by Susan Sey
She wasn’t nauseated, she was nervous. Liar. Okay, fine. Terrified. She was trying to confess her damn love and doing such a good job he was worried she might boot her lunch. Wonderful.
Temper swooped to the rescue and she said, “Okay, let me make sure I understand. According to the Honesty Only policy, I can smile if and when I feel happy, but in all other situations smiling is prohibited and you get to mock me?” She glared at him. “Because if that’s the case, I think honesty sucks. I think you suck. Because I’m trying here. I’m trying really hard and you’re sitting over there taking potshots at my face.”
“It wasn’t a potshot. And I like your face. But it was all—” He broke off, clearly aware he maybe shouldn’t take that conversational ball any farther down the field. Good for him. “So your stomach is okay?”
She closed her eyes. “My stomach is fine.”
“Are you sure? Because you look a little pale.” He came across the room to her, concern in his eyes. “A lot pale, actually.” He took her chin in one hand, turned her face up to the light and inspected her pupils. “Nausea is one of the first symptoms of advanced dehydration. I wonder if Lila’s little sweat fest didn’t—”
“Rush. Stop.”
She wrapped one hand around his wrist and forced herself to look straight into his eyes. Eyes that held concern, yes, but also . . . nerves? And not over her health, either. Hope sparked to life inside her, feeble but undeniable, and propped up her faltering courage.
“I do not have indigestion,” she told him firmly. “My gastrointestinal system is fine. My bowels are in good working order, too, if it matters. I suppose I could be a little dehydrated after the sauna earlier, but it’s nothing a bottle of water won’t cure. Otherwise I’m in perfect health.”
He frowned down at her, clearly unconvinced. “Then why do you look like you want to throw up?”
“Because I’m in love with you.”
His hand fell away from her chin. “You’re what?”
“In love,” she said grimly. “With you.”
“Which makes you want to throw up.” He shook his head. “Wow. That’s . . . not flattering.”
“I know, right?” She laughed, though she didn’t really find the situation very funny. “I was surprised, too. I mean, never having experienced the real deal, I kind of expected hearts and flowers, you know? But love sort of sucks. It’s inconvenient and painful and I’m not really enjoying it, if you want the truth, which, of course, being Rush, you do. But I’m definitely in love.” She patted his shoulder, stone-like under the soft flannel of his shirt, and tried desperately to stem++ the torrent of horrifying words pouring out of her. “With, um, you.” She closed her eyes against a wave of intense embarrassment. “So, that’s it.” Oh God, it wouldn’t stop. It was like a hiccup, involuntary and spasmodic. “I’m in love with you.” Jesus, another one? “Sorry.”
She pressed bloodless fingers to numb lips and prayed. Please let it be over now. Please let that have been the last one.
“Maria?”
She forced herself to meet his eyes. “Yeah?”
“Are you done?”
“I think so.”
“Good. Because I have something to say now.”
“Oh, goody. Will it be as fun as mine was?”
“I don’t know,” he said seriously. “Yours was pretty fun. Especially the part about your bowels being in good working order.”
She closed her eyes again.
“Hey, don’t do that. Don’t check out.” He reached out, drew one gentle finger down the edge of her face. Her heart shuddered inside her chest and she opened her eyes cautiously. “Not when I’m about to pledge my troth.”
She stared at him in openmouthed astonishment. “Pledge your what?”
“My troth. My fidelity. My loyalty.” He hooked a hand around the back of his neck and squinted down at her. “My undying love? I was planning to break it to you later, but after you said . . . what you said—”
“That I’m stupid in love with you?” Hic.
“Yeah, that.” He smiled. Beautifully. “It seemed like I should say something. Sooner rather than, you know, later.”
“You should. Definitely.” The first tiny bubbles of joy started rising, sliding up through her panic and fear. “I’m listening.”
“Okay.” He paused. “I’m crap at this kind of thing.”
She gave him a narrow stare. “Yeah, well, after what I just did, you owe me this, so start talking.”
“Right. Okay. I’ll try.”
“You could maybe start with ‘I love you,’ ” she said helpfully. “See where it goes from there.”
“I love you,” he said obediently. Baldly. Uncomfortably. And utterly, completely sincerely. She’d never heard three more beautiful words in her entire life. “It happened during the ceremony tonight—”
A bolt of dismay shot through her. “Wait, you’re in love with me because of a pagan ceremony?”
He lifted a brow. “Do you want to hear this or not?”
She shut her mouth. “Go on.”
“Give me a little credit, will you? I know better than to think there’s some deity up there with a master plan and puppet strings. I haven’t believed in anything like that for a long time, if ever. But Lila needed reassuring and you needed Lila’s trust, so I figured I’d just do the ceremony. What the hell, right? Everybody gets what they need in one quick, if chilly, half hour. It wasn’t until I was actually saying the words, until they were tumbling from my memory to my mouth, that I realized I meant every one of them. By the time I understood that I wasn’t reciting an old prayer so much as making some deadly-serious promises, it was too late. I’d already given my word.” He lifted his shoulders, a curiously helpless gesture from such a strong man. “I’d already pledged my damn troth.”
“And a troth is what, exactly?”
“Hell if I know. But whatever it was, it totally moved us beyond let’s-just-jump-each-other-and-see-where-thisgoes territory. I’m yours now. You’re mine. No matter who you are.” He gave her a hard look. “Or who you choose to be. I’m in love with you. With all of you, including the odd pocket of crazy here or there.”
“Hey.”
He held up a hand. “Not that I’m complaining. I have a few pockets of crazy on board myself.”
“Amen.”
“Look, I don’t know why or how this happened, Maria, so I can’t give you that. I’m sorry. I only know that I feel it. I feel you. And that’s a fucking miracle because the days when I just knew things, just felt what was right and true and good? I buried those days in the sand with all the bodies. But then you came along and lit me up like the Fourth of July. One look at you and everything inside me sat right up and said mine.” He gave her a crooked smile. “You’re beautiful and smart and terrifying and so damn complicated, but I waited a long time for the voices in my head to start talking again. Now that they have, I’m not about to argue with them.”
He took her hand, threaded his fingers through hers. “So that’s it. There’s my troth, pledged to you.” He looked gravely down at her. “So . . . are you supposed to accept it? Or thank me? Or, shit, am I supposed to wrap this up with flowers or something?”
“I have no idea. Nobody’s ever pledged their troth to me before.” She touched the sharp edge of his cheekbone with her thumb as joy and fear tumbled around inside her like a couple of puppies. “I never wanted anybody to. I didn’t let myself want anything. Then you came along.”
“And you wanted.” A grin spread across his face, smug and self-satisfied. He dropped onto the couch and tugged her down beside him. “Yeah, I get that sometimes. Sorry.”
She sighed theatrically. “So I tried sex. I thought maybe one wild night of hoopty and you’d be out of my system.”
“Not my hoopty, babe.” He tipped his head back, spread his arms across the back of the couch and closed his eyes. “Women get hooked on my hoopty.”
“Tell me.” She grinned and laid her head next to
his on the couch cushion. “And your hoopty wasn’t even free. Hell, no. You had demands.”
“Well, yeah. You give away the milk, who’s going to buy the cow?”
“Can I just say how refreshing it is to hear that old piece of crap and have the guy be the cow for a change?”
He rolled his head to the side to meet her eyes, and she saw laughter in them. But there was more, too. A gravity. A beautiful, uncompromising honesty. “I wanted, too, Maria.”
“I know. And not that pretty, polished robot I’d become, either. You wanted me. And I was such a fool, such a complete idiot, that I honestly debated. Do I scrape up the courage to actually participate in my own life? Or do I keep punishing myself by living somebody else’s?”
He found a single ringlet in the bramble of her hair, tugged the end and watched it bounce. “Do I get a vote?”
“Yours is the only one that counts.”
“I love you, Maria.”
She had to swallow hard to find her voice. “And that’s a miracle,” she said softly. “A gift. I don’t understand it and I certainly don’t deserve it, but I’ll take it.”
“You’d better.” He threaded his fingers through her curls to cup her skull in his big, hard palm and bring her mouth to his. “Don’t argue. Just marry me and be done with it.”
MARRY ME.
The words fell out of him without forethought or consideration. They just jetted straight up out of his heart and leaped into the air between them. No parachute, no net. They hung there, suspended in time and space, while she stared at him with a wild-eyed terror that almost made him long for one of her old fake smiles.
“Okay,” he said, “I hadn’t planned to go quite this far tonight, but I have that terminal honesty thing going for me and, well—” He lifted his shoulders and plunged forward even as he cursed himself for a fool. “Screw it. I have no patience. I love you, Maria. I always will. You don’t have to marry me right this minute, but fair warning? I’ll want that eventually. I’ll push for it, too, so brace yourself. For now, though, I’d be happy if you just stayed. Here. With me.” He cleared his throat. “Or somewhere else. It doesn’t have to be here. On Mishkwa. Because I could go to—” He broke off. “Where do you live?”
“Minneapolis.”
“Minneapolis. I could go there. Or we could—”
“Rush?”
“Yeah?”
“I hate Minneapolis.”
“You do?” He searched her eyes and found the sorrow he knew would always be there to some degree. He found barely checked fear hunkered down next to some serious doubt. But he also saw hope. He saw love. And he saw his future.
“Yes,” she said. “I want to be here. With you.” She smiled at him and it was shaky but genuine. Growing. “I won’t lie to you, though. The whole let’s-get-married thing? It scares the crap out of me. I only just hopped off the Penance Express. I don’t even know what my life is, and the idea of promising it to somebody—anybody, Rush, not just you—is really—” She broke off. “I just don’t know if I can.”
“You can. You absolutely can. But for now?” He pressed his mouth to hers with an aching tenderness, and everything inside his chest shifted. Settled. Bloomed. “For now, this is enough.”
Then her mouth opened under his and all that lovely tenderness went hot and needy. An ache filled him. A desire. A fierce imperative to take and hold and claim, but he battled it back. Just for tonight, just this once, he wanted to be gentle. He wanted to give her the moonlight and roses she deserved and he was so bad at. He wanted to give her poetry.
He tore his mouth from hers and buried his face in her hair. His heart tried to stop, then go, then settled for knocking against his sternum like it was trying to get out. He breathed in the green, earthy smell that clung to her hair, which was spectacularly unhelpful in terms of maintaining his self-control, but he bore up under the temptation. He held. Right up until she licked his throat.
“Oh Jesus.” His fingers twisted into her hair, and he dragged her onto his lap.
“Hallelujah,” she mumbled as she straddled him and gave him her sweet mouth. His hands found the neat angle of her hips and he jerked up underneath her, ground his want shamelessly into her heat. And she purred. Actually purred.
“Maria,” he said, but then her tongue slid up to his ear.
“Hmm?” She bit his lobe with exquisite tenderness. His blood leaped into a rolling boil.
“I wanted—” He desperately tried to think.
“Yes?” She circled her hips against his in a knowing, lazy swirl that incinerated a good half of his meager vocabulary.
“I wanted—”
She trailed her tongue along the rim of his ear. And there went the other half of his vocabulary. He was starting not to care. He managed, with a great deal of focus, to say, “I wanted to go slow this time. To be gentle. Last time I was so—”
Her hands—those clever, quick, blessed hands—slid under his thermal. Every inch of his skin sang as she jerked it up to smile fondly down at a series of love bites she’d left on his chest a few nights before. “Yeah. You were. Me, too.”
He blinked at her, dazzled and more than a little confused.
“Rush,” she said, leaning in until their foreheads touched. “Listen to me, okay? I’ve spent a lot of years hating the way I wanted. Fearing the strength of my desire. But I’m finally in a place where I can look it in the eye and it doesn’t scare me. Not when I’m with you.” Her eyes went hot and she nipped at his shoulder with a sharpness just this side of pain. A vicious pleasure sliced into him. “What’s in me isn’t gentle. It’s not soft and it’s not sweet. And, Rush?” She soothed the sting with her tongue. “It’s asking for you. All of you. I want you to come into me with everything you’ve got. And if you even think about holding back . . . well. I might have to punish you.”
A wondering joy settled into his stomach alongside the relentless churning want. “Punish me? Really?”
“Oh, Rush.” She sighed but her eyes sparkled with molten mischief. “Do you need me to prove it?”
A smile broke across his face then, slow and considering. “Would you?”
She shoved him down on the ancient couch and did exactly that while moonlight spilled over them like a benediction.
Chapter 30
IT HAD been, Maria mused as she sat between Einar and Yarrow in the deserted front room of Mother Lila’s Tea Shop the next morning, a very disorienting twenty-four hours. First there was her headlong tumble into unexpected love. Then there was Rush’s mind-boggling confession of a matching tumble. Then there was a terrifying proposal of marriage she still didn’t have the first clue what to do with, followed by several hours celebrating their matching declarations, the memory of which pinked her cheeks.
She buried her nose in her teacup and forced herself to focus on Yarrow, who was inexplicably lying her ass off. She set down her cup and gave the girl a skeptical look.
“That’s quite a confession, Yarrow.”
“I’m quite a girl.”
“I thought you said you had better things to do than behead chickens by the light of the full moon.”
Yarrow lifted sharp shoulders. “I lied.” Her mouth, painted just this side of black, quirked into something between a sneer and a grimace. “I’m good at it, you know.”
“What, lying?”
Again with the grimace-sneer. “Listen, I was really angry, okay? The backstory’s boring, so I won’t get into it, but let’s just say I was on the wrong side of a bad breakup. I was hurt, I was angry, I got into some bad stuff. Oldest story there is, right?”
“What, boy meets girl, boy dumps girl, girl steals a chicken, snowshoes five miles to an abandoned mine shaft—which is dangerous, by the way—and whips up a little love potion number nine for paybacks?” Maria tipped her head, considered. “I don’t think I’m familiar with that one.”
Einar leaned forward to insert himself into the conversation. “To be fair, Goose, it’s not all that far a
field. There’s a certain culture up here on Mishkwa that lends itself to that sort of thing. Maybe on the mainland it would be a hard sell, but up here? People cast spells all the time, for everything from healing to protection. Why wouldn’t a bright kid take a page from her elders’ book?”
She gave him a tight smile. “True.” She turned back to Yarrow. “You’re claiming responsibility for the counterfeit money, too?”
She picked at her nail polish, refused to meet Maria’s eyes. “That guy I told you about? Back home? Sells pot on the university campus? He asked if I’d meet a guy for him in Thunder Bay, pick up a backpack and bring it back to Mishkwa. No drugs or guns or anything, just money. He sent a guy to pick it up at the end of tourist season before the ferry stopped running.”
“You knew the money was counterfeit?”
She shrugged. “I didn’t care what it was. I only cared about what he was paying me.” She gave Maria a burning glare. “No college fund in my future, you know?”
Maria accepted that in silence. Einar was right, actually. It wasn’t a bad story. It was pretty believable, all things considered. Teenagers were unpredictable, emotional and volatile. They did stupid things.
But Yarrow was no ordinary teenager. She wasn’t impulsive, and she was the farthest thing from stupid Maria had ever seen. Oh, maybe she’d been more normal once, but walking through the fiery hell that her stupid, selfish, impulsive behavior had landed her in had likely burned all that foolishness out of her. That was something Maria could attest to from personal experience. She’d been through her own reckoning with the evil that came standard with her soul. And, worse, with the consequences it held for the innocents around her.
That sort of reckoning knocked all the nonsense out of a girl. Exactly the sort of nonsense that prompted kids to off chickens by the light of the full moon for revenge. Or risk juvie for a few bucks and a bad mood.
And that was only the intellectual evidence. Her gut smelled something off, too. The girl was lying to her. Hiding something. So what was it, and why was she hiding it? And more importantly, why was Einar facilitating it?
