She turned, her mouth inches from mine. “I know. You offered. And trust me, I’m tempted to take you up on that offer.”
I was tempted to do a whole lot more, but not now—not unless she made the first move. “Not just me. You’ve got six sisters who are ready to back you up with their magic. You’ve got a dryad sheriff, that rat-shifter of a policeman, trolls and cyclops, and fairies, and whatever else this town has. Every one of them has an interest in keeping this town a peaceful place for them all to live without fear. You’re not alone, Cassie.”
She leaned forward and touched her lips to mine. Tentative. Soft. Gentle. I held back, letting her take this where she wanted. Slowly she eased back, her eyes raising to meet mine.
“Maybe you shouldn’t sleep in Adrienne’s bedroom after all.”
“Where should I sleep then?” I murmured. “The couch? Here in the attic? Some doghouse out back.”
“My room.”
She leaned forward again and this kiss had all the runaway passion she’d held back from the previous one. Her tongue tasted mine, her hands bunching up the bottom of my shirt to feel their way up my skin. I dug my fingers into her hair and pulled her to me. She made an impatient noise, shifting to straddle me, pushing me backward onto the ground right into the bowl of pasta.
“Shit! I’m so sorry.” She laughed, trying to wipe the food from my shoulder, smearing noodles and peas in cream sauce all across my shirt.
Sitting up, I yanked the shirt over my head, tossing it to the side. She took the opportunity to do the same, revealing a lacy red bra.
“That needs to go as well,” I told her.
She hesitated. I took a chance and reached out to trace the edge of the lace with my finger.
“Or not. Your call, sweetheart. Everything we do or don’t do is entirely up to you.”
She took a breath, then smiled, slowly unhooking the bra, sliding it down from her shoulders and off to join her shirt on the attic floor. With a graceful move she stood, slowly unzipping the skirt and dropping it to the floor. Then she hooked her thumbs in the red panties and shimmied them down to join the skirt.
I stared, drinking in the view. I’d been imagining her naked since I’d first seen her from my jail cell, and my imagination hadn’t been anywhere near as spectacular as reality.
“Your turn, hellboy,” she teased, her voice husky.
I stood, shucking my pants with far less grace than she’d just done.
“All the way,” she said, waving a finger at the underwear that wasn’t doing much at hiding my desire.
I complied and she stepped forward, sliding a hand up my chest and around my neck to pull my mouth to hers. She tasted of honey and cinnamon and wine. Her lips and tongue, her body pressed against mine, the thought of her underneath me was almost more than I could stand.
Then she pulled back and I stifled a groan, torn between the desire to take her here and now on this attic floor and to let her move this at her own pace.
It seemed like forever I waited for some sort of signal from her. Finally she tilted her head and shot me a crooked smile. “Let’s go downstairs. To my room where we don’t have to deal with hard attic floors or spilled bowls of pasta or knocking over the wine.”
“Deal,” I told her, scooping her into my arms.
We somehow made it downstairs and into her bedroom, kissing all through the hallway like crazed teenagers. And once that witch got me into her bed, that’s where I stayed. All night long.
Chapter 13
Cassandra
I awoke alone in my bed to the smell of bacon and coffee.
Last night…oh wow, last night. My hand crept between my legs as I remembered all the things Lucien and I had done. His tongue working its way up my thighs. His hard length driving deep inside me as I dug my nails into his fine ass. I hadn’t gotten much sleep at all, and I was looking forward to more. I hoped this demon stuck around, because a girl could get used to sex like this.
For the first time in a very long time, I felt as if life were truly good—cool clean cotton sheets, soft feather pillows, a warm down comforter. A sexy man who’d rocked my world all night long. He seriously needed to get that cute ass of his up here again so we could snuggle and more. And while he was getting up here, he should also bring some coffee and bacon to me in bed.
I was tempted to slide out from under my sheets and head into the kitchen wearing the tank top and underwear I’d gone to bed in, grab said coffee and bacon, grab the hot guy cooking it all, and take everything back to bed to enjoy properly, but the sound of multiple voices coming from downstairs ended that little fantasy.
Hopping out of bed, I did the morning bathroom essentials, threw on a pair of jeans and a t-shirt, then headed down. In the kitchen I found Lucien along with my sister Glenda. Glenda was at the stove, her personal domain, cooking what looked to be a frittata along with French toast and the bacon I’d smelled from upstairs.
And clearly she’d brought her own supplies, since the only thing in my refrigerator as of last night was a half-empty container of ice cream and some moldy cheese.
“…non GMO, free range, and cage free. That’s important, you know. Beyond the ethics of treating other creatures in the most humane way possible, you can taste it in the eggs. Those poor things stacked on top of each other in tiny wire cages, their feet cut from the wires, poop falling down through to each chicken below it…those eggs taste of desperation and pain.”
“Lovely visual,” I announced. “Not thinking I’ve got the stomach for breakfast after hearing about chickens pooping down on each other.”
Glenda spun around with a smile that never failed to light up my world. “Nothing puts you off your breakfast, Cassie darling. Nothing.” She leaned over to give me a smooch on the cheek, then went back to the frittata and her lecture on the ethics of food-chain management. That was Glenda. She was smack in the middle of our line of siblings. Me, Bronwyn, then the twins Ophelia and Sylvie, then Glenda. Only Adrienne and Babylon were younger, but sometimes this quirky sister of mine seemed the eldest of us all. She’d been the one who’d deciphered the bookshelf full of cookbooks and kept us from living on instant oatmeal and frozen pizza once Mom had hit the road. I’d always thought she’d become a chef, but each year her food mantra got more and more dogmatic. Paleo. Keto. Whole Foods. Nothing that wasn’t strictly organic, grass-fed, locally sourced. Now she was making noises about veganism, although from the bacon and frittata on the stove, that seemed to still be in the “just talking” phase. Soon I expected her to be trying to convince us all that we needed to only eat seaweed and dandelion roots, or something like that.
Glenda healed. That was her specialty. And in keeping with her quirky nature, she only healed through her food. I was pretty sure that after eating this frittata, the blister on my heel from those new pumps would completely be gone, as well as the paper cut I’d gotten yesterday. Sadly she’d never cured cancer or anything life-threatening, but any time someone had a urinary tract infection, strep throat, or a bad case of athlete’s foot, they knew to call on Glenda.
“Morning, sunshine.” Lucien poured a cup of coffee, stirred in two spoonfuls of sugar, and handed it to me with a kiss on the top of my head.
Glenda shot me a perceptive side-eye. “So I come by to find this hottie half-naked in the kitchen about to open a can of beans for breakfast. Anything you want to tell me, Cassie?”
“Nope.” I sipped my coffee, marveling that Lucien somehow knew exactly how I liked my morning beverage. Was he a mind reader?
“I’m a client,” Lucien offered. “Although I’m hoping to become more than a client.”
“Well, this coffee is improving your chances,” I teased. “Any news on our favorite werewolf this morning? You’re not in jail, so I’m taking that as a positive sign. What’s your demon intuition tell you?”
“It’s telling me I have better things to do on a Saturday morning than worry about a werewolf.” He pulled me close, his arm around my shoulder.
“Ophelia texted me about what happened,” Glenda commented, eyeing us with a smirk. “She was on-call at the firehouse. Last thing either of us heard, Clinton Dickskin didn’t make it back to his den last night.”
I shrugged, but my stomach dropped a few feet at her words. “Full moon is tonight. Not surprising that a werewolf wouldn’t come home with their blood stirred up.”
“Clinton is an idiot, but not a suicidal one.” Glenda flipped the bacon and picked up the pan to gently slide the frittata out onto a plate. “A werewolf loses that much blood, he’s not going to continue looking for fights, sex, or any other shenanigans. He would have gone somewhere safe to heal. He would have wanted to make sure he wasn’t going into the full moon suffering blood loss and who knows what else.”
I frowned, thinking about what I knew about werewolves, which was a bit more than I knew about demons. “They go all out during the full moon, though. Run until they die. Bleed until they die. They’ve got no sense of self-preservation or restraint then. One day shouldn’t make such a huge difference in that. I mean, the shifters are already feeling the moon a few days before the actual event.”
Glenda nodded. “Yeah, but hyped up isn’t the same as moon-crazy, and Clinton isn’t some random pack member. He’s dominant in the pack. A wolf doesn’t get that way without knowing when to fold his hand and go home for the evening.”
I’d never experienced any of this with Marcus. Feline shifters didn’t have packs, and their behavior during the full moon wasn’t quite as crazy as the wolves.
“Your sister Ophelia said it was a lot of blood, even for a werewolf,” Lucien chimed in. “Maybe he was too weak to make it home. Maybe he was worried that whoever attacked him would be waiting for him to finish the job. If that’s the case, he could have decided to bed down in someone’s barn or garage, or old shed.”
I watched Glenda put the food on the table and debated my conflicting desires to go eat, and to remain here with Lucien’s arm around me. He decided for me, sliding his hand from my shoulder down to my ass and urging me toward the table. I sat, waiting for the other two before I snatched up a piece of bacon.
“If Clinton doesn’t turn up this morning, we’ll need to go search for him. Not that I think he’s going to stagger into the Stagecoach for our breakfast meeting after losing all that blood.”
“I don’t know,” Glenda commented. “Their pancakes are pretty good. I might just rise out of my deathbed for a short stack of pecan oat with warm maple syrup.”
True. Their pancakes really were that good. “Well, I’m assuming he’s not going to be there. Ophelia said he wasn’t attacked in the hotel room—that was a manufactured crime scene to set Lucien up for some reason we’ve yet to determine. If the werewolf is alive and he did decide to spend the night somewhere other than his home, then we’ll need to find where he was attacked and search in a radius from there. With that much blood loss, he can’t have gone far.”
“Unless he had help.” Lucien slid a pie-shaped slice of the frittata onto my plate. “A few of those other werewolves were with him after our fight last night. His buddies, I assume. Maybe he got into another fight with someone who was using claws or a knife, and his buddies gave him a lift.”
“Then he would have been home.” I took a bite of the frittata, marveling as I always did at Glenda’s amazing culinary skills. “Unless he told his buddies not to take him home. Who would be pissed enough at Clinton Dickskin that they’d kill him? Or nearly kill him?”
“That much blood loss, I’d normally say vampires,” Glenda added thoughtfully. “Except they wouldn’t waste it dumping the blood in a hotel room.”
“This wasn’t a vampire getting carried away,” I told her. “This was someone who wanted Clinton dead, whether they succeeded or not. They tried to frame Lucien for it. No one is going to do that for a simple brawl where the next morning Clinton can name his attacker. The blood in that hotel room means someone wanted Clinton dead.”
“If they killed him, why not leave his body in my hotel room with the blood?” Lucien asked. “It’s what I would have done.”
He was right. If there had been a dead werewolf in that room, Lucien would be in lockup right now. “Maybe that’s what they planned, but Clinton got away and this was the next best thing? Maybe they’re hoping he died in a ditch somewhere, and Lucien is still the top suspect?”
“Let’s think this through,” Lucien said. “I fight with Clinton outside the tavern. His friends haul him off to nurse his bruised ego. Something happens and he either gets into another fight, or someone takes the opportunity to knife him.”
I shrugged. “Could be a planned hit and Clinton spoiled it all by managing to get away before dying. Could be a spur-of-the moment thing, and someone frantically tries to pin the blame on you in case Clinton ends up found dead in a ditch the next day. Who knows?”
“Full moon tonight though.” Lucien took a bite of his bacon. “Can’t be a coincidence.”
I nodded. “It’s when all the shifters go a bit nuts. The wards help keep the moon sickness somewhat under control, but there’s always fights, vandalism, unexpected pregnancies.” I remembered the tension between the two werewolves yesterday afternoon, when I’d been at the pack-house asking for the charges against Lucien to be dropped. “Maybe this is less about the moon, and more about pack politics?” I mused.
Glenda’s fork stopped halfway to her mouth. “Crap. Not another alpha fight. That last one nearly destroyed the town.”
Not that any of us had been alive for the last one, but that sort of turmoil lived on in legends. Grandma had let the werewolves work it out mostly on their own, only intervening when the violence began to spill over to the rest of the town residents, but even so there had been some property damage, a few broken bones, and no one had felt easy watching the werewolves battle it out on the mountain, or whenever they happened to come to town which had been more frequently than anyone had wanted. In the end, eight werewolves were dead, and Dallas Dickskin had become the new pack alpha. The werewolves still continued to cause trouble, but nothing compared to the battle of the alphas.
“So Clinton makes a play for alpha?” I shook my head. “Not the smartest move after getting beaten up by a demon. You’d think the guy would have the brains to wait until he was fully healed.”
“Night before the full moon,” Glenda pointed out. “Clinton comes home pissed off. Dallas says the wrong thing. A fight turns into something a whole lot more, and suddenly there’s a challenge. Not like those things don’t happen all the time in pack hierarchy. Dallas has been riding his ass since Clinton was a teen. If you haven’t seen that coming to a head, then you’re blind.”
There had been a lot of jockeying for position among the werewolves in the last few decades. Heck, last year one of the females nearly unseated Clinton for pack second. The only reason she wasn’t dead was because werewolves, especially misogynistic ones like Dallas and Clinton, were reluctant to kill their females.
“But why smear a bunch of blood in my hotel room if that’s the case?” Lucien asked. “Aren’t alpha battles exempt from your town laws regarding assault and murder?”
I grimaced. “Sort of. Last time there was an alpha battle was forty years ago. Grandmother allowed the deaths to be considered an internal pack matter as long as no non-werewolf died during the fighting, and as long as the werewolves could show that the challenge battles followed their pack laws and those who died were truly killed in a challenge fight.”
“But do you really believe that?” Lucien asked softly.
I met his gaze, knowing what he meant. The diary last night… Grandma had her doubts, but hadn’t wanted to go up against a pack of werewolves with only my mother to back, or not back, her up.
“No, but what could one witch do?” I shrugged. “I remember hearing her and Mom discussing it once. I think it had been less of a rules-based challenge battle and more of a gang war up there on the mountain. I think Grandma had her hands f
ull just making sure the violence was contained to the werewolf territories.”
But that child… Lucien was clearly remembering that as well.
Glenda pushed her plate away from her. “What would happen if there were an alpha battle now? We’ve got a mayor and a sheriff, but no Grandma to keep the werewolves in line.”
Oh no. I knew where she was going with this. “The mayor and the sheriff are perfectly capable of keeping law and order here. The days of a witch running this town are over.”
“Are they?” Lucien sat back in his chair. “Are fights to the death among the werewolves going to be written off as pack politics like they were forty years ago? Are the mayor and sheriff just going to take the alpha’s word for it that the dead wolves are challengers who knew this was a fight to the death? Are they capable of making sure the town isn’t destroyed by rival werewolf gangs?”
“Sheriff Oakes can handle it,” I told him, not believing that for one second. That werewolf child… He’d not been a challenger, and even if he had, a child’s life should never have been forfeited in a challenge battle. It was against pack law. It was against human law.
It was against witch law. And as powerful as Grandma had been, she hadn’t done anything to stop it. All she could do was turn her head and go to her grave with that child’s death on her conscience.
“There are seven of us, Cassie,” Glenda said softly. “It doesn’t have to be you. It doesn’t always have to be you.”
But it did, didn’t it? My six sisters were powerful witches, but all specialized. I was the only one who wouldn’t be limited in what I could do. And of them all, I was the only one who had the sort of power to take control of this town. But why did I have to? Why did a stupid accident of birth mean I had to spend my life dealing with werewolves and the issues of the town?
Damn it all. Everyone in my family knew I wasn’t going to just sit back and watch this town get steamrollered by a bunch of fighting werewolves. And everyone knew I wouldn’t brush off werewolf deaths without some sort of intense investigation.
Brimstone and Broomsticks: Accidental Witches Book 1 Page 12