by Gigi Moore
She agreed wholeheartedly.
This was more than sex magick. This was a sex miracle created by the three of them.
Maia was even surer of this when she pulled back from Thayne and glanced up to see him sheathed in a shimmering glow of light as if his aura was on steroids or something. “Oh…Goddess…” Goose bumps broke out on her skin, and she felt the hair stand up on her arms.
Cade slowly slid from her body with a gasp. “Oh…Oh shit.”
He was as awestruck as her. Maia understood why when she staggered to her feet and saw that the iridescent light wasn’t just surrounding Thayne but all three of them.
“It’s like a protective bubble,” Cade whispered. “Like from the basement.”
Maia remembered the glow from the basement right before they’d all been zapped to the Old West. Prentice had somehow penetrated that veil that had surrounded Thayne and Cade but hadn’t been zapped with them. She, however, had time traveled with them and still wasn’t sure how that had all worked out.
Had Thayne’s “desires” and “wishes” to protect her and get away from Prentice been that strong, strong enough to escape Prentice even after he’d pierced the bubble? “I wonder how impenetrable we can make it and if we can do it without having sex,” she blurted.
“No way to know for sure until we try it and practice,” Thayne said.
“We can practice later though, after we wring another orgasm from our Little Maia and run through what we’ve learned during sex.”
“Practice does make perfect.”
Maia purred. “I like the sounds of that.”
Chapter 21
The three of them finally made it down to the kitchen around eight thirty.
Of course, by then lots of face-stuffing was already taking place, but not enough to deter everyone’s curious stares as he, Maia, and Thayne all walked in.
“It’s about time you three showed up,” Sabrina said as she put a healthy helping of warm hotcakes, scrambled eggs, grits, and ham on each of the three empty plates at the table. “I’ve been keeping this all warm for you.”
Cade expectantly looked at Maia, liking that she still had the capacity to blush after all she, he, and Thayne had done together in the bathhouse earlier.
He grinned and took a seat on one side of Maia while Thayne took a seat on the other, effectively sandwiching her between them like two bodyguards protecting a rich and famous visiting celebrity or dignitary.
Luke Beckett, sitting across from them next to two other gentlemen that Cade, Thayne, and Maia had yet to meet, grinned before stuffing his face with a spoonful of grits and gravy.
One thing Cade could say for the people out here in this time was that they knew how to eat hearty. Of course, he knew they had to pile up on the calories to prepare them for all the hard work they did out on the range and the farm throughout the day. He was used to the practice from his days living with Aunt Aura and Uncle Jeff, when morning meals like this were the rule and not the exception.
Unlike in his time, though, obesity was rare here. No one had time for such a thing with all the stuff that needed to get done out here. Just taking a bath to relax involved a couple of hours of preparations and toil, not to mention the cleanup involved afterward.
Cade respected the people out here in this time. He was honored to be among them and looked forward to earning his keep.
He had a moment of nostalgia remembering how much fun bathing and cleaning up had been with Thayne and Maia helping him. It was a wonder they’d made it out to the kitchen when they had. Truthfully, Cade could have gone another couple of rounds but deferred to time constraints and better judgment.
They all had things to do, places to go, and people to see.
Thayne wanted to hit town and ask around about any ranches in the area that needed hands. Maia wanted to pick Sabrina’s brain about a potential business venture concerning her notions and potions.
This thought brought up an issue that Cade hadn’t even consciously considered before now and that pertained to the fact that Sabrina might be gifted.
She gave off every indication that she could be, which made Cade wonder what she was doing in a one-horse town like Elk Creek. Okay, maybe it wasn’t a one-horse town. As far as towns went in this time, Elk Creek was pretty large and prosperous by comparison. Cade just couldn’t help but compare the town—and all its denizens—to twenty-first-century standards, and he knew he had to stop doing that.
Sabrina took a moment from her bustling around the kitchen to introduce the other two boarders to him, Maia, and Thayne.
One gentleman, Ford, was in town on business and enjoyed the amenities at Sabrina’s better than any place in town when he visited. The other, Joshua, was “just passing through.”
That was another thing Cade had noticed about the people in this time and place. Most didn’t volunteer more than a first name if they could help it, and they didn’t offer information about where they came from or what they did for a living unless it was absolutely necessary. Asking people about themselves was just plain rude here, unlike in the twenty-first century, where it wasn’t uncommon for guests at a dinner party, who barely knew one another, to ask what one did for a living and how much one made at it.
The information blackout in the nineteenth century, of course, piqued Cade’s already healthy curiosity all the more.
Like with Sabrina. She was a mystery to him, and Cade didn’t like mysteries. It was in his nature to solve puzzles, especially when those puzzles were people.
While he was at it, he might as well add Luke Beckett to that list of mysteries.
At the thought, the man glanced up at Cade, as if he knew Cade considered him. Cade didn’t avert his gaze, not wanting to appear guilt ridden. Thank God he didn’t have to hold that intent, bluish-gray gaze too long, as Sabrina came to his rescue with second helpings of food for the gambler.
Luke glanced up at Sabrina as she leaned over him to fill his plate with more hotcakes and ham, and Cade could swear he saw him surreptitiously lean forward to smell Sabrina’s hair.
He thought maybe he imagined the motion until Sabrina drew back and grinned down at Luke. The look Luke gave her in return was as smitten as any schoolboy’s with a crush.
Ah, the flinty-eyed, silent gambler had a weakness!
Cade smiled at the thought and wondered if Sabrina had any inkling. He doubted it. Luke seemed adept at hiding his feelings if he didn’t want them known. It was a quality that served him well at cards. Cade suspected had he not been looking so closely, he wouldn’t have noticed Luke’s interest in Sabrina himself.
“Is there something wrong with the ham and eggs?” Sabrina paused on her way back from the stove to fill everyone’s cups with coffee. She arched an eyebrow and had that ubiquitous hand on her hip as she stared at Maia.
Maia returned her look. “Oh no, there’s nothing wrong. I’m a, uh…I…”
Maia fidgeted beside him, and Cade felt her discomfort as the others at the table all stared at her. As bossy and extroverted as Maia could be, he knew that being pushed in the spotlight and made the cynosure this moment wasn’t to her liking in the least. His heart beat in sympathy with her plight, and just when he prepared to come to her rescue, Maia raised her cleft chin a notch. The indomitable look on her face made Cade’s heart, not to mention his cock, pump from something else entirely different than sympathy, however.
“It’s just…so much food.”
Cade knew Maia had a good appetite and it wasn’t just the amount of food. He saw she was still struggling with her vegan preferences. A lifetime commitment and habit didn’t just go away in twenty-four hours, and he respected that she was trying. Sabrina frowned at her, as did the men at the table. “It’s just enough food to keep that body of yours going.”
“Excuse me?”
Sabrina didn’t hesitate to elaborate. “Pardon me for saying it, missy, but you’re nothing but skin and bones. I don’t know how you do things up in that highfalutin’ ci
ty where you come from, but if you’re going to survive out here for any length of time, you need some meat on your bones, and eating a hearty breakfast is the best way to start your day.”
Rather than take offense, Maia chuckled. “You sound like my mother.”
“Well, your mother’s a smart woman.”
“She thinks she is.”
Sabrina didn’t move from her spot, just eyed the untouched ham and eggs on Maia’s plate as if waiting for her to dig in. By now even Thayne had made a stab at eating his ham.
“Look, Sabrina, I can’t eat the ham and eggs, but I’ll have more of your delicious hotcakes and grits, if you don’t mind.”
Cade sat on the edge of his seat as he sensed all the other men doing. It was as if they all waited for a catfight to erupt at any moment.
He knew how much of a compromise eating in this time had been for Maia. Even the grits and hotcakes weren’t all that harmless, since both had more than likely been made with butter or lard, thereby exploiting one or more animals in some way.
Damn, Thayne had rubbed off on him more than he thought, and his brother wasn’t even a full-fledged vegan like Maia.
After a brief but tense Mexican standoff, Sabrina finally sighed and continued back to the stove, grumbling as she retrieved the tray with the hotcakes on it. She wasted no time piling several onto Maia’s plate and divvying up her ham and eggs between Cade and Luke, silently glaring at each of them as if she dared either man to object.
“Thank you, kindly, ma’am.”
“Oh, don’t you ma’am me.” Sabrina cuffed Luke, but it was obvious to see the lighthearted teasing taking place between the pair as he ducked out of her reach and laughed.
It all made Cade wonder what Luke’s story was and if he was just “passing through,” like Joshua, or staying in town indefinitely, like them.
Once everyone had food on their plate and was comfortably occupied with eating their meal, Sabrina finally took a seat at the table in front of her own plate.
Cade noticed she, like Maia, had a healthy appetite, vegan or not. He liked this about Sabrina. He also liked that she didn’t seem to have any qualms about her weight, not that she needed to anyway. Her body was the perfect combination of athletic and feminine. She had an hourglass figure with lush, round curves filling out her small frame, but her well-delineated biceps were a testament that she did not fear breaking a sweat at hard labor.
Cade felt Maia staring at him and slowly turned to meet her look with a smile.
“Like what you see?” she asked under her breath.
“Always.”
Maia shook her head and laughed. “I’m going to call Sabrina over here to give you a good cuff upside the head, you keep it up.”
“That one giving you a hard time?” Sabrina asked.
“Always,” Maia said.
“Another reason for you to keep up your strength, dealing with the likes of your two escorts here, I reckon,” Sabrina said, and Cade covered his laugh with a hand over his mouth and a cough as Maia and Thayne both blushed vivid red.
Maia recovered enough to say, “They are trying.”
If he and Thayne didn’t watch out, the two women would soon be in cahoots and ganging up on them, not to mention the rest of the men in the house.
The kitchen was silent for a moment as everyone enjoyed the food that Sabrina had prepared, before Joshua spoke up.
“It’s a real shame about that boy going missing this week.”
His low tone was conversational, but Cade sensed something more beneath his words than regular chitchat.
“I know, and so soon after the Humlet boy went missing,” Sabrina said. “Maybelle is still beside herself with fretting.”
“Seems like a real epidemic,” Luke put in, and Cade noticed his frown of concentration.
Cade had a bad feeling, the kind he used to get when he was working missing-persons cases with LAPD. Even with all the forensic and scientific breakthroughs, missing and exploited children were still an all-too-common phenomenon in the twenty-first century. How bad was the problem back in this time without all the complex procedures and science at the lawmen’s and town’s disposal?
Cade looked at his brother, who simply shrugged. Any other time he would have let things go at that and deferred to Thayne’s sagacity, but hearing about Maybelle’s fretting twisted something inside him. He had to respond. “Epidemic?”
“It’s the strangest thing. Started with the Indian settlement a couple of towns over, then it moved to the Negro town a road or two down from it, and now children have started turning up missing in Elk Creek.”
“How many?” Cade rasped.
“All told, or just here?”
“All told.”
“To the best of my recollection, ten, including the two boys from Elk Creek.”
“How long has this been going on?” Maia asked, taking the words out of Cade’s mouth.
“Hard to say.” Sabrina shrugged as she cut into a piece of her ham with her knife and fork. Her nonchalant words said it all.
Kids turned up missing from the Indian and Negro towns, no big deal, and the good Christian folks in the white towns just brushed it off. As soon as children turned up missing from the white town, the problem becomes an “epidemic.”
Cade didn’t fault Sabrina or Luke. They weren’t the problem. They were just a small symptom of a bigger issue. The attitude was what it was—pervasive, systemic racism. Sadly, the mind-set was the same in the nineteenth century as it remained in the twenty-first century. People of color, but probably more importantly their children’s lives, just weren’t valued as much as white children’s lives.
Cade knew he had to handle his next questions very carefully, if he said anything at all.
He mentally weighed the pros and the cons of getting involved and couldn’t come up with a good reason not to show a little healthy curiosity. “When did the first boy go missing?”
Sabrina looked at Luke and Josh as if for confirmation before answering. “Don’t rightly know. I heard tell about the Indian kids a couple of months or so ago, maybe more.”
“And the first boy from Elk Creek?”
“That would be Olivia and Clay’s boy, Tommy. He’s the sweetest kid, a hard worker. He and his best friend, Isaiah, help me in my garden sometimes.”
“When’s the last time he was seen…” Cade almost said alive, but seeing as Sabrina spoke about the kid in the present tense, he didn’t want to pop her bubble unnecessarily. Not to mention he was breaking a lot of unspoken rules asking so many questions.
“I saw him about a week ago, probably when most of the town did. He and Isaiah came by to help me gather some herbs and plants for my tonics.”
“How old is he?”
“Tommy’s fourteen.”
“And the boy that went missing this week?”
“That’s Aaron. He’s thirteen, although you’d think he was older. Took up the slack working the farm for his mama after Maybelle lost her husband a year ago to consumption. Like Joshua said, it’s a real shame, it is.”
Poor woman. First she’d lost her husband, now she’d lost her son?
Cade had to do something.
He felt Thayne looking at him and turned to catch his brother’s subtle look of warning. It may have been subtle to everyone else at the table, but Cade heard him loud and clear. The look shouted for him not to get involved. As selfless and compassionate as his brother usually behaved, Thayne’s expression surprised Cade. Cade was usually the apathetic one who couldn’t be bothered by other people’s problems. The mien had served him well for a while, all the way up until he’d come back to Los Angeles and walked into that police station handling a high-profile missing person’s case. He’d told the desk sergeant he could help, and that was all she wrote. His life changed from that point on.
Cade knew he’d get an earful from his brother later for what he was about to say, but he couldn’t stop himself. “Is there any way we can help?”
“I’d like to try.”
Sabrina raised her eyes from her plate to give Cade her full attention. “How would you do that?”
“I’d be real interested to know how you’d do that, too,” Joshua said.
Cade really looked at him for the first time since Sabrina had introduced him.
His sandy-blond hair and droopy, silver-gray eyes gave one the impression of youth and inattentiveness, but Cade saw just how alert and sharp Joshua was. Despite the dark circles beneath his eyes, the cause of which Cade briefly wondered, it was obvious that Joshua wasn’t a man to take lightly.
“I could—”
Thayne cleared his throat loudly and glared at Cade.
His interruption didn’t go unnoticed, and everyone’s eyes went from Cade to Thayne and back to Cade again.
Cade felt everyone waiting to see what he would do next. He wasn’t sure himself what he was going to do or say next.
Finally, Sabrina leaned forward in her chair and patted Cade on the hand, saving him from himself. “I’m sure you mean well and the families would appreciate it, but there’s really nothing you can do that the sheriff and his deputy haven’t done already.”
The sheriff and his deputy aren’t psychics.
Cade held his tongue, however. He knew he couldn’t go shooting off his mouth about any sort of extrasensory perception, something with which these good people probably didn’t have too much experience, if any.
He also knew he wouldn’t be able to keep quiet about this for long. Especially if, God forbid, another kid turned up missing.
It was just a matter of time.
Chapter 22
When Prentice initially landed in the Old West after finally successfully casting Brielle Malloy’s spell, he’d thought he would be prepared for anything. He wasn’t as prepared as he’d assumed he’d be.
As the days progressed and bled into each other, Prentice grew to understand that this shithole dust bowl was exactly where he was meant to be, as much as he detested it.
