by Holley Trent
Tamatsu picked up the bowl and brought it slowly to Noelle’s lips. Smelled like soup. She took a tentative sip.
Not too hot, so she swallowed more.
“Ooh! Get a load of this. I’ve been dying to tell you.” Jenny clasped her hands together and her eyes went round with excitement. “I was in Maria earlier listening to Willa rant about Blue and his so-called ‘domineering dogs’ and we passed by an empty storefront. You could have an office there and I could live over it. Has a studio apartment on the second floor. Shortest commute ever. That should make winters much easier, don’t you think?”
Noelle mouthed, “What?” She didn’t know what the hell she was going to do with a storefront.
“For your real estate business, Noelle.”
Oh!
Noelle took another swallow of soup.
“I took some liberties,” Tamatsu said. “The space was up for sale, and someone was about to put an offer in.”
“He totally scooped him,” Jenny said with a cackle.
Noelle peered back at him, eyes narrowed. “With what funds, sir? Did you kill something large that had a valuable pelt?”
Actually, she wasn’t so sure she wanted to know. She liked being able to pretend she didn’t know some things.
“Gulielmus loaned me the money.”
Silent groans were so very unsatisfying. Apparently, she’d have to find a new physical response for disgust.
“I know,” Tamatsu said. “I don’t like owing people favors, either, but he could access the cash quickly and he won’t gloat about it.” He grunted. “Much.”
“Is Clarissa all right? When I last saw her and him, they were …”
Tutting, he put the bowl to her lips again. “Clarissa is fine.”
Jenny cringed and rocked back on her heels. “She’s a survivor, that one. Don’t worry about her, Noe. She’ll get him straightened out, I’m sure of it.” Her expression opened up and brightened in a snap. “Ooh! She’s gonna visit Maria soon. She has some friends in town. We can all go out cavorting like old times.”
Noelle snorted silently, and wondered if it was actually a good thing that people couldn’t hear the multitude of rude sounds she tended to make.
“Anyhow.” Jenny rocked back onto her heels again and a gentle smile spanned her lips. “I’d best go find out what about that closing date.”
“Have you forgotten that I need to carry you?” Tamatsu asked.
Jenny closed one eye and rolled the other. “I did.”
He set down the soup bowl, bundled Noelle tightly in her nest of blankets, and stood with her. “We’ll all go. I’ll set you down in Maria and I’ll carry her to her place in Vegas. Give Tarik a poke later if you need to move around.”
“Aye, aye. Let me just check that cookstove.”
Jenny ensured that the fire in the stove was out, and then joined Tamatsu and Noelle in the corner. She hooked an arm around his, and nodded.
Tamatsu whisked them into Lola’s salon in Maria.
Or at least, Noelle thought he did.
She arrived a split second before them and hit the hard floor tailbone first.
“Fuck!” she shouted, but of course, there was no sound from her. Still hurt her throat the same as if she had yelled.
There were plenty of laughing sounds from Tamatsu, though, who scooped her up.
The goddess, knitting in the corner, furrowed her brow.
“Did you teleport ahead of me?” he asked Noelle.
“Did I?” Her sore ass certainly felt like she’d done something unexpected like that. She was undernourished and her usual padding was gone. She couldn’t even rub the damned thing because there were witnesses.
He scoffed. “What else are you borrowing from me through the tether?”
“I …” She gave her head a wild shake. “I honestly have no idea.” More things she wasn’t sure she wanted to know yet, but she’d need to find out soon. If she were drawing on power from someone as dangerous as Tamatsu, she could accidently hurt people. She preferred to only hurt people on purpose, and only the people she’d chosen.
“Huh.”
Jenny hurried over to them, squealing, and thumped Noelle’s arm. “Ooh, fun! New tricks, huh? I wonder what else will pop up the longer you’re together. Maybe you’ll even get your voice back.”
Noelle wasn’t going to hold her breath, but it was nice idea.
“Hey, want to come with me?” Jenny asked. “I need to talk to that odd duck who sold us the shop.”
Lola grimaced and set down her needles. “I suppose I’d best escort you and do what I can to divert him. He’s been spreading rumors about people materializing out of thin air.” She gave Tamatsu a scathing look, and then peered at Noelle, bundled in her blankets.
Noelle wriggled her eyebrows at her and worked her hand free enough to give her a finger wave over the top.
Lola gave her one of those goddess nods that could have meant everything or absolutely nothing.
Noelle didn’t have time to ponder which, because Tamatsu whisked her away.
“Not you. You rest.” He laid her down on her bed, peeled away the blanket and her robe, and whisked all that material to the closet—likely to the hamper. “Going to bathe you, feed you, and …”
She raised a brow. “Seduce me?”
He cleared his throat and retreated into the bathroom. The sound of water pelting the tub bottom thundered, and he emerged with his shirtsleeves rolled up to expose muscular forearms.
He pressed his hands to the bed’s edge for a moment and stared at her.
She stared back, not knowing what else to do.
“Odd, not being hungry all the time,” he said. “Odd being able to decide that I can eat later instead of right now.”
She walked her fingers over to one of his hands. “And have sex later?”
She didn’t understand her fixation on the matter, but she was going to roll with it.
He shrugged. “If I ravage you, it’s because you want and need me to, and not because I have to.”
“When you ravage me, then.” She grinned.
The last thing she needed was to be thinking about sex when she could hardly hold her head up straight, but he was so pretty, and his voice … did things to her. She tugged her lower lip between her teeth and wriggled her eyebrows at him.
“Behave.”
“No.” She danced her fingertips up his arm and shoulder, and over to his collar. She pulled him close and pressed her lips to his—barely a touch, not really a kiss. “And just so you know, I’d do it again and again. If your hunger returns, I’ll push it back.”
“I won’t let you.”
“You can’t stop me. I don’t mind sleeping for a couple of weeks if that’ll make you comfortable exponentially longer.”
Tamatsu grunted and kissed her before lifting her. “I don’t want to lose you for weeks at a time. Even if you recover from the gifts, I don’t like the idea of you carving off part of yourself for me.”
“I’m sure you’ll find ways of occupying yourself. Time will fly.”
He bent and turned off the water in the tub. After testing the temperature with his hand, he set her into the bath and peeled off his own clothing.
Once he’d settled himself into the water behind her, legs bent, and knees jutting from the surface, she added, “I’m happy with the way things are. Truly. I wanted to give that to you. I wanted to show you what you meant to me.”
He kissed the top of her head and stirred his hand in the water in front of her. “And so now I’ll get to spend forever showing you what you mean to me.”
“Forever.” She shook with unvoiced laughter. “I hardly think it’ll take that long.”
“I know. But I will, anyway, because I love you.”
She couldn’t say it back aloud, but she could still show him with her lips. She turned and kissed his roughly. She grabbed at his cheeks, his hair, his shoulders and sparred with his tongue before dizziness flared and she had to sett
le back into her cozy spot in front of him.
He chuckled and reached for a washcloth. “Yes, I think you’ll adapt fine to not having a voice. You don’t need to talk if you’re going to kiss like that. Just don’t do that to anyone else. I might have to kill them.”
She sighed, and snorted, not that that anyone could hear either. She really was a rude elf, and—voice or no voice—that wasn’t ever going to change.
Fortunately, her angel didn’t seem to mind one bit.
Acknowledgments
I’d like to give special thanks to Chell Morrow for being my Masters of Maria backup brain and for poking me about my epic-length sentences.
(I’m glad you could tell what I meant, even when I couldn’t).
About the Author
Holley Trent is an award-winning and USA Today bestselling author who’s written dozens of paranormal romances. She didn’t have cable during her formative years, so her sense of humor was molded by Britcoms on public television, watching Coming to America several hundred times, Lucille Ball, and three out of four Golden Girls. She’s married with two kids and two cats, and no one in her house can tell when she’s being sarcastic.
So you don’t miss future stories about Willa, Blue, and other delinquents in Maria, New Mexico, sign up for Holley’s paranormal romance newsletter at: http://holleytrent.com/blog/newsletter-sign-up/.
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A Sneak Peek from Crimson Romance
The Cougar’s Pawn
Holley Trent
CHAPTER ONE
Ellery Colvard zipped her sweatshirt up to her chin and tugged her bandana down so it covered her ears from the freezing Utah air. “I hate you both,” she said to her friends.
Miles, shuddering on her little corner of the rapidly deflating air mattress, wore a broad grin. A manic grin. Ellery had known the woman for ten years, and thus knew the smile was as phony as that Gucci purse Ellery had bought out of some guy’s trunk last Christmas. Momma hadn’t figured out it was fake yet, and given their tumultuous relationship as of late, Ellery didn’t care if she ever did.
“Pretty sure the fifty states camping trip bucket list was your idea, precious,” Miles said sweetly.
Teeth chattering, Ellery shook her head. “No. It was Hannah’s. I was too drunk to say no.”
Hannah sighed and rapidly chafed her thin arms. “Okay, maybe it was my idea, but it was Miles’s idea to run down the states in reverse alphabetical order. We could have been in California right now.”
“Yeah, I was definitely drunk when I suggested that,” Miles said. “But in my own defense, what woman in her right mind—especially a woman as educated as you two are—would give a flying frick about the specific order they received their torture in? Y’all, it all sucks equally, if you ask me. Which I guess you did. Why did I say yes to this?”
Ellery turned her gaze to the tent’s sagging fabric above them and sighed. Try as they might, they couldn’t get the stakes positioned right, and this wasn’t their first camping rodeo by a long shot. “If we’d done Alaska first, it would have probably also been the last,” she groused. “I hear the bears up there could shit out a human being completely undigested.”
“For God’s sake, screw the bears,” Hannah said. “The people around us are bad enough. So damned hunky-dory. Happy smiley people in their head-to-toe Patagonia gear who’ve barely gotten their boots broken in.” She wound her long blond braid around her index finger again and again and let her knee bob. “I actually hate camping. I did it so much as a kid with my dad and brothers, and I hated it back then, too. It’s just so inconvenient.”
“But you agreed,” Ellery said. She leveled her friend with an incendiary glare, but Hannah was unmoved. Didn’t even flinch. Ellery should have expected that. Southern women couldn’t use the stare on each other. They were born immune to it from everyone except their own grandmothers. No one was immune to a granny stare. When Granny gave that look, a little girl would sit up straight and get the scrunch off her face immediately.
Hannah shrugged. “I just thought it was time I did something more adventurous than chasing butt-naked practical joker patients down the hospital halls. So sue me.”
“Thanks for bringing us down with you, girl.” Ellery pulled her leggings-covered knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around her shins. Her damned coat was too snug and too short to pull over them. “Who would have thought it’d get down to forty degrees in Utah in the middle of the summer?”
“Might have something to do with that hail storm coming through,” Hannah said. “I think I caught something about that on the radio when I was at the Jeep.”
“Hail storm?” Ellery’s voice careered to that stratospheric pitch her sister Gail had been trying to coach out of her for the past year. When Ellery got agitated, she got shrieky, but who could blame her? She wouldn’t get so freakin’ frustrated all the time if crazy shit didn’t keep happening to her.
She took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and concentrated on the sharp sting of her nails against her palms.
Deep breath.
Deep breath.
Anxiety gets in the way of clear thoughts.
She pushed her panic away on an exhalation and opened her eyes. When she spoke again, she wanted her voice to be level. Calm. “So, Hannah, you didn’t think that, perhaps, with the storm coming that we’d like to get under some cover more than a millimeter thick? Or did being in this dinky tent while hail and wind pelted it sound like a proper adventure to you?”
Ellery could handle a little wind. She was a goddamned witch, for crying out loud, and her magic was tied up in air and weather. She could buffer them a little, at least for a while, but Hannah and Miles didn’t know that. In the ten years they’d been friends, Ellery had never told them what she was. Folks like her played their cards close to their chests. No one was “out,” and knowing too much about the supernatural world wasn’t necessarily a good thing. Sympathizers sometimes became targets, and Ellery had been fighting off boogeymen of the demonic and minor-god sort frequently during the past year. It was all Gail’s fault. At least, that’s what Ellery liked to tell her. It wasn’t really, but Gail hooking up with that gorgeous half-demon witch had a little something to do with their goddess zillion-times great-grandmother coming out of the woodworks and raising Hell—somewhat literally—a year ago.
Nope. The girls didn’t need to know about that.
“Next time, warn a girl, would ya?” Ellery muttered.
“Shhh!” Miles hissed, and she put one index finger on each friend’s lips.
Ellery grunted. She loved her friend like a sister, but she was shivering so hard that she could see sounds and feel colors. Her patience was edging ever-closer to cut-a-bitch territory, but that dull-ass knife on the multi-purpose tool she’d bought at Camper’s Paradise before their last ill-fated trip couldn’t cut cheese, much less flesh. Her fingernails would have to do.
She nudged back one cuff and studied her nails. Oh yes. Nice and jagged.
“Did you see that?” Miles’s pale eyes went wide in the dim light and her gaze flitted from the tent slit to each corner of the enclosure in search of some phantom shape only she had seen.
“See what?” Ellery whispered.
“Don’t do this to me, tramp,” Hannah hissed, and she grabbed Miles’s wrist. “So help me God, if I have to get my gun out of the Jeep to feel safe enough to sleep tonight, you’re gonna—”
Wind whipped around the trio, blowing maps and paper wrappers around them as their tent peeled back in one easy yank, exposing them to the elements.
“What the hell?” Ellery scrambled to her feet intending to chase the tent, but no sooner had she turned did a rough hand clap over her mouth and another over her eyes.
When then the hand on her mouth retreated, she tried to open her mouth to scream only to find her lips were taped together.
Memories of the last time someone had gagge
d her came rushing back, and her heart rate soared.
No. No! Not again.
She wrenched her body around and swung her arms, trying to make contact with her assaulter and vaguely registering her friends’ wild movements in her periphery, but he moved around her with a silken ease and pulled a hood over her head.
“Mmmf!” she mumbled, and the attacker grabbed her around the thighs and heaved her up to one broad shoulder.
She kicked, flailed her arms, and thrashed her fists against his back.
He held her tighter, and his hot energy enveloped her, stealing her breath for a moment. It was like stepping into a sauna—stifling and uncomfortable at first, but moments later it was soothing. No. Enervating. She could fall asleep in his grip.
She didn’t know what he was, exactly, only that he wasn’t human. Wasn’t witch, either. She’d know a witch, even if she didn’t know what kind he was.
“Let’s go before the park ranger drives by,” the giant said in a bland voice, far too calm for a man participating in an abduction attempt.
It was a deep voice. Low and rumbling in his chest and a sound as smooth as the one the cello Ellery played as a teen made. She wondered, briefly, if the Neanderthal in possession of that sexy voice had a face to match. Baritones seemed to be in such short supply where she lived, and she’d much rather hear her name called out in the throes of passion in a nice bass than in a strained tenor. Because that was so important at the moment.
She gave herself a thump to the forehead to reboot her common sense and started kicking again.
“What about their stuff?” another deep voice behind them asked.
Sounded like the owner of that voice was straining a bit. I hope one of the girls is giving him hell.
“Ooo!” Ellery said behind her tape, meaning good! When Miles got squirrely, she fought dirty. She’d seen it time and time again when they did kickboxing classes at their gym. Instructors always thought Miles was an easy target because she was so darned cute. Well, Miles wasn’t beneath the occasional low blow. Really low. She was short.