MIDNIGHT PLEASURES

by Amanda Ashley, Sherrilyn Kenyon, Maggie Shayne, Ronda Thompson

  "Thank you for not interrupting."

  He blinked, surprised. "You knew I was here the whole time," he said, and it wasn't really a question. He had a feeling this woman was as aware of him as he was of her.

  She smiled. The firelight on her face did something to her eyes. She'd been beautiful to him when he'd seen her at the studio today. Beautiful, though it made no sense. It wasn't on the surface, certainly not when she'd stood flanked by two of the most glamorous beauties in the business, wearing a rather conservative skirt and blazer, her hair in a bun, her face lightly made up. His sense of her beauty had been based on something inside her, something not seen.

  Now, it was more. Now, like this, she was stunning. Inside and out.

  "You can come out by the fire, if you like. I've already taken up the circle." As she spoke, she walked back toward the fire. "Grab those two folding chairs and bring them along, will you?"

  He glanced to his left, saw two beach chairs sitting there. He picked them up and carried them with him across the sand to where she waited, setting them near the fire.

  She sat down, and he did the same. He couldn't seem to stop looking at her, trying to nail what it was that drew him. There was something wildly attractive about her. Forbidden and natural. Her eyebrows were fuller than most women wore them these days, and her hair—God, her hair was everywhere. Untamed, long and wavy, its color a lustrous honey-tinted brown that glowed bronze in the firelight. Her feet were bare, coated in damp sand. Her breasts were heavy and unbound underneath the loose, flowing dress she wore. He liked that best of all. The weight of them. He wanted to touch, to feel.

  "I'm surprised to see you here," she said. Was she nervous? She should be. He didn't know what the hell this was, but it made him nervous, too.

  "I told you I'd see you later. I always say what I mean." He reached up, impulsively, to brush a bit of sand from her cheek. But the moment his fingers touched her skin, she stiffened and pulled back, her brows drawing together in a frown.

  "I'm sorry." He drew his hand away, held it in midair.

  She only blinked, looking him over. "It's not you—it's… Stand up a second, Alex."

  He was puzzled, but he rose. She did, too, going closer to the fire and bending to pick up a large shell with some dried leaves inside. She took a flaming stick from the fire and touched it to the leaves. They blazed a little. She blew gently until the flames died, and smoke billowed. Then she moved toward him, knelt in front of him, and blew the smoke at his legs and feet.

  Alex closed his eyes in a mingling chaos of anguish and desire. God, she was killing him.

  She moved behind him, still blowing. Then higher, her breaths pushing smoke toward his thighs and buttocks. She came around to the front of him again, blowing gently at his groin.

  "Jesus," he muttered, and his hands twitched, wanting to bury themselves in her hair. He fought the urge and hoped she didn't notice how hard he was getting, but hell, he was only human, and there was an earthy wild woman kneeling in front of him blowing on his crotch.

  She stood, still moving around him, still blowing gently, wafting smoke over his belly and chest, his back and sides, his arms and shoulders, his neck, face, and head.

  When she finished, she blew a little smoke at his chair and the area where he'd been sitting. "Better?" she asked.

  He looked down at himself, frowning. When he managed to look past the fact that he was more turned on than he'd been in a decade, he realized he felt… different. As if he'd just stepped out of the shower. And the dull ache that had been knotting his lower back all day was gone. "Yeah," he said. "I do feel better."

  "You should. You were practically reeking with negative energy."

  "Yeah?" He sniffed his shirtsleeve. "And now I'm reeking of… ?"

  "Sage." She smiled at him, sitting down in her chair, nodding for him to do the same. "Who have you been hanging around with lately, anyway?"

  "What do you mean?"

  She shrugged. "Well, I'd hate to think all that darkness in your aura was coming from you. It couldn't, or I wouldn't be so—" She bit her lip, stopped herself. "You must be picking it up somewhere else."

  "You wouldn't be so… ?" He searched her eyes and wondered which one of them was going to be the first to admit that they were each sitting here thinking about ripping the other's clothes off.

  She averted her gaze. "Nothing. I just… nothing."

  He licked his lips. No, he wouldn't bring it up. Not just yet, he decided. "Could it be the actresses?"

  "They're nasty, self-centered, and vain, but I don't think they're malicious. This feels… dark."

  He shrugged, averting his eyes, ignoring the warning bells going off in his mind. He'd been feeling the same way himself for weeks now. As if there was some dark shadow clinging to him like a parasite. He was tired, moody, didn't feel well. He kept thinking it might be the house. But damn, he didn't want it to be the house.

  Time to change the subject. "So what were you doing when I arrived? Magic?"

  "Not really."

  It was not the specific answer he would have liked. "Listen, you have the job. This isn't a test. But I want to know more."

  "About what I was doing when you arrived?"

  He held her eyes. "For starters." She just looked at him, waiting, as if she knew he wasn't being honest.

  "All right," he admitted. "What I really want is the truth. What really goes on?"

  Her brows rose. He decided he liked them. You couldn't tell what a woman was thinking when her eyebrows had been reduced to a pair of plucked, waxed, colored, and extremely thin arches. Hers were expressive. Now they were expressing—what? Surprise?

  "What really goes on?" she repeated.

  "Not the kinds of things you would normally reveal to an outsider. I want the truth. I want to know what it's really like. Ritual magic. Covens. Spells. Curses. All of it."

  She lowered her eyes. "I'm not sure you have the stomach for it, Alex."

  His stomach knotted up when her lips formed his name and her voice spoke it. He tried to shake off the feeling. What he was asking her was important. More important than she could know. "I have the stomach for anything you can dish out."

  She tipped her head to one side, meeting his eyes once again. Hers glittered with something close to anger. "Are you sure? We're talking about some pretty heavy stuff here. Bloodletting. Ritual orgies. Animal sacrifice. The Scourge."

  He held her eyes, his own unflinching. "I can handle it."

  She pursed her lips and turned her head away. "We don't do any of that stuff, Alex. My God, where do you get those ideas? This is a spiritual belief system, not a cult." Lowering her head, she shook it slowly. "You created the show—are you telling me you didn't do any research at all?"

  "Of course I did. I just—lately I've learned some things that contradict what I thought I knew."

  "From whom?"

  He shook his head. He wasn't going there, not with her.

  "Tell you what," she said. "I'll loan you a book or two, so you can read up on the subject. And then we'll talk some more. All right?"

  She's lying.

  He frowned, ignoring that whisper in his mind. "You're going to give me one of those light, fluffy, 'harm none' books, aren't you?"

  "Harm none is one of the core values of the Craft, Alex."

  "So you all keep telling me."

  "We all?" she asked. Then she frowned. "You sound as if you've been doing some digging on your own."

  He nodded, getting to his feet, frustrated and angry. Even more angry that he didn't want to leave this spot, this woman. He wanted to stay. For her, not the information he sought. "I really hoped you'd be different. Willing to tell me the truth," he said. "I'm disappointed that you're only giving me the same party line as the rest of the so-called Witches in town."

  "So-called?" She got up as well. "Maybe if you told me just what it is you're looking for?"

  He sighed, shaking his head. "Look, Melissa, not every character in
this show is a do-gooder. I mean, we need opposing forces. Villains. The polar opposite of good Witches who play around with white light and moonbeams."

  She stood very still, pinning him to the spot with her eyes. "Alex, don't mess with the dark stuff. You don't want that kind of energy clinging to you, trust me on this." Then she frowned. "You've already been messing with it, haven't you? That's where all that negative energy came from."

  He held her gaze. Eyes like black velvet, deep and dark and potent. "Don't be so dramatic. It's not as if any of this is for real."

  She closed her eyes as if praying for patience. "It's for real." Her words emerged as a whisper, one that sent shivers of reaction creeping up his spine, into his nape, tingling along his scalp. But not so much as when she opened her eyes again and they locked onto his, held them.

  Something moved between them. Some energy he couldn't have put a name to even if he'd tried. It tagged him, bodily, so much so that he swayed forward. He gripped her upper arms, and she tipped her face up. And then he lowered his head to kiss her.

  She turned her face away, so his mouth only grazed her cheek.

  "I don't… I can't…" She drew a breath. "Go, please," she whispered.

  God, the woman pulled him in like gravity. What the hell was that? Since when did he hire a woman he knew nothing about and proceed to make a move on her?

  He turned and hurried back up the stone steps, around the little beach house, and to his car. He would get his answers, just apparently not from her.

  He drove back to the gloomy mansion that belonged to him, pulled into the driveway, and sat there for a long moment, just staring up at the huge granite stones of the place, thinking about the events of the past several weeks, as if thinking about them, analyzing them, would cause them to make sense. They didn't. They hadn't then, and they wouldn't now.

  And now there was one more inexplicable event unfolding in his life. An attraction to a woman he'd just met that felt like the most powerful force in the entire universe. God, maybe he needed therapy.

  CHAPTER 3

  Mists rose from the river far below, engulfing the suspension bridge and the couple who stood upon it. Melissa stared through the rising mists at the man, who bore a striking resemblance to Alexander Quinn, except that he wore black ritual robes and an inverted pentacle of solid gold with diamonds winking at each of its five points. The woman stood near the railing, her back to the man, her flowing white dress dancing in the mist-laden breeze like a living thing. Her wild golden hair was damp with the kiss of the moist air. Melissa couldn't see her face, but she knew the woman was weeping.

  The man spoke, though his lips never moved. Go on. Do it. Do it, now! He pulled something from his pocket, a small white-robed doll with hair like the woman's. Do it! He shoved the doll toward the railing.

  The woman climbed over it.

  "No," Melissa whispered. "No, wait."

  But neither of them could hear her. It was as if she weren't really there.

  The man moved closer to the rail, held the doll out over the water. As he did, a pair of hands, strong astral hands, attached to nothing and no one, appeared behind the woman, hovering above her shoulders.

  The woman turned, as if suddenly aware of the presence, and Melissa gasped as she saw her face. It was almost like looking into a mirror.

  Do it! the man commanded, and then he flung the doll over the rail.

  The hands closed on the woman and pushed her.

  She fell silently, her white dress wafting behind her. Like an angel cast from heaven, she spiraled downward. The water opened where she plunged into it, then closed around her, swallowing her down.

  Melissa screamed.

  The sound of her own voice shocked her awake, and she found herself sitting bolt upright in her own bed. Her skin was damp with sweat, her heart pounding, as she looked around the room. But it was real. She was there, in the beach house, and the rest had just been a dream.

  "No," she said softly. "Not a dream. Something else—a prophecy, or a memory, or something—it was too vivid to be just a dream."

  She glanced at her nightstand. The clock read 2:00 a.m. A soft, steady beep emanated from somewhere in the living room, startling her for just a second, before she recognized the familiar sound of her answering machine. Somehow, she'd been too deep in the vision to have heard the telephone ringing. Sighing, she got out of the bed, padded into the living room, hit the playback button, and then shivered at the sound of Alexander Quinn's deep voice.

  "We're meeting with the writers in the morning, Melissa. Ten a.m., my office." The machine beeped once more to signal the end of the message and then went silent.

  Pushing a hand through her hair, she wondered if she should just quit now and have it over with. She wandered through the living room, toward the table in the back where she'd dropped the script he'd given her the day before. As she did, she looked up, through the glass doors.

  And she saw something on the beach—a shape, with long golden hair and a flowing white gown.

  Her heart tripped and she lunged forward, hands pressing to the glass, eyes straining. What the hell… ?

  There was nothing there. Maybe it had just been a reflection, a trick of the moonlight on the water, or a stray light on her glass doors. But she couldn't quite shake the feeling that she'd just seen the woman from her dream, standing in the sacred space of Melissa's own circle.

  She checked her locks, just in case. Then she picked up the manuscript and took it with her, back to her bed, where she felt safe.

  She wanted to do this job right—and for more reasons than just the money. She'd made a promise to her Goddess that if she could land this job, she would do it justice, set the record straight on prime-time network television. For her Craft, for her fellow Witches, for all those who'd died due to ignorance in the past.

  She couldn't quit. Maybe all of this was some kind of a test.

  It was not easy, forcing Alex and that troubling dream from her mind. Something was going on with him—with the two of them, maybe. She felt it in her gut, and she never ignored her intuition. It was usually dead-on. She was as afraid of him as she was drawn to him. She knew he felt that attraction, too. The air between them practically sparked with it when he was close to her.

  What was the dream then? A warning? Was Alex to become her lover or her killer? Or both? Or was the dream just a manifestation of her own fears of failure and of this sudden, potent desire?

  She couldn't dismiss him or the questions from her mind, only push them to the back long enough for her to do her work. She spent the rest of the night with her copy of the season's story arc, a stack of episode-by-episode breakdowns, and a red pen, which ran out of ink, so she had to finish in blue.

  She wasn't exactly fresh when she finished at 7:45 a.m. She spent a half hour doing yoga, fifteen minutes in the shower, and just had time for her morning ritual before she had to begin the transformation into working-girl Melissa. The change involved taming her wild hair into a nice neat bun, corralling her breasts within the confines of a bra, putting on panties and nylons and a nice, civilized-looking outfit that included an ivory-colored silklike sleeveless blouse, a matching skirt, and a pair of pumps with two-inch heels. She flat-out refused to wear heels higher than that.

  Then she drove her beloved lime-green Bug into the city, into the traffic, whispering prayers of protection to keep from being hit by the frantic driving tactics common to LA.

  She made it to the meeting at one minute before ten. The others were already there, seated in comfortable overstuffed chairs and minisofas in a room that looked more like a living room than an office. The head writer, Merl Kinney, was there, gray hair, white at the temples, three-hundred-dollar suit, way too thin for a man his age and way too tan as well. Only one of his underlings had shown up, a young, pale woman with blond curls. The two were sleeping together. Melissa wasn't sure if it was as obvious to everyone else as it was to her, but as far as she was concerned they might as well have b
een wearing a sign. The director, Karl Stone, was there. But one presence dominated the room. Alex.

  He was as potent to her senses as a shot of adrenaline. Dark hair, killer smile, and those piercing black eyes that seemed always to be focused on her. He wore tight-fitting jeans, a tank-style undershirt, and a short-sleeved button-down shirt, unbuttoned. All black. As her gaze slid over him, it froze on his chest.

  He wore a pendant that rested there. An inverted pentacle with diamondlike stones winking at its five points.

  Melissa's blood went cold. It was the same as the one from her dream.

  She dragged her gaze from it, up to his eyes, and then got stuck there, captured. If he saw the fear in her eyes, he didn't show it. He smiled as if he knew something she didn't, then rose from his chair until she sat in one of her own.

  Karl Stone said, "What do you want, Mel, coffee? Tea? A soft drink?"

  She tried not to grimace at his calling her Mel. "Nothing, thanks, I'm fine." She opened her briefcase, pulled out the story arc and breakdowns, and stacked them on the coffee table in front of her.

  Merl Kinney leaned forward, brows drawing together at the red markings on the top page. Without asking, he drew the stacks toward him, flipping through the top several pages. "My goodness," he said. "Had I known I was in need of a ghostwriter, I'd have hired one myself."

  The room went dead silent. She could hear the soft ticking of someone's wristwatch, it was so quiet.

  Drawing a breath, Melissa called up her courage. "These are only suggestions. I wouldn't dream of changing your words, Mr. Kinney. I only tried to highlight the places where I found… technical inaccuracies. The notes in the margins are suggested corrections."

  He lifted his gaze from the script pages, locking it with hers. "I've won an Oscar and three Emmys, Miss St. Cloud."

  "I've worked magic, Mr. Kinney."