeks in time for him to nod at her.
“Exceptin’ Maggie, a-course,” around a mouth full of mashed potato.
Rosie laughed, tucking into her dinner. It was such a simple, wholesome compliment that it came quite unexpectedly from Declan, who didn’t seem able to take anything seriously. But more than that, it was totally the opposite of Randy’s compliments. Randy only ever said things about how she looked or what she wore, or what sexual thing he’d been planning in his head.
They ate quietly, the sounds of the cottage creaking and the trees swaying in the stiff summer breeze outside keeping real silence at bay. By the time they had both emptied their bowls, Rosie felt like she could have crawled into bed for a week.
She was tempted. The trials of being a single mom mandated that you are on the clock 24/7. There were no sick days, or overtime, or substitutes you could call in. And, she thought as she hopped up and collected the bowls and cutlery to place in the sink, she had been a single mom ever since Maggie had been born.
Randy hadn’t ever been interested in the nuances of raising babies, and she had been only too happy to be Maggie’s world. But the last few days had started to open her eyes about how it could have been. What it would have been like for Maggie to have a dad to play on the lawn with. How it would have felt to make a big family breakfast together on Sunday mornings.
What it would have been like to have someone in her life who had wanted her, too.
She turned away from stacking the sink and almost ran straight into Declan.
“Oh!” she uttered before a breathy laugh escaped her. “Sorry!”
He smiled down at her but didn’t move to get out of the way so that she could pass him. Rosie met his gaze, her embarrassment at nearly colliding with him morphed into confusion.
“I’m heading to bed,” she announced in a hushed version of her too-chipper voice. Her earlier blush had returned in full force, and she was starting to think he meant to kiss her in the kitchen. She didn’t know how she would feel about that – which told her that she wasn’t ready to feel anything about it at all.
“Goodnight!” She flashed him a strained smile and made to step around him, but he reached out and took her hand.
“There’s one more thing we need to do,” he told her. His voice was soft and husky, and the heat of his palm against hers made that fluttering feeling from her stomach explode.
“I’m beat,” she said with a little more force. “I need to go to bed, Declan.”
“If we don’t re-do the wards, then we’re left exposed,” he said pointedly, letting go of her hand.
She mentally stepped back from where she thought this had been going. Her brain slipped out of the half-panic, half-tempted fog it had bogged down in. “The wards?”
“Yes. The moon is perfect, and there are two of us this time.” His expression was earnest, but the spark of cheek in his eyes reminded her of an important detail.
“But... hearth magic has to be cast while naked,” she reminded herself.
He dipped his head to one side, his lips pulled in a half-smile. “I won’t look if you don’t,” he teased.
Rosie had forgotten about the wards after the excitement of being able to use magic to fix the window and the exhaustion that followed. The thought of stripping down to her birthday suit in front of Declan filled her with dread. She already had a hard time believing that someone like him would even look twice at her. She didn’t need to confirm those beliefs by having him gawking at her stretch marks.
But, what if learning to do this properly could help her keep Maggie safe? What if Declan was right and she really was a witch, and her magical powers were starting to build? Was she so ashamed of her naked body, which nature had given her, that she wouldn’t use it to protect her child?
She focused on taking a deep breath, letting the air fill her
lungs as though she thought it would give her the strength to say what she was about to say. Tilting her chin up in a look that was half defiance, half nerves, and all sass, she nodded.
“Let’s do it.”
Rosie stood hunched behind an oakleaf hydrangea bush that had been choked by weeds and half-dead when they had moved in. The time and care that Rosie had poured into re-establishing the yard was now paying off – the bush was thriving. Its large, dark green leaves filled the gap between the big oak tree and the smaller St. John’s Wort bush to the left. And, she thought to herself as she drank in the soft, honey-scented aroma of the delicate white blooms on the hydrangea, it provided the perfect dressing screen.
Declan was standing not too far away. She heard him pull his shirt over his head, and the rustle of leaves as he hung it on a branch. The tell-tale zwip! of his zipper being undone came next.
Rosie shimmied out of her denim shorts and felt the heat in the breeze coast over her lower body. She glanced down, ignoring the fact that she desperately needed some new underwear. True to Declan’s word, the moon shone thick, milky light over the whole clearing, including on the cellulite dimples she could see highlighted on her upper thighs. Rosie tugged her tank top over her head, making sure her ponytail was still in place. Then she unclipped her bra.
Gravity was a cruel mistress. Without the support of the underwire, her breasts didn’t have the same shape they’d had at seventeen. Her stomach was a tight knot of nerves. She bent down, hooking her thumbs into the waistband of her panties. She pushed them down her legs quickly as though she was removing a Band-Aid. As soon as her body was free from fabric, Rosie broke out in goosebumps despite the warm summer night.
It was as though the moon itself was greeting her skin. A sense of recognition filtered through the air to settle on her shoulders like a gossamer mantle. On instinct, Rosie reached up to her ponytail and pulled at the hairband, releasing her long dark curls. They fell over her shoulders, hugging her breasts and hanging down the middle of her back. She hoped that the added coverage would help conceal a little of her boob-sag, but the overall feeling was incredibly sensual, which was rather inconvenient because she didn’t want to feel sensual.
She wanted to feel like a badass witch.
“Rosie?” Declan’s voice drifted across the garden to her, and she felt her breath catch in the back of her throat. She snatched a branch of the bush, pulling it against her skin like a shield.
“What?” she called back in an exaggerated whisper.
“Ready?”
Taking a deep breath that she immediately let out again once she noticed it made it look like her bosom was heaving, Rosie steeled herself. “I guess,” she muttered.
When he spoke again, Declan sounded much closer than before. “What?”
“I said yes!” she yelped, moving closer to the bush as she tried to see where he was standing. She could almost make him out, standing on the lawn a few yards away.
He paused, and it seemed like he wanted to say something but then thought better of it. “Okay, you go around the house in a clockwise direction – I’ll go anti-clockwise. Like you did the first time, only this time with more intent. Between the two of us, we should be able to double-charge the wards.”
In her head, Rosie was already planning the route she would take to get maximum coverage. She wasn’t sure whether success in this instance would having wards strong enough to keep Randy and his men at bay or by being able to run around the house completely nude without Declan seeing her. At last, she replied with a terse, “Okay,” and bent down to retrieve the carton of rock-salt by her abandoned flip-flops.
“Great. Let’s go.”
He didn’t need to tell her twice. Rosie turned her back on him and adopted a weird lope that was equal parts skipping and running, trying not to knock herself out with her jiggling boobs. She gave up three paces into her crossing of the lawn. Scooping her breasts up with one arm across her chest, she clutched her carton of salt with the other. She sprinkled as she galloped but forgot that she was also supposed to be chanting until she reached the relative comfort of the oak tree garden bed in the middle of the lawn.
“Shit,” she huffed, trying to catch her breath from her first effort. She turned to face the trunk of the tree, standing close enough so that it would cover the front of her body from view. Sprinkling salt around the base clockwise, Rosie reached around the trunk, almost like she was hugging the tree, and passed the salt carton to herself.
“Mother Moon, please hear my call,” she began, straining to remember the chant. “Uhh... I don’t remember the rest at all!”
Her admission forced an unexpected giggle out of her, which she stifled by clapping her hand over her mouth. When she was sure that she wouldn’t laugh again, she decided that honesty would be the best policy and that it was time for some real talk.
“Look, Mother Moon,” she said, feeling ridiculous. “I don’t remember this chant, and it seems kind of dumb to say it anyway. You know my intentions – they're in my heart.” Rosie pursed her lips. “I need to protect my kid from her father, and I’m willing to do whatever it takes to do it. Ain’t no intention purer than a mother’s love.”
She looked straight up into the full, clear moon, bright and white on the summer evening. “So please hear me. I need your help.”
She stood there for a long moment, her arms around the oak tree and her body pressed to the bark. The breeze swayed the air around her, and it felt like a mother’s soothing caress. Rosie took it to mean that she had the Moon’s blessing, and she smiled. “Thank you,” she whispered.
Rosie peeked around the tree trunk. Seeing no sign of Declan, she decided to dash her next location – the corner of the cottage. She gripped her salt carton, supported her boobs once more, and took off. A thin trickle of salt drifted to the ground in her wake as she made the sprint in record time. She paused in the darkness beside the cottage. After a quick pause to catch her breath, she began to walk the length of the wall, trailing salt as she went. Just a little further, and she’d be on the home stretch.
She rounded the corner at a walk, and then stopped in her tracks. Declan was directly across from her, weaving his way through a copse of baby pine trees. He hadn’t seen her and continued to mumble the incantation under his breath as he worked. Rosie almost panicked and dashed back behind the wall of the house, but it was as though the calming influence of the moonlight made her relax.
So instead of making a run back behind the wall to safety, she moved forwards. Her eyes coasted over Declan, from the serious expression on his face that she caught as he moved between patches of moonlight and shadow, down over the broad strength of his shoulders. But she didn’t stop there. Rosie came to stand behind a straggly dogwood hedge. She took in the taut muscles of his belly, the purposeful movement of his thighs.
She drank in the rest of him with pleasure, watching him turn back toward the house. It wasn’t until she looked back up to his face that she noticed him staring at her. Instead of snatching branches of the hedge to cover herself better, she stood tall. His gaze fell, following the dark cascade of her hair to her breasts and then back up. When their eyes met again, his were stormy, the green of a northern sea lashing a dark, rugged coast.
“Are ya finished?” he asked her, his voice husky.
She could hear the blatant desire in his tone. Her body responded by breaking out into goosebumps all over again. She didn’t know whether he was referring to the hearth magic or her staring at him, and she considered the question before giving her answer.
“Yes,” she said, her eyes skipping between his.
He studied her face and then nodded gruffly as though trying to shake himself out of a dream. “I’ll... uh.” He cleared his throat.
The sound made her realize the effect she was having on him. He tried not to let his eyes fall to look at her nakedness. But even though he failed on several occasions, Rosie knew that he wasn’t looking to find fault with her. He wasn’t looking
with a critical eye. He was looking with restrained hunger, with desire.
And that knowledge made her feel like a badass witch after all.
“I’ll turn around so you can get your clothes on,” he told her and promptly turned his back.
The Rosie of five minutes ago would have been grateful for the opportunity and made the most of it. But now Rosie could feel something powerful building inside of her. It was fierce strength, smoldering in her belly in a way that told her it would soon burst into fire. The hint of a wicked smile tugged at her lips as she made her way around the end of the hedge, walking straight up to Declan.
She reached for his hand, entwining their fingers. He turned to look over his shoulder at her in surprise, and when he noticed her expression, a look of recognition overcame him. His answering grin was bold and celebratory, and it encouraged the first flickers of her confidence to unfurl. They walked together, hand in hand, to collect their clothes and get dressed.
Chapter 10
For a while, Rosie's life settled down into a groove that was close to normal as she’d ever known. Maggie had summer reading, and she had work. They went for a quick walk through different parts of town on their way home each afternoon, starting to get to know their surroundings. She didn’t have friends, and women her age in town now seemed to avoid the Go-Go-Mart like the plague. Rosie felt that she was okay with a quieter existence.
Maggie had insisted on spending the afternoon with Declan. They were headed to Wood & Wax to get supplies for the deck repairs he was doing. Rosie wandered into the Kwik Kleen. It was fast becoming her least favorite place to be despite her initial excitement. The small, dingy room looked like it hadn’t seen a lick of paint or a spit of disinfectant in years, which probably accounted for the musty smell.
Washers and dryers were crammed against one another along the back wall. An uncomfortable outdoor bench hunched by the door, scattered with outdated magazines. The noticeboard where Rosie found her job perched above the seat, threatening to fall on anyone who dared sit beneath it.