Something mystical, no doubt, but not romantic. Certainly not love. They’d only known each other for a few days, after all.
He kissed her inadvertent tears, whispered his concern, pulled her toward and away from him letting his shaft slip the slightest bit in, then out as fast. A new experience, always to remember. Never to have with another. It wasn’t possible.
Pay attention to the signs. Words to live by. But she’d missed the biggest sign of all: sex for sport—a warning she’d ignored. And yet that’s all she’d ever wanted . . . until King.
She took him in, and he stopped controlling her. At his entry, her sharp burst of pleasure took her by surprise. His thickness and length stretched her, amazing, wondrous. He touched new pleasure points, deeper points, yet he raised her up. Rapture, and he’d barely entered her.
They moaned into each other’s mouths.
Yes, he was the king or commander. Whatever. She’d never had a lover like him. Not that she’d had many, but last night had been better than all four.
Their presence in this Goddess cathedral was more than serendipity. It was synchronicity, the earth and all its elements in alignment so she could be here with King, lost to the world, but more alive than ever.
Here, she found her true self. Mating with King. She could do that. She didn’t need him to return any sentiment. Knowing how she felt, however premature, was enough.
The hot water added to their buoyant play, as they rode in harmony, her climax close, so close . . . yet he kept pushing it away, making her reach. He rode her hard. Someone screamed. Her. Him? Both of them.
Over the edge in a rush down the far side of a rainbow they went, then over the falls into the sea, until they bobbed and drifted.
Heat pooled between her legs. A loss. He’d left her. Empty. She whimpered, and he consoled her.
Nothing would be as beautiful as the experience they’d left behind. But when she opened her eyes, she saw beauty in his whiskey gaze. Concern. Caring. Honest and true. No walls. Vulnerable. Open to being cared for.
His vulnerability wouldn’t last, but she’d cherish the moment. She kissed him and drew the nectar of the Goddess from his lips, abundance, joy. Entwining her shaky limbs with his, she drifted toward sleep, her cheek against his chest, his chin on her head, him cradling her as she floated free, warmed by the water that surrounded them like babes in the womb.
“Harmony, darling, wake up.” Prince Charmy kissed her awake.
She opened her eyes. “Oh, it’s you.”
“Who did you expect?”
“Prince Charmy. He called me his darling in my dream. Couldn’t have been you.” She read King’s confusion. “It’s a fairy-tale dream I’ve carried around forever. My sisters make fun of me.”
“What? I’m not good enough to be your prince?”
“Good? You’re spectacular. But I never thought of Charmy in the sexual sense.”
“Well, there’ll be no happily ever after for you without sex, Orgasmatron. Time to upgrade the fairy tale.”
“True enough. Look at us making love in nature’s sacred place. I’m living a fairy tale, after all.”
“Not for much longer. The air’s getting cooler, if that’s possible. Time to swim out and see if there’s an escape route to be had before the sun goes down, or we’re gonna have a long, cold night.”
“You’re aces at warm-ups,” she said. “We’ll make our own heat.”
His laugh lines triple crinkled this time. She pushed off his chest and swam away. “King Paxton. I think you do know how to smile.”
“Great guns, sunshine, don’t tell anyone, especially not Aiden or Morgan, or my hard-ass rep will never recover.”
King’s walls remained down, Harmony realized, as they swam the serpentine spring toward a wide, round opening in a cliff, like a window to the sea. They held to its granite edge to look down on a suicide ledge of thorny rock, warm water sluicing past them over their hands, roaring down the side of the cliff into the sea a hundred feet below.
“Is that a dolphin?” she asked. “Never mind. It can’t be.”
“Yes it can. I saw dolphins around the island when I was a kid. Not long ago, a Newburyport whale watch tour had more than a hundred Atlantic dolphins playing around their boat.”
Harmony pulled herself up on the edge of the opening to see if she could find more.
“Hey,” King said, “you have a mermaid tattoo at the base of your spine.”
Harmony slid back into the water. “Really? Who knew?”
“I’ve never seen a mermaid on a woman. Men yes, all the time. That’s natural, but not on women. What gives?”
“Mia is a symbol of the Goddess and of female sexuality. The mermaid is a water spirit capable of utilizing the energy of the sea.”
“You named her, like you named your dolphin vibrators. Why does that turn me on?”
“Everything turns you on.”
“Everything about you ,” he said, but she read his regret for the disclosure. “Pretend I’m a sea captain,”
he said to distract her, “and take me down.”
“To the sea in ships? That’s a myth. Mermaids don’t lure men to their deaths. Men go willingly, too stupid to realize that if they follow a mermaid into the ocean, they can’t breathe. Mermaids have saved many a man from his death.”
“I didn’t mean to upset you.”
Harmony shrugged. “No man has ever seen Mia. I thought of her as . . . a rite of passage, except, well, I planned to share her with someone special.”
“I’m special.”
“But you’re not the one .”
“The one? Oh, ‘the one .’ ” King put some water distance between them. “No. No, I’m not. That’s a beautiful waterfall,” he said, scared spitless. “I’ve seen it from my boat.”
“What kind of boat?” she asked, changing the subject so he wouldn’t have a coronary.
“You never ask the expected question. My boat’s a beauty, a ninety-foot wooden schooner called The Sea Horse .”
“You’re kidding? I love sailing, and I love sea horses. I have a sea horse tattoo.”
He swam closer. “Seriously? Where?”
“That’s for you to find out.”
He put his arm around her shoulder. “Do you want to know if we can get out of here or not?”
She shrugged. “I know we can’t.”
“How do you know?”
“Your body language. You’re being protective. We’re sunk, you’ll pardon the pun, and Mia had nothing to do with it.”
“Mia is not under suspicion, but we are up the hot springs without a paddle.”
“At least it’s not a swamp of eternal stink, and we won’t go hungry. We have bananas.”
“If they’re not mush, they’re black by now. I dropped them on the way down.”
“I know. They arrived before you did, and I rescued them. Frozen bananas are awesome, especially with chocolate sauce . . . like sex. Hot fudge sounds especially good right now.” She shivered.
“Here, let’s get away from the cool sea breeze and swim underwater to get warm on our way to lunch.”
Beneath the green blue surface, they kissed and teased, frolicked and chased, and Harmony felt like a mermaid, cavorting with ‘the one ’ fate intended for her. Wow, she was a sucker for a fairy tale.
Pulling her attention from King and futile fairy tales, she looked down to see the white caps of the stalagmites below them. So the spring was a relatively new addition to the cavern. She surfaced, sluicing water from her face and hair from her eyes. “What about the source of the spring?” she asked as King surfaced. “Maybe we could find our way out that way.”
“The source has to be somewhere beneath the cavern floor beyond the spot where we made love,” he said.
The roar of the falls was nothing to the sound of her heart roaring in her ears. He said they’d made love.
He misspoke, of course, but, wo
w, he didn’t catch himself. The poor man needed rescuing in more than the usual way.
“I’ll bet I can’t find a banana as big as your pecker,” she said, diving beneath the surface to race him back to the cavern.
Chapter Twenty-three
HOW stupid was he? If he was ever going to stroke out, King thought, this would be the time. When had he ever thought of sex as making love? He didn’t even consider the phrase viable.
Good thing the hellcat was pragmatic and comfortable with her sexuality. He might not have gotten away with that slip with another woman. He liked Harmony. Usually, if he liked a woman, he couldn’t have sex with her, or if they had sex, friendship was out of the question. Harmony was different. “You ever have a man friend?” he asked, resurfacing to find her waiting.
“No, I grew up in a convent. What the hell kind of question is that? Of course I’ve had men friends. You thought I was a virgin?”
“See, there you go mixing sex partner with friend . That’s why men and women can’t be friends. Women don’t have it in them.”
“Whoa. Wait a minute. Are you asking me to be your friend? Because you didn’t blooming say it that way. You asked—”
“I get my mistake,” he said. “Yeah, I think we could be friends.”
“Friends . . . who . . . have sex together?”
“I love the idea! Perfect, isn’t it? No commitments. No dating pressure. No, ‘why didn’t you call?’ We could play it by ear, do lunch, catch a quickie, roust a ghost, fight a jack-in-the-box.”
“Yeah,” she said with a raised brow. “I do those things with all my friends .”
“So . . . our friendship would be unique. I can live with that. You?” He pulled himself from the water and sprinted to the bananas.
“King Paxton, don’t you move!”
He froze.
She scoffed. “What do you have on your back?”
He lowered his head. “Busted.”
“You bet, bozo. A mermaid tattoo. No wonder you went overboard about men getting them and not women. Care to explain?”
“My feet are freezing. Can I come back in the water first?”
“Only if you bring the bananas.”
Raising them, he streaked back and jumped in, his arm raised to protect the bananas.
“Black,” he said, surfacing. “I told you.”
“Edible,” she said. “Mermaid?”
King sighed. “We were sailing The Sea Horse in the Pacific, anchored near an island, went exploring, got rip-roaring too-stupid-to-live drunk, and we all got tattoos.”
“We being? You, Aiden, and Morgan?”
“Who else?”
“What kind of tattoos did they get?”
King laughed. “Mine is tame compared to theirs. Aiden’s, well, never mind. You’ll never know, because I swore I’d never tell, or die.”
“That bad?”
King shook his head, but he chuckled. “I got a mermaid because I liked her curves.” He skimmed his hand up Harmony’s hip and along the side of a breast as he said it. “Like yours.”
“Speaking of which . . .” She broke off a huge banana, felt him up beneath the water, then she felt up the banana. “See, it just doesn’t measure up.”
“Well, you gave it a pretty hard workout.”
“I mean the banana, dumb ass.”
“Hey, is that a name to call a friend?”
She laughed. What a sound. Like tinkling glass stars. He took a lock of her hair, brought it to his nose, and sniffed. “Peppermint’s gone.”
She reared back. “I’ll wash it again. You smelled the peppermint? You got a nose like a bloodhound, or what?”
“It’s normal enough,” he said. “Like what’s that perfume you use? Makes a man really take notice.”
“I make it myself. It’s patchouli, frangipani, and honey-suckle oils.”
“You should bottle it.”
“I’m sure somebody already has,” she said. “What are the three scents you remember most from your childhood?”
He didn’t have to think long. “Chipped beef, shoe polish, sweat.”
“In the summer?”
“Military camp. Same smells.”
“Some childhood.”
“You’re right. It sucked. But I always got a couple of weeks here on the island. That was cool. What three scents do you remember from your childhood?”
“Patchouli oil, smudge sticks, fresh lavender. I was always trying spells to bring my mother back and turn us into a family.”
“You were a baby witch.”
Her laugh charmed the pants off him. No, those were already off. All the better to—
“Like you were a baby soldier. We’re pathetic. No wonder we play well together. We never played as kids.”
“If I knew about spells for families, I probably would have tried a few.”
“Watch and learn.” She took a banana and raised it in the air:
“In the cave of the Goddess
Mid the glitter of jeweled dew
Grant these poor souls a family
Hearts and homes to return to
Loved ones to cherish,
Nurture, protect, and love
So below as above
All that’s holy, hear my plea
Harm it none; this is my will; so mote it be.”
“Did you just spell us a family?”
“Not that it ever worked, but yeah. Who knows, maybe one of these days, our absentee parents will land on our respective doorsteps. I assumed yours were absent, with military school and all. Where were they?”
“My mother was/is career army. I lived at home with my dad until he ran off with a hairdresser. Then I lived at school. You?”
“A woman hairdresser?” she asked.
He laughed.
“Hey, I like that sound.” Harmony echoed his thoughts of her. “It’s a rusty laugh, but I could get attached. My mother ran before they cut the cord. Flew the nest before Dad came to pick us up from the hospital.”
“That’s why you said you and your sisters raised each other?”
“Yep. Dad was an absentee father even when he was present, usually with a liquor bottle in his hand.
Now he’s flown the coop, too. Maybe he found my mother, and they’re lost together.”
“My father wanted a woman who hung around. The hairdresser hung, until he died, actually, but she didn’t want me hanging with them. I know, because I asked.”
Harmony placed her head on his chest and stroked his arm, and King thought her empathy felt almost as good as sex. “It’s hard to ask for family support,” she said. “I’ve done it, too. We found our older sister—from my father’s first marriage—when we needed her most. She didn’t know we existed, but she took us in. Her name’s Vickie. She was our best break ever. The shop was hers. Now we’re partners.”
This was getting too touchy-feely for him. He needed to get them back to earth. “You want a banana for dessert?” he asked.
“No thanks. Maybe we should save a couple for breakfast.” She made curls in his wet chest hair. “We can have each other for dessert.”
King set the bananas by the pool and floated into the kiss. He liked her sexual willingness. Ah, who was he kidding? He liked a lot of things about her. He wanted to make her childhood better. Weird. He lifted her and impaled her as they kissed. She sighed and moved along his shaft. Slick, sweet, and hungry, a seductress, pleasure her only goal. Life didn’t get any better than this.
A cough echoed in the cavern, and Harmony pulled from the kiss. She looked over his shoulder. “Hey, scraggly stud muffin. How come you keep finding us like this? You a Peeping Tom or something?”
“I’m a disappointed rescuer, is what I am. And I’m thinking this doesn’t bode well for our upcoming date.”
“It doesn’t,” King said, turning Aiden’s way, using his body to hide Harmony’s. “You want to turn around so the lady
can dress?”
“Sure, but . . .” Aiden picked up the lemon lace panties and bra and inspected them.
“Give me the damned things,” King snapped.
“How about I give them to the lady?” Aiden asked hypothetically, as he gathered the rest of Harmony’s things and put them on the edge of the spring.
King helped her out of the water and watched her dress, well, he guarded her privacy while she dressed.
Yeah, right. That’s what he was doing, but he couldn’t find her sea horse tattoo before she gave him his clothes.
Harmony slicked her wet hair back and went to Aiden. “How did you get down here?”
“The same way you did, I presume?” He indicated the ice slide.
“Funny, we didn’t hear you coming.”
“We shouted our heads off. Thought you cracked yours in the fall.”
“I’ll bet we were underwater,” Harmony said.
“Swimming,” Aiden said, “that’s what you were doing?”
“Are they down there?” Morgan called.
“They are.” Aiden tied a rope around Harmony’s waist. “Here comes Harmony. Take care.” He tugged on the rope, and she slid up the slippery slope.
Aiden faced him. “You’re gonna hurt that girl bad when you dump her. I hate to see it happen, because she’s a hell of a lot better than the usual.”
“She and I are friends,” King said, sounding foolish even to himself.
Aiden barked a laugh. “If you’re only friends, then I’m damned well gonna take her out on that date, after all.”
“It’s up to her,” King said, itching again to hit something or someone. He and Harmony must be friends.
She made him laugh, the way she was laughing with Morgan above them right now. She asked things he
hated talking about, but her, he answered. Who knew you could talk to a woman? They were more than sex partners. He had no hold on her, but as her friend, he’d warn her off Aiden. She wasn’t looking for commitment, but Aiden was tired of roaming, even if he didn’t know it yet.
King rode the rope up to the cave and put an arm around Harmony, as if he’d missed her. He thanked Morgan, and Aiden, when he joined them, but he didn’t think Harmony’s thank-you kisses were necessary. “Where are the bicycles?” he asked.
Sex and the Psychic Witch Page 13