Why did it matter that he did these things with his own hands? That no one else be allowed to acquire and prepare these things for her?
Why did he…
Care? A foreign voice in his head suggested.
He rejected the notion outright. No, not care.
Control.
He wanted to own every ounce of pleasure she derived from eating the food upon her lap. To arrange the plate the way he wanted it arranged. To deliver it to her when he felt it should be delivered.
And Moira would die when he decided she should die. She was, after all, his to conquer. He alone had been entrusted with the task, and he would not be commanded by anyone on this earth, above, or below it, to execute her before he was ready.
Not even Moira herself.
“You got locusts in your ears or something?” Moira asked. “I said, I surrender.”
“No,” Nick said. “You don’t.”
“Yes, I do. Honest to Goddess, cross my heart and hope to die.”
The last part was true. Nick knew that much. “Surrender not accepted. This isn’t the way it’s supposed to happen.”
“Yeah? Well I was supposed to work the Thursday night shift down at the HooDoo shack before I was summoned by some magic spell and learned that I’m one of four identical sisters prophesied to end the world. Life don’t always work out the way it’s supposed to, does it, Sugar?”
Nick boiled beneath his shirt collar, feeling his jugular vein throb in time with a heady mixture of anger and arousal.
“What happened to the woman who was too proud to allow me to buy her a drink on an airplane? The woman who spilled water in my lap to make it look like I pissed myself just for her own amusement? The woman who conjured a wave to drive me halfway to Canada after I’d just given her the first orgasm of her life? The woman who had the balls to put up a fucking fight?”
“She’s fucking exhausted, all right?” Moira surged up to the extent of her chains and the coffee and juice sloshed over their edges, threatening to spill. “She’s tired of hateful looks from every female on the planet. She’s tired of people always wanting, always taking. She’s tired of being a problem and never a solution. She’s tired of being afraid.” Her body sagged back against the bed, burdened by the weight of her words. “I said I surrender and I mean it. I. surr-en-der,” she said, drawing out each syllable of the word as if speaking to a small child.
“You surrender?” Nick repeated, his voice dangerously low and quiet. He set the spoon back in the bowl of grits, noting the whiteness of his knuckles on the handle.
“You want me to get a note pad and spell it out for you? I give up. I give in. I’m done.”
“Fuck your surrender!” Nick abruptly upended the tray, sending it toppling off Moira’s outstretched legs, the orange juice and coffee painting brief arcs across the air before the glassware shattered on the floor. The silverware clanged among the shards.
Her smart mouth hung open in a perfect “O” of disbelief and shock as he leaned over her, gripping the headboard but not touching her as he brought his face close enough to catch the scent of rain and wild muscadines in her cascading hair.
“You don’t know the meaning of the word, Moira de Moray.
“Trust me, Mr. Kingswood. I’m from the South. If there’s one thing we know how to do, it’s surrender.”
Another thin attempt at levity. Nick refused to be distracted.
“You think you can throw a few cowardly excuses at me and I’ll clamber to obey like one of your hang-dog backwater boyfriends?” A cracking sound heralded the headboard splintering beneath his grip. “You couldn’t be more mistaken.”
“Let me get this straight. Just this morning, it was all, ‘Damn you woman, you will surrender!’ And then I surrender, and now it’s all ‘You don’t know the meaning of the word!’ Would you tell me what the hell you want from me so we can move this along?”
Anger bloomed roses in her cheeks, the precise color of an ass slapped good and hard. A dark thrill rolled down Nick’s abdominal muscles and drove blood into his cock.
“I said I wanted you to surrender to me. Not to the self-destructive thoughts in your own head or some half-baked savior complex you’ve convinced yourself is for the greater good.”
Moira’s ever-shifting oceanic eyes took on the dangerous blue-gray of waves whipped into a squall. Resentment radiated from her with the force of the tsunami she’d sent to rid herself of him the last time he’d dared speak a truth she didn’t want to hear.
“Yes, you tasted me that day on the dock, Moira,” Nick continued. “But I tasted you, too. I know what you hide beneath those smart-ass quips and your I don’t give a shit ‘bout nothing exterior. You may hate me because I’m an arrogant bastard who wants to own you, dominate you, and make you beg for the pleasure I want to give you. You may even hate me because you know that I’m willing to carry out what I was created to do even when my brothers are not. But here’s the real kicker.” He cupped her chin to turn it toward him, wanting to observe the delicate and subtle shifts in her fathomless eyes. “Deep in the engines of your mind, whatever loathing you may harbor for me pales in comparison to what you feel for yourself, and when you say ‘I surrender’ what you really mean is that you want me to relieve the burden of being you.”
His verbal arrow had hit its mark. Blood drained from Moira’s face into some internal wound—one he’d had to cut through a lifetime of scar tissue to hit. And yet, behind the hurt, a small, blue flame of anger flickered, waiting to be fanned into rage.
The airless space between them vibrated in violent silence, the kind of preternatural quiet that only the last seconds before battle could bring.
“You want me to play executioner now that you’ve become your own judge and jury, Moira, but I am not yours to command.”
“I’m not commanding you to kill me. I’m asking you. And pretty damned politely, too. But if you’re unable to perform, I’d bet one of those brothers of yours out there just might be. I’d bet that big ol’ hunk Dru would be more than happy to—”
A resounding crack as loud as a gunshot echoed through Nick’s chambers, and the headboard behind Moira split down the middle. “None of my brothers would dare touch you. You belong to me.”
“Then finish what you started when you shot the arrow that nearly killed my sister.”
The pleading note in her voice scraped against his resolve like nails on the inside of a coffin, a sound Nick wished he did not know.
“I’ve got to think there would be something in it for you,” she continued. “I mean, you’d get to be the one who ends the Apocalypse. Doesn’t that get you a gold star or something?”
“I don’t give a fuck about gold stars,” Nick answered, lowering his mouth close to her ear. “But we can talk about the or something.” He allowed himself to drink in this image of her, beginning with the wine-dark hair spilled on his pillow and ending in her delicate, shackled ankles and bare feet. “I will end you, Moira de Moray, as you ask, but on one condition.” He savored the momentary flicker of fear in her eyes.
She was right to be afraid.
“What?” she asked.
Her ear was as warm and silky beneath his lips as a sun-rinsed shell on the beach.
“I will fuck you until you understand the true meaning of the word surrender. Then, and only then, will I kill you, Moira de Moray.” He nipped at her earlobe, gratified by the involuntary answering shudder rolling through her body.
Moira turned her head and blinked at him. “I’m about to die, and you’re really going to use that as an excuse to extort sex from me?”
“Absolutely,” Nick said.
The disbelief written on her features amused and delighted him. If she believed this request depraved, she had much to learn about his tastes and sensibilities.
Teaching her would be a pure pleasure.
“Well, Moira?” Nick dragged a finger across the fullness of her breasts above the line of her tank top. “Yes?” he asked,
pausing to draw an ‘X’ directly over her heart. “Or No?”
Chapter Eight
Is there anything you wouldn’t do to save your sisters?
Aunt Justine’s question rolled through Moira’s head like thunder.
Moira hadn’t necessarily reckoned that saving her sisters might include agreeing to do the horizontal hokey-pokey with one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. With Conquest himself, no less.
Not that she hadn’t thought about it. Hell, she’d finished what they’d started on that rainy, windblown dock at least a hundred times in her mind, in dozens of dreams, and even a couple times in the hot respite of the claw-foot bathtub.
A girl had needs, after all.
Of course, it was damn near impossible to look at a man like Nick Kingswood and not think of what he’d be like in bed. Broad shouldered. Lean-hipped. Muscles cut by the gods’ own chisel. But for Moira, it was more than that.
It was his liquid caramel eyes climbing the muscle of her thigh the way a general traces a territory to be conquered. His arrogant smirk and the knowledge it hid. Silent promises made by his sinfully sensuous mouth. The way he made any space he occupied belong to him with the brusque movement of his powerful body.
A powerful body now leaning over her, blotting out the world and making her dizzy, leaving her only with his question and the few breaths she could sneak into her tightening chest past her thundering heart.
She didn’t look him in the eye. Couldn’t, for fear he’d read the answer already written there. “What if I said yes, but had a condition of my own?” she asked.
“Name it,” Nick ordered, his voice thick with desire.
“I want these shackles off,” she said. “Since this is going to be my last time, I’d prefer not to be trussed up like a chicken for Sunday dinner.”
When he didn’t answer, she dared a look in his eyes and had to bite her tongue to stifle a gasp.
Nick’s eyes glowed unnatural saffron orange.
Something had caught fire inside him.
How many had seen this same hue before meeting their end?
“I promise I won’t try to escape or nothing, if that’s what you’re thinking. Girl Scout’s honor,” she claimed, even though she’d never in her childhood been accepted into a troop.
“Feel free to try and run from me, if it pleases you,” Nick invited. “But I can save you some effort by letting you know now that you would not succeed.”
“And what makes you so sure?” Moira challenged.
“No one ever has.”
Why the finality of these words caused heat to gather between her thighs, Moira couldn’t say.
Nick’s chest rose and fell in deepening breaths. “So we have an accord then? If I unchain you, you agree to let me fuck you?”
Taking one steadying breath, Moira nodded.
“I need to hear you say it.” Nick loomed above her, perfectly still, unwilling to make a single movement until he had extracted from her the words he wanted.
“Yes,” Moira said.
“Yes what?”
Lord. This conceited motherfucker wanted her to say all of it. In for a penny, as Uncle Sal would say.
“Yes,” Moira repeated. “If you unchain me, I agree to let you fuck me.” Feeling irritated and more than a little brazen, she’d put as much emphasis on the word as he had. “In exchange for killing me,” she added, purely to make certain they were clear on expectations. “I’ll be damned if it doesn’t sound like I’m getting the raw end of this deal.”
Nick leaned close to brush his lips over her ear, releasing a riotous wave of goose bumps down her neck and shoulders.
“It will be more than your end of the deal that’s raw by the time I’m done with you.”
Moira was certain Nick could hear the rush of blood pounding in her ears as he planted a kiss on her wounded temple that was as tender as his words had been brutal.
Warmth spread into her cheeks and down her neck, tightening her nipples into painful buds beneath her tank top. And she waited. Waited for him to go retrieve a key. A crowbar. A butterknife. Hoping for even a moment free of his presence to mentally steel herself against whatever he had in store.
It was not to be.
Nick reached for the cuff at her wrist and pulled the metal apart, bicep and pectoral muscles straining against his finely tailored shirt, the shackle yielding with only the briefest sound of protest. It fell to the bed at her shoulder, and she looked up at him, knowing her face most likely bore a dopey mix of wonder and disbelief.
Only when Nick’s index finger gently urged her bottom jaw closed did Moira realize her mouth had been hanging wide open.
“Show off,” she retorted, feeling a little burst of pride that she’d been able to subdue him earlier when such feats were within his repertoire.
He leaned across her body and repeated the same process on the shackle holding her other wrist.
Moira drew her arms into her chest, glorying in the feeling of unrestricted movement. She rolled her wrists and rubbed the pink, damp skin where the cuff had been. A thousand pinpricks needled her hands.
“Seems like an awful waste if you ask me,” Moira said, filling the room’s dense silence with insubstantial words.
“I didn’t.” Nick rose and walked to the foot of the bed where he broke the band around her left ankle as quickly as he had the others.
“I mean, you’re just going to have to get you a new set next time you need to chain someone to your bed,” she babbled. “Uncle Sal used plenty of chains down in his shop, and these don’t look like the kind that’d be easy to replace is all.”
“That’s because they’re irreplaceable.” Nick rent the last band binding her to the chains but kept hold of her ankle with his hand. “A gift from the Marquis de Sade.”
He gripped her opposite ankle, and for a moment, Moira thought it was to relieve the tingling as she had done for her own wrists…until Nick pulled her roughly to the end of the bed.
Splitting her legs, his hips plowed into her inner thighs with bruising force. Already, his desire hardened against her thin panties, the heat of it radiating through the fabric separating them.
The barrier disappeared as quickly as the shackles had, torn and discarded. As were her skirt and tank top in the seconds that followed.
Nick’s eyes burned brighter as she lay naked on the bed before him, devouring every detail from breasts to belly button to the thatch of hair between her thighs.
“Roll on to your stomach,” he ordered.
“But aren’t you going to—”
He gripped the backs of her knees, rotating one leg over, flipping her onto her face. Nick’s fist fastened around the hair at the nape of her neck. He yanked just hard enough to send a tingle of mingled pain and pleasure down Moira’s spine.
“When I give you an order, you will obey me, Moira.”
“Obey you? We didn’t say nothing about—”
What happened next stunned her with an embarrassment she hadn’t felt since her girlhood, when Uncle Sal took her over his knee for borrowing the fishing boat without asking.
Nick spanked her.
A hard, stinging slap on her right ass cheek. Moira bit down on the bedclothes to keep from crying out. She’d be damned if she’d give him the satisfaction of knowing her body answered with an unexpected clench of pleasure.
“You will do as you’re told. Do you understand?” he demanded.
“I said you could fuck me,” she ground out. “I didn’t say you could—”
“You’ve spent enough time punishing yourself.” His voice was as hard and sharp as a blade’s edge. “Now, I will do it for you.”
Another slap scorched her ass and, frightened by the rush of moisture between her thighs, Moira kicked out as hard as she could, unbalancing Nick just enough to wriggle from his grasp. She rolled to her back, scuttling backward to the headboard away from this dark part of herself as much as from the man who made her confront it.
T
he second she caught Nick’s enflamed gaze, panic fluttered in Moira’s heart as she saw her own mistake. She had run. Like prey.
Nick lunged for her, launching himself from the end of the bed, his full weight coming down on her before she could find purchase against the cracked headboard. With her free hand, she slapped his face hard enough to feel the indentation of his cheekbone beneath her palm.
He caught her wrist in his iron grip, pinning it to the mattress as she bucked beneath him.
Whatever power she had enjoyed over him earlier had evaporated the second she had voiced her agreement to his terms.
“There,” he growled into her ear. “There’s the fight I was talking about. Without opposition, there can be no conquest. And oh, Moira, am I ever going to enjoy breaking you.”
Had she heard that right? Was he saying that he actually wanted her to fight him?
“Fat fucking chance,” she spat.
“You think it’s just me?” Nick challenged. “You think I’m the only one who wants it this way?”
“What the hell are you talking about, you sick fucker?”
Nick rolled her out from under him until they were on their sides, her body held fast to his, his powerful legs wrapped around hers. With his hand still fastened on her wrist, Nick forced her fingers down to her own sex.
“Feel yourself,” he whispered, forcing her legs wide with his own. “Feel how wet you are for me.”
Moira’s fingers slid into the slippery folds, shocked to find them drenched with her own desire. He guided her hand over the sensitive nub at the apex, and her body jerked with unexpected pleasure.
The knowledge came in the quickening of her nerve endings and the delicious ache scribing his name on the inside of her thighs. This was conquest. Coming up against an opponent who knew her so intimately, even her own strengths could be used in the fight against her. A force so ancient, so brutally wise that yielding is not a requirement. She would be owned. Assimilated. Absorbed.
Nick brought her hand to his mouth, sucking each finger clean of her arousal with wicked, languorous movements of his tongue. “You may lie to me all you please, but your body will always speak the truth.”
Which Witch is Wicked? (The Witches of Port Townsend Book 2) Page 32
