Witchy Woman

by Karen Leabo

  “Touch me,” he directed her.

  Freed from every inhibition she’d ever had, she did touch him. First she laid her hands lightly against his rib cage. Then she leaned in and tongued one of his nipples.

  He groaned in obvious pleasure.

  Emboldened, she blazed a trail of kisses up his firm arm to his collarbone. At this point she didn’t kid herself, he was in complete control of the situation—standing stoically with his hands lightly resting on her shoulders, enduring her gentle ministrations with scarcely a sign of reaction except the quickness of his breathing.

  When her mouth reached his chin, he came to life. His grip on her shoulders tightened. He tilted his head down and angled his mouth over hers, taking possession with one long, slow, wet kiss.

  The kiss was a little familiar. She found she didn’t even have to summon the memory of how he tasted—it was just there. It was also different, new, more exciting, more frightening, maybe because she knew it wouldn’t end there. She slid her hands around his middle and planted them firmly on his back, holding him tightly to her as he thoroughly explored her mouth with little nips and nibbles, then a bold thrust of his tongue.

  Tess had never felt anything so wonderful. Closeness was foreign to her, always associated with discomfort, yet there she was practically inside Nate’s skin, and she’d never felt better. She’d never felt quite so much a woman, either. Her blood thrummed through her veins, her heart beat wildly, her juices flowed, and the core of her burned with a fire that would not be quenched by anything but total satisfaction.

  It kept getting better. Still kissing her with exquisite thoroughness, Nate moved one hand to her breast. At first he simply held it, letting her get accustomed to the new intimacy. Then he began a slow caress, exploring every square inch before finally focusing on her nipple.

  Such sweet torture! Following unfamiliar instincts, she pushed her hips against his, finding the evidence of his arousal pressed against her belly. She reveled in the feel of it, exalted in her sense of feminine power.

  “Am I there? Am I with you?”

  Nate’s voice floated to her from somewhere else. It took her a few disconcerting moments to realize it was the real live Nate, speaking softly into her ear. He had no way of knowing whether he had breached the barriers of her mind unless she told him so.

  “Yes, I’m reading you loud and clear,” she said a little desperately. “For God’s sake, don’t stop now!”

  “No, no,” he murmured soothingly. “I won’t.”

  She was briefly aware of his arms, wrapping themselves more securely around her in the real world; their bodies, though still fully clothed, touching intimately.

  Then she was back, fully involved in the fantasy, naked and surrounded by silk and satin.

  Nate ended the kiss, then abruptly scooped her up into his arms as if she weighed no more than a cloud. And, she thought dimly, maybe she didn’t. This was fantasy, after all.

  He eased her down onto the mound of pillows. “I’m going to love you like no woman’s ever been loved,” he said, as clearly as if they’d been talking in the conscious world. “I’m going to worship every part of your body, from your little toes to your eyebrows, and then I’m going to take you and make you mine—forever mine.”

  She thrilled to his words even as she acknowledged that she might be embellishing the fantasy. Forever mine? Nate wouldn’t have said that. They’d never even talked about next week, much less eternity.

  But she couldn’t devote any more time to analyzing words. He was making good on his promises, kissing her feet, sucking on her toes, finding little hollows and dents and bumps that were incredibly sensitive—places she’d never dreamed could be so erogenous. Writhing with pleasure, she wondered distractedly if she wouldn’t be expected to do the same thing to him in reverse. She found herself thinking about touching him intimately, and her whole body flushed and tingled.

  He worked his way up, eliciting sighs and giggles and moans of pure pleasure, though he meticulously avoided her most intimate areas. By the time he’d reached the halfway point, she’d reached the end of her patience.

  “I’m ready now,” she said.

  He kissed each of her breasts without comment, lavishing attention on them.

  “I’m ready now.”

  He ignored the pleading tone in her voice, taking his time. Surely midnight would come and go by the time he finished reducing her to an abject puddle of wanton desire, but she couldn’t change a thing. She was helpless. Deliriously aroused, but helpless.

  He did, indeed, finish with her eyebrows. Then he looked deeply into her eyes. He didn’t have to say anything further. She separated her legs, inviting him to become a part of her.

  He knelt between her bent knees, then covered her body with his. He gave her a light kiss, almost an apology, and then he slid inside.

  Her whole body felt electrified. As Nate thrust inside her the affected nerve endings practically cried out from the stimulation.

  Her brain was about to be overloaded with pleasure.

  It occurred to her to wonder—if this was his fantasy, how come she felt so great?

  An exquisite pressure built inside her, demanding release. Was this what she’d heard about and thought would never happen to her? How could those mechanical descriptions she’d read about in sex-education classes translate into this heavenly experience? Or was her imagination working overtime? She’d certainly read enough romance novels, with their heavily sensual, overembellished love scenes.

  She couldn’t devote much attention to wondering about that. She was swamped with sensations. She wanted to laugh and cry at the same time. Then suddenly the earth tilted, and she thought she got a real glimpse of heaven. She cried out from the sheer physical joy of it, of finding such unexpected ecstasy.

  Her eyes were closed, both in fantasy and in reality. When she opened them tentatively, she saw not the satin room with its pink-and-lilac pillows, but Nate’s dimly lit living room. Her cries seemed to echo around the room, and her throat felt a little raw.

  Nate still held on tightly, his face buried against her neck. He spoke first. “You okay?”

  “Yes, I think so.” She was still trying to figure out what had happened. Though she was definitely back in the here and now, some vestiges of the fantasy remained. The way her body felt, for example. Satiated. Completely and thoroughly satisfied.

  “I feel like an idiot asking this, but, did it work?”

  She nodded. “Really well.” She twisted around so she could see him, then cupped his face with her hand while he looked at her quizzically. “It was the most beautiful …” Words failed her. She was surprised to feel tears threatening. “What have I been missing?”

  “I wish I’d been there.”

  “You were!” she insisted.

  He shook his head sadly. “It was just a fantasy for me—an especially good one, but completely imaginary—nothing approaching cosmic.”

  “For an imaginary guy, you sure know how to give a girl a good time.”

  He grinned, as she’d hoped her bit of male ego stroking would make him do. “You did seem to enjoy yourself.”

  “How do you know?” she asked suspiciously.

  “It was hard to miss.”

  “Did I …”

  “That’s what it looked like to me.”

  Tess was torn between being fascinated and embarrassed by her body’s behavior. This was all so new to her.

  Nate glanced at his watch, suddenly grim again. “We probably should get going. No telling what kinds of roadblocks the Cat has in store to slow us down.”

  Tess gasped. “Midnight. Midnight—how close are we?” She twisted his arm around to look at the watch. “Nine forty-five?” The entire fantasy had lasted less than ten minutes. It had seemed like hours to her, though she’d heard that earthly time had no meaning in other dimensions.

  Surely that’s where she’d been—in another dimension.

  Reluctantly she slid off Nate�
��s lap. “We’d better get going.” Her time with Nate had been a pleasant interlude, but the real world was intruding. “Can you help me take stuff down to the car?”

  He stood and touched her arm, stilling her. She looked back at him over her shoulder.

  He stroked her cheek. She hoped he would say something about making love for real at a later date. But whatever he was thinking, he kept it to himself. “Sure, I’ll help with whatever you need.”

  Tess had all of her canvas bags stashed neatly by the door with all of the necessary ingredients. All but one. As she and Nate shrugged into jackets, preparing to leave the apartment, she approached him shyly, nail scissors in hand. If she didn’t get this done quickly, she would lose her nerve.

  “Is that everything?”

  “Almost.” She reached up with the scissors and snipped off a lock of his hair, then tucked it into a plastic bag. “That’s it.”

  He stared after her, speechless, as she preceded him out the door.

  ELEVEN

  It took Nate a few moments to recover from the hair snipping. What was the significance? he thought as he followed Tess down the back stairs, watching every step so he wouldn’t end up like the shopkeeper, Anne-Louise. What, exactly, did the damn spell say?

  The blood of a virgin, and a lock of hair from her own true love.

  Holy hell. Did that mean what he thought it meant? Whoa, whoa, he was getting ahead of himself. It didn’t mean she was in love with him, just that he was the closest thing to a “true love” she could find. They couldn’t very well perform the spell with no one’s hair. His would have to do.

  He was sure that was all there was to it. Now, though, he couldn’t decide whether that conclusion relieved or disappointed him. He’d already acknowledged that his feelings for Tess were more than casual. That something important was happening. But as for a future together … how could he deal with the one-sidedness of their relationship? How could he cope with a woman who knew, or could find out, every intimate detail of his life just by touching him, while she remained such a mystery to him?

  He couldn’t see how it would work.

  He and Tess put everything they would need in the backseat of his car, along with the Book of Shadows in case they wanted to refer to something, though Tess had the spell memorized backward and forward. They hadn’t driven the car since their flight from Judy’s town house two days earlier, because the Cat statue was in the trunk. Now, Nate’s trusty Fairlane seemed to groan in protest when he opened the door. Even the car’s appearance had taken on sinister qualities.

  “Man, I’m losing it,” he grumbled, rubbing at the healing scratches Whiskers had given his arm. He supposed he was lucky he didn’t have gangrene.

  “What?” Tess asked.

  “Nothing. Just a minor delusion that my car has turned evil.”

  “Wouldn’t surprise me at this point. Are we ready?” she asked too brightly.

  “Ready as we’ll ever be.”

  Their first hurdle came when Nate tried to start his car. Nothing. “I just replaced the battery six months ago,” he said on a sigh.

  “Maybe we left the lights on last time we were in it,” Tess suggested. “We were pretty unnerved.”

  “Since when did you start trying to assign logical explanations to everything that happens to us?” he groused as he got out of the car. “Let’s just chalk another one up to the curse and be done with it. Should we jump the engine, or move everything over to your car?”

  “My car,” Tess said decisively.

  Ten minutes later they were on the road in Tess’s Tercel. Right before they’d left, Nate had gingerly transferred the Crimson Cat to Tess’s trunk. Was it his imagination, or had the thing been vibrating in his hands? And just before the trunk lid had slammed, he thought he’d seen something glowing in the darkness.

  The trip to Sudbury was surprisingly uneventful—no accidents, no falling trees. But a storm was brewing. By the time they turned off the main highway, the winds had picked up considerably, buffeting the car with alarmingly violent gusts. The full moon, now high in the sky, played peekaboo with churning storm clouds.

  “Someone’s following us,” Tess said. “That same car has been behind us ever since we exited the main road.”

  A few days before, Nate would have thought Tess was being paranoid. But not now. They had to watch anything out of the ordinary carefully. And the car that Tess had pointed out was following a little too close.

  Nate slowed down and pulled to the shoulder to let the car pass. At first, the other driver didn’t take the hint. But finally the car pulled around and ahead of Nate and Tess.

  Tess sighed audibly. “Guess I’m a little skittish.”

  “Me too.”

  As they moved into a residential area another car turned from a side street and started to follow. “Ah, hell.”

  “What?”

  “We’ve got company again, and it’s the same car. Want me to try to lose him?”

  Tess looked at her watch. “We don’t have much time to spare, and I’m not sure my car has enough horses under the hood to lose anyone. Let’s just go.”

  The strange car stayed on their tail all the way to the turnoff for the church and cemetery, but at that point he went on straight.

  “Thank God for that,” Tess said.

  Nate reserved his gratitude. He’d tailed people a time or two. Sometimes he would deliberately not turn, just to throw off his prey, then double back or catch them at another intersection.

  They were still blessedly alone, however, when they pulled into the church parking lot. The wind was blowing hard, whistling eerily through the wrought-iron fence that protected the graveyard. The huge hardwood trees that surrounded them groaned in protest.

  Nate took one look through the fence at the gravestones within and felt his skin go clammy. The way the moonlight wavered and flickered made the stone markers move, as if they were dancing. Visions of every B horror movie he’d ever seen danced through his mind. Carrie’s hand pushing through the dirt of her new grave. Zombies lurching around with their empty eyes and green skin.

  “Nate? Nate!”

  “Huh? Oh, sorry. I zoned out there for a minute.” He’d been standing frozen beside the car. “Let’s carry this stuff to the fence. Then you can climb over and I’ll hand everything to you.”

  “Okay. I hope it doesn’t rain.” At her words, the first fat drops began falling. “Well, so much for that.”

  When it came to carrying the cat, Tess insisted it was her turn. Up until now, she hadn’t actually come into physical contact with the statue. She leaned inside the trunk and picked it up, still wrapped in its paper bag.

  She hadn’t gone more than a few steps toward the fence when she cried out and dropped the statue into the grass.

  “What’s wrong?” Nate demanded, at her side in an instant.

  “It burned me!” She held out her hands. Even in the on-again, off-again moonlight, Nate could see the angry red welts on the palms of her hands.

  “Holy—! Are you okay? Do you need medical—”

  “No, it’s not that bad. Hurts like hell. I’ve got some old towels in the trunk I use at the car wash. Maybe we can use them like pot holders—”

  “That won’t be necessary.”

  Nate and Tess froze, looking around for the source of the voice that didn’t belong to either of them. Nate recognized it, though.

  A shadow stepped from behind a massive tree trunk. Tristan Solca stood before them, and this time he didn’t wait before displaying his knife, an even bigger knife than he’d used before. It glittered malevolently in the moonlight, as did his black eyes. “All I want is the statue. That’s simple enough, isn’t it?”

  All of Tess’s oxygen seemed to be trapped in her throat. They couldn’t get this close, only to be thwarted by this horrible man who wanted to use the Cat for who knew what evil purposes.

  Well, he’d have to take it over her dead body.

  “Look, Solca, give
us half an hour,” Nate said, using his best cajoling voice. “We’re about to use the statue for a small … exercise. A religious ceremony, if you will. After we’re done, you can have the Cat. And we won’t even press charges for assault with a deadly weapon, which this in fact is. Fair enough?”

  Solca’s face wavered with uncertainty.

  “That okay with you, Tess?” Nate looked over at her.

  She nodded, though she didn’t have a good feeling about this. What if the spell failed? How could they, in good conscience, hand over an instrument of evil power to this horrible man?

  “What kind of ceremony?” Solca asked suspiciously.

  “Just a little witchly hocus-pocus,” Nate said glibly. It was the wrong thing to say.

  Solca’s eyes narrowed dangerously. “You’re going to take the curse off it!” He turned his head and spat. “Morganna attempted and failed. It can’t be done.”

  “Then why don’t you let us get on with it?” Tess said. “We’ll try, we’ll fail, we’ll probably die in the process, and you can have your old Cat.”

  Solca wavered again. “Why should I take the chance? Morganna always said her spawn had powers she only dreamed of. You might succeed at that.” He took a step forward.

  Tess and Nate instinctively moved closer together, protecting the hated Crimson Cat between them. “I wouldn’t recommend it,” Nate said.

  “You think those fancy kung-fu steps of yours are any match for a man with a knife?” Solca challenged. His teeth glowed yellow in the moonlight. He took another step, his eyes on Nate.

  Nate adopted a fighting stance.

  Oh, God, Tess thought, she couldn’t let Nate get hurt. She was just about to speak up and tell Solca he could have his damn statue when all at once the man lunged at her.

  The move was so completely unexpected, it knocked both Tess and Nate off balance. Before she knew what was happening, the knife sliced downward faster than she could see, and her left arm was cut—deep.

  Nate’s attention immediately went to Tess, no doubt as Solca had anticipated. He made a grab for the Cat and started running with it.