“Now I know you’re lying,” she accused. “There’s no way Port Townsend would sell an entire block of historic Water Street to a private citizen.”
“I suppose that depends on whether the citizen had acquired a renewable energy grant. You would be amazed at how much revenue those bring to a city. Not to mention the jobs.”
“Jobs?” Tierra repeated. “And what do you suppose will happen to the jobs of all the people here? All the businesses?”
“Sometimes sacrifices must be made in the name of the greater good. I’m sure you can understand that. We’re talking about renewable energy here, Miss de Moray. Or are you so arrogant as to think your presence here justifies environmental damage on a global scale?”
“My presence?” Tierra sputtered. “Environmental damage?”
If Nick cared for popcorn, now was when he would have sat back to indulge. The color rushing to the witch’s cheeks, her glass-green eyes standing out against them like shining marbles.
The coffee cups rattled on the shelves, clinking against their saucers. For a split second, Nick felt the ground beneath him submitting to a will other than his own.
“Don’t pay him no mind, Tierra,” Moira said, coming up behind her sister. The cups went quiet as she laid a hand on her shoulder. “Just cause he’s got enough money to burn a wet mule doesn’t mean he can push you out of your store.”
“Actually, Moira Jo,” Nick said, “that’s exactly what it means. And your sister knows it. Don’t you, Miss de Moray?”
Tierra shoved the papers at his chest with surprising force. “Get out of my store.”
“I think you mean my store. Or should I say, Crown Industries’ store?”
The haughty toss of her head reminded Nick of dark warhorses of days past. “Not for the next three days, it isn’t.”
Nick leaned across the counter, drawing close enough to make sure Moira could also hear his whispered words. “Don’t come between me and what I want, Miss de Moray. I would take great pleasure in showing you how much you have to lose.”
He looked straight at Moira and winked.
One last splendid sip of their defeat was all he allowed himself before walking out into an afternoon bruised with storm clouds.
Now, for the others.
Chapter Nine
“What an ass!”
From her vantage point, Moira had a hard time knowing exactly how Tierra meant it.
Nick Kingswood’s hindquarters in a pair of tailored trousers did as much to recommend him as his mouth did to damn him. Well, not his mouth really. That was pretty okay to look at too. He had more mastery over every movement of his face than most men had over their fishing boats.
It was his words that were the trouble.
She watched him until he slid behind the wheel of a Corvette Stingray, a car Moira had seen in a magazine down at Red’s shop. March’s centerfold. She’d damn near torn it out to hang on her ceiling until she thought of the Badger and felt a pang of guilt.
“What are you going to do?” Sunny asked, sliding a steaming latte across the counter to one of the few remaining men who hadn’t fled the shop when Nick stood.
“He is not getting Ambrosia’s,” Tierra said, running an affectionate hand over the scarred wooden counter. “I don’t care if I have to chain myself to the radiator.”
“Somehow I don’t think that’d stop him from bulldozin’ it with you inside.”
Tierra and Sunny turned in unison to look at her.
“He said you had met.” Tierra raised an eyebrow at Moira. “How?”
It had been phrased like a question, but felt more like an accusation.
Moira picked up her damp dishcloth and resumed mopping down the counter. “On the plane over here.”
“Ugh,” Tierra grunted. “You had to share space with that man for five hours?”
“Naw. I got up and left after a while. One of them stuck-up cart monkeys wouldn’t let me sit in first class on account of Cheeto.”
“Whoah,” Sunny marveled. “You flew first class from New Orleans. That had to have been uber pricey.”
“Yeah,” Tierra agreed. “How did you swing that last minute?”
Moira frantically scanned her bleary memories of last night’s lengthy conversation. She had avoided questions of money like a drunk dodges church, but Tierra had been unwilling to let it go.
“Oh, it was one of those last-minute discount things. I was just in the right place at the right time.”
“That’s lucky,” Sunny laughed.
“How much?” The unfiltered weight of Tierra’s full attention came to bear on Moira. She could feel it pricking the back of her neck like push pins.
“Well, I—”
“Psst.”
Moira looked up from the counter to find Tierra face-to-face with Ray Dean. Judging from the way he leaned toward the counter, he’d found a few bottles on his way to the store.
Moira tried to get his attention behind Tierra’s back, but found herself under Sunny’s careful eye.
“Can I help you?” Tierra asked.
“You sure can, darlin’.” His grin fell into a lopsided leer that had Tierra backing away from the counter. “How ‘bout a lil’ of what you did for me last night?”
Tierra crossed her arms over her chest. “Excuse me?”
“Now don’t pretend you don’t remember. I gave you a ride right up to that purty house on—”
“Oh boy!” Moira interrupted, tugging Tierra away. “I think someone’s had a snootful. Sunny, would you mind getting our friend some coffee?”
“You!” Ray Dean bellowed, one leathery finger pointing toward Moira. “It wasn’t her. It was you!”
“What was you?” Tierra asked.
“Nothin’.” Moira ducked away from Dean’s stare and busied herself refilling the container of half and half.
“Pffft.” Ray Dean gave a loose-lipped snort. “What you done for me wasn’t nothin’. Ain’t no one ever sucked the—”
Hot coffee erupted from the cup Sunny carried to the counter and soaked the front of Ray Dean’s shirt. He yelped and scrambled backward, pulling the sodden garment away from his body.
“Oh no,” Sunny apologized. “I am so sorry. I don’t know how that happened.”
“I do.” Tierra’s green gaze went a shade of gray closer to her aunt’s as she grabbed Moira by the upper arm and dragged her through the swinging door to the kitchen.
“Turn me loose!” Moira jerked her arm free, still feeling her sister’s steely grip in her flesh after she released her hold.
“You’re loose enough already!”
The words hit Moira’s chest like a brick. She could feel herself shrinking. That familiar sensation of folding in on herself, knowing that one day, she might just disappear entirely.
“Tell me you didn’t sleep with that truck driver for a ride.”
“I didn’t sleep with that truck driver for a ride.” Technically true. They hadn’t done any sleeping. The sexual part of what she’d given him was the least of it, and yet, as always, it was all folks cared to see.
“So he’s lying?”
“Look, it’s not as simple as you’re tryin’ to make it,” Moira explained.
“Did you have sex with him? Yes, or no?”
“Yes,” Moira. “But it wasn’t—”
“And the pilot? Is that how you got that first class seat?”
“Yes. No. If you’d just listen—” Words tripped over themselves to get to the tip of Moira’s tongue, mixing with tears at the back of her throat to become a paste she could neither swallow nor spit out.
Tierra’s eyes flew open wide with shock. “The men! All the men winking at me in the shop today. All those times you disappeared. Oh, Moira. No. Tell me you didn’t.”
That look.
Pity. Disgust. Fear. Revulsion.
All her life, she had seen it on the faces of women, the only consolation that they couldn’t know her. Didn’t want to know her. She had grown us
ed to seeing it on the faces of strangers.
But now, it was on her own.
Her own face staring back at her like the mirror capable of showing her to herself.
The world had gone to all this trouble to show her exactly what she had always feared. That old hurt. That loathing for everything she was. Everything she wasn’t. The truth she ran from at every turn. She was someone’s idea of a sick joke. Given powers to heal others but damn herself.
She came, and trouble followed.
Well, that part she could fix.
“Your aunt was right. I shouldn’t have come.” She bolted then as she had so many times before. Wasn’t a body in all of Terrebonne Parish that could catch her, and she guessed her sister wouldn’t be able to either. Not in those lace-up sandals, anyway.
“Moira!” Tierra’s cry was nearly swallowed up by the cozy hum of the crowd. “Come back!”
The brass bell clanked in protest at her hasty departure, and she was vaguely aware of knocking tourists away like bowling pins as she tore up the sidewalk.
Rain pelted her face, and the bruised sky overhead rumbled promises of a real downpour. When her wet flip flops slid off her feet, she left them behind. She was faster without them anyhow.
That’s right. Get the hell out of my way.
A clap of thunder punctuated the thought, rattling the windows of buildings sliding by in her peripheral vision.
The streets were clearing, people shaking off their umbrellas at the doorways to cozy restaurants and bars.
She cut a sharp left at what Tierra had told her was the Hastings Building, easily one of Port Townsend’s most venerated landmarks. Its sky-blue paint had darkened with the rain, drops tracing the nooks and crannies of the façade’s cream-colored columns and scalloped windows.
Tires squealed in some distant reality. The scent of burnt rubber mingled with salt air and wet asphalt invaded Moira’s lungs.
“Moira!”
Nick.
She could have picked his voice out even over the howl of hurricane sirens. It pierced her in the same way the loon’s call always did. That otherworldly melancholy beyond human understanding.
If she looked back now, she would stop. The world would catch up with her, and so would he.
Run. All thought concentrated itself around this one word. Cement gave way to wet wooden planks beneath her feet. She could see the ocean beyond and imagined how cool and heavy the water would be in her lungs. Sinking to the bottom like a wrecked ship, she could yield to its siren call of soundless space. Back where she came from. The endless deep pressing quiet hands against her temples to blot out all the pain—her own, and others’.
“Moira, stop!”
Nick’s footfalls echoed behind her like a horse’s galloping gait. Gaining on her. He would overtake her before she could get to the edge.
She spurred herself on, muscles screaming, chest threatening to burst. If she could only make one last…
An abrupt, painful force burst around Moira’s middle, and she was jerked backward, her motion arrested so effectively, she wondered if she had run into an unseen guardrail.
Moira’s gaze whipped back over her shoulder to find Nick with a handful of apron ties.
That piece of shit apron.
A fresh wave of rage sent a stream of obscenities cascading from her tongue.
Nick’s hand closed over her arm almost exactly where Tierra’s had and spun her around. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
Lord, but the man was huge. Not folded into an airline seat, not separated by a counter or some span of distance, he towered over her, his broad shoulders blocking out a stretch of blackened sky. His rain-soaked dress shirt stuck to every slope of muscle on his arms, glued itself to the plains of his chest and ridged stomach.
Dark hair hung in dripping locks over eyes of burning amber. She stared into them with every shred of self-hatred boiling up inside her.
“Let me go!” She pulled against his hold with all the strength she had left, lurching toward the dock’s edge.
“No.” His grip tightened on her arms, giving her something solid to thrash against.
And she did.
Like a wild cat, like an alligator, like every untamed beast she had ever witnessed meeting its end in the hands of a predator against whom there was no victory. She knew her own fight to be just as futile, but didn’t care. Maybe the end would come quicker. Maybe she could bring the curtain down upon them all.
Another clap of thunder stole the end of a throaty growl that served as her only warning. Nick bared his teeth and propelled her backward until the wooden railing sent pain rattling up her spine. The length of his body came flush with hers, pinning her in place. He caught her wrists and forced them away from her chest. They hit the wood with bone-jarring force.
“You can’t win.” Stinging stubble from his jaw rasped against her ear. “Not against me.”
“Don’t bet on it,” she snarled. “You have no idea what I’m capable of.”
“It’s you who have no idea what you’re capable of, Moira. Which is why you will keep destroying every life you touch.”
“What would you know about it?”
“More than you are capable of comprehending.”
“Just let me go. Let me be.” She could hear the strength ebbing from her words the same way it was ebbing from her body. Joining with the raindrops to slide down her body and into the sea.
“So you can run? So you can hide? You think power like yours will be satisfied with that end? You think you know misery now. Wait until what lives inside you has no outlet.”
Moira met Nick’s eyes for the first time since he’d laid hands on her. She searched his face hoping to find the truth promised in his words. “What am I supposed to do?” Her throat closed over the sob she had been strangling her whole life long. “I didn’t ask to be made like this. I didn’t ask for this…this curse. All I ever wanted is to help. But all I ever do is…hurt.”
When the tears leaked from the corners of her eyes, they were as warm on her cheeks as the driving rain was cold.
“What you have is a gift. But it will act like a curse as long as you treat it like one. You force from it only benefit for others. Have you ever, even once, taken pleasure in it for yourself? Have you ever taken anything? Just for yourself. Just because you wanted it? You want your gift to stop devouring everything in its path? Feed it.”
The thunderclap could have been the sound of her ribs cracking open, her heart naked to the open air. She was seen. She was known.
Moira looked at him then. Looked at the ruthless beauty of this stranger laying her bare. “Who are you?”
Nick leaned close enough for her to feel his words cool the drops running in rivulets down her cheeks. “Reckoning.”
Chapter Ten
Never since the earth’s dawning had Nick been surprised.
Until now.
Moira lunged at him with the speed of the lightning that tore the sky above them, and yet she still only made it halfway to him before he crashed into her. The force of their mouths meeting sent searing heat through his lips and into his jaw where it doubled back in a hungry, hollow ache.
She grabbed handfuls of his sodden shirt, her fingers scraping his ribcage through the thin fabric. Her teeth sank into his lower lip and she bit down hard enough to drag a mingled moan of pain and pleasure from his chest. Sharper than a dagger’s point, exquisite and clear, coloring the world around him in a palette more vivid than the human eye could see. Abandoning himself to it would see his cock inside her in less time than it would take to shoot a bullet from a gun.
Her tongue swept across his and he answered in kind, drinking in the heady taste of her. She was the sex-saturated air of sultry spring. The answering call of a mate in the darkness. The end and beginning of a cycle older than time itself.
Her exploration had become a teasing torment, the small, wet tip of her tongue tracing the indentation her teeth had left in his swol
len lower lip. Raindrops in the mouth of a man dying of thirst.
His fingers dove into the wet tangle of her hair to cup her head against retreat. He held her to the force of his passion the way others held torture victims to a flame. He would extract everything he wanted, and more, from her.
What she wanted, she would have to fight him for.
Nick yanked her hair downward, forcing her mouth open to him. He searched the velvet darkness for the words she spat at him in that husky, honeyed voice, but found only a whimper of pleasure. One hand released its hold in her hair to dip downward past her waist to palm the curve of her ass.
Fingers flexed, he ground her hips against him, and brought her to judgment before the hot, hard length she had wrought.
Her low, guttural groan of appreciation sent a sympathetic shiver through the muscles of his back.
She wound her slim arms around his neck and rocked her pelvis against his with a violence that nearly unmanned him. His hands were on her apron then, each grabbing a side and rending the fabric in twain with one brief rip of protest.
He felt her grin against his lips as he shoved his hand beneath the wet fabric of her tank top and found her naked breast. The flesh was moist and cold to the touch, her nipple as cool and hard as a pearl. He rolled the aching bud until it was heated with blood and then caught it between his thumb and forefinger.
He drank her gasp, filling his lungs with her exhaled pleasure. Their breath came in abbreviated pants, unable as they were to inhale with mouths fused in an angry, devouring embrace.
Delicate fingers trailed down his chest and pulled the wadded fabric of his shirt free of his pants. He jumped at the contact of her hand on his bare skin, pulling away from the intensity of the sensation her fingertips created as they played over each taut abdominal muscle.
One quick, silky flick and her cold fingers slid against his hot, pulsing flesh. Breath caught in his throat when her palm grazed the head of his cock.
Power leeched into the rain-slicked fingers wrapping around him, gliding all the way to his root, tightening as they pulled upward with infuriating leisure.
Which Witch is Which? (The Witches of Port Townsend) Page 7