Chapter Thirty-seven
HARMONY ran up the steps from the boat dock to see if King’s helicopter sat on its landing pad. She was disappointed he wasn’t there yet. It had taken days for his lawyer to spring him. Kidnapping charges were serious business. Evidently, Belinda the Bitch had friends in high places. Harmony had missed him so much that she wanted to welcome him home alone.
Reggie understood, so she and Jake were still with Destiny and Storm. They planned to tour Salem and take in some of the sights. They’d be back in a few days for the summer solstice, but for now King Paxton was all hers.
The goons who’d tried to keep her out the first day tipped their hats and unlocked the castle door for her. It was creepy inside, alone, without lights. Good thing she knew her way to the dorm. She and King shared it now, and the cots were gone.
He was due back any minute, so she took a quick shower, perfumed the right places, and slipped into a lime lace babydoll cami with matching bikinis.
He stepped into the room a minute later. He’d probably landed while she was in the shower.
“Jailbird!” she said in greeting, but he said nothing. His hungry gaze was transfixed by the blonde triangle of hair beneath her translucent bikinis. Harmony rolled to her stomach, crossed her legs in the air, and looked at him over her shoulder.
He dropped his bag and cane, and lunged. She screamed as he landed on top of her. She laughed as he planted kisses all over her. She hadn’t expected such a bodacious welcome from her nonspontaneous . . . lover. Yeah, that’s what he was . . . her lover. Why not admit it?
He pulled down one side of her cami, exposed a breast, and took it in his mouth. Then he kissed her triquetra, the tattoed symbol of three in a heart low on her right breast.
“God, I love this,” she said. “You’re spoiling me for any other man.”
“Damned straight I am.”
“Whoa, careful there, mister. That statement cuts a bit too close to the sharp edge of commitment. You don’t want to go charging into a toy room without bulletproof shorts.”
“I’m charging in without my shorts. How’s that for spontaneous?” He pulled back and gazed, entranced, at her full and ready breast glistening from his mouth.
“Like what you see, flyboy?”
“Like it? I’m gonna devour it.”
“I want you inside me.” She lay down and raised her knees in a not-so-subtle invitation.
“You scare me, Hellcat. I’m not sure I’ll ever get enough of you.”
“There’s enough for more.” Something that happened in California had changed him, set him on a new course, though it was difficult to read him. At any rate, his movements were unhurried, profound, unselfish . . . overwhelming. He used his man brain to good purpose, setting his compass on her, not him. He didn’t move with the intention of taking pleasure but of giving it. This was less sex and more a mating, less about the body than the . . . heart.
Couldn’t be.
Emotions, maybe, but not the heart. Despite a thin veneer of self-protection, Harmony followed where King led. While he worked to pleasure her, she pleasured him.
New territory, this. Walls to scale and pull down, walls protected by iron-spiked fences that could tear the climber to ribbons, but she tried to scale them anyway. Forever became a possibility, at least for her orgasm. She’d never had one that lasted so long. Their cries mated in the quiet dusk, but they seemed to rise higher, and higher still, the two of them exploding and colliding like shattering stars spilling light across the galaxy.
Energized yet sated, breathless, they lay tangled, touching, kissing, nipping, wordlessly, as they drifted back to the world like feathers floating on a midsummer breeze.
King pulled wet tendrils of hair from her face. “Where the hell did you come from?”
“Why? Am I so different from your other women? Is it because I’m not lying here like a dead fish?”
“Stop making jokes.” He kissed her exposed skin, adored his way up her legs, discovered and adored the Celtic rust and gold sea horse tattoo on her hip. “What does the sea horse stand for?” he asked. “Knowing you, it must have a meaning.”
“I’ll tell you after the solstice ritual,” she said. “I don’t want to raise your expectations.”
“I love a mystery, but I have to be honest. I have the world’s worst taste in women.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“Except for you, which is why you scare me. All exceptions do, because there’s always an exception to the exception. Belinda is a prime example of the bitch factor in my usual choices.”
“Why do you think that is?”
“Hell if I know.”
“Maybe you like women who are mean-spirited and nasty?”
“Are you out of your mind?”
“If you choose a not emotionally available woman, your emotions remain intact, untouched, invulnerable.”
“Screw you.”
“Please do.”
He slipped inside her again. Nothing slow, languid, or generous about his movements this time, he took her with savage intent. His plundering kisses and inciting caresses at her center led them to another death-defying but mutually satisfying climax. Moonbeams transported them like a magic carpet to a land of ecstasy.
Waves of aftershock rippled through her, and she drifted, only to wake up as King sat beside her, fresh from the shower.
He opened a tiny tin of candies. “Peppermint breast?” he offered.
She took one, examined it, popped it into her mouth, and crunched it.
“Damn,” he said. “You bit right into it. I could not do that to a gummy penis.”
He stood and she roared, because she’d just noticed that his white boxers announced Free Toy Inside, in fire engine red.
He looked so proud. “See, peppermint breasts and literal statement shorts . . . I can be spontaneous.”
“One spontaneous moment does not a free spirit make,” she said, but she went looking for the prize, anyway, and she got herself a handful. “Fantasmaglorious!” She pulled down his shorts. “All hail to the king! It’s a keeper.” And keep it, she did.
She kept it happy . . . for three days.
Harmony woke first on their last morning together. No more shared nights of sex, lust, love . . . whatever.
Sometimes she thought King was trying to show her how he felt without saying the words. At other times, she thought he got close to speaking the words, but not close enough.
She’d always hoped for a man who could make a commitment, but she’d found King Paxton instead, and she couldn’t think of anybody she’d rather wake up beside. Fortunately or unfortunately, given their ghostly situation, their futures were on hold until she could complete the most important part of her psychic mandate and free the castle of Gussie.
Her sisters, with Reggie and Jake, would arrive tonight. Now would be her last chance to put her energy into making love to King before they were surrounded by the energy of others. Energies, however wonderful, and welcome, that would take their focus from each other.
Last chance, she thought looking over at the sleeping beast, admiring his raven hair of natural waves, remembering the depth of his whiskey eyes and the skill in his work-of-art bod, sculpted and wide-shouldered, thick-muscled and strong.
Virile. Voracious. Vulnerable—whether he wanted to believe it or not—and vocal in his pleasure.
Withering witch balls, she was spooky in love. Dipped and glazed. Waxed and sealed. No gilding the lily. Her love was pure, unadulterated, problematic, complicated, irrevocable, and polished to a magick mirror shine.