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That really only offered him a minimal amount of comfort. “I still don’t like the idea of you getting too close to them.”
“I can’t treat them if I can’t touch them.”
“And you can’t touch them if they rip your arms off,” he shot back. “I want you to promise me that you won’t go in that cage on your own even if you think they’ve got them both sedated.”
“If they’re unconscious, I don’t see what they could do to hurt me.”
“Promise.”
“Eli—”
“Promise.”
She gave in with very little grace. “Fine. I won’t go in the cage unless I have someone else around.”
“Unless I’m around.”
Josie rolled her eyes. “Eli, I can’t put my practice on hold and wait around for you to get off duty before I perform a medical procedure.”
“I’m not asking you to let me know when you have to put a splint on the leg of a cocker spaniel,” he argued, cupping her jaw in his hand. “This is a special circumstance, and this is the only time I’m going to insist. But I am going to insist. Understand?”
“Fine.”
Her grace seemed to be slipping away like the tide. He discovered he liked that. He didn’t want to think of Josie being cautious or polite with him. He wanted her to be comfortable and honest and completely herself. He wanted her to argue with him. Anything less would bore him silly.
His mouth curved and he leaned forward to kiss her forehead. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” she muttered, reaching up to drag him back down to her. “But just so you know, your aim stinks.”
Then she planted her mouth on his and proceeded to drive him crazy.
Absently, Eli heard Bruce heave a disgusted sigh and felt the sofa cushions shift. The dog jumped to the floor and padded his way into the bedroom. Absently, because Eli had much more important things to think about than Josie’s dog. Like Josie herself.
His hand moved from her jaw to the back of her head so he could hold her still while he turned the tables on her. He went from an ordinary male with bad aim to a pillaging conqueror in the space of a breath, and then he decided to steal her breath as well.
If it were possible, he wanted her to feel his hunger, actually experience it alongside him, not just respond to the evidence of it. He wanted her to know how warm and soft and feminine she felt in his arms, not just wriggle and strain in his grip. He wanted to share with her how it felt to slide inside her and feel that amazing, mind-blowing sensation of coming home.
And if he couldn’t do all of that, he at least wanted to imprint himself on her soul, so that she would never forget how he felt, how he smelled, how he tasted. Gods knew he could never forget her.
The hunger he had sated that morning stirred awake like the kraken rising from the sea. It welled up inside him until he wanted to swallow her whole just so he could carry her always inside of him. The crazy part was that he knew he was being ridiculous, but it didn’t matter. He couldn’t stop himself.
He slid his hands under the hem of her oversize shirt and found nothing but warm, silky skin, and that by itself made his head spin faster than a mouthful of straight whiskey. He stroked her hip, her back, the curve of her waist and wondered who enjoyed the caresses more, the touched or the toucher? At the moment he felt like he could stay this way forever, just holding her closer, tasting her, breathing her in, and feeling the living velvet of her flesh beneath his hands.
She became impatient well before him. With a frustrated groan, she yanked the shirt off over her head and tossed it to the floor, leaving Eli to experience the epiphany of finding her more beautiful tonight than she had been last night, the first time he’d seen her nudity, or this morning under the bright lights of her clinic. He’d expected that the magic of looking on a lover for the first time could never be recaptured. It lived in that instant, in the revelation of something previously unknown. But he’d had it all wrong.
This was magic, this knowing that the sandy pink of her erect nipple would flush the most beguiling shade of rose when he circled it with his tongue, then deepen further still from the pressure of his suckling mouth. Magic lived in the way he knew that the tiny little cluster of moles on her left hip formed a shape like a compass rose. The magic nearly flattened him when she leaned forward and he felt the familiar weight of her breasts against his chest, the perfectly remembered fit of their bodies aligned.
Magic, he realized, had nothing to do with novelty.
Thirsty, he bent again to her mouth and drank of her sweetness. His hands stroked up her sides, cuddling her breasts in his palms, thumbs strumming against her nipples until she mewled like a hungry kitten. The sound echoed inside his head and left him dazed and aching. Her smallest sounds, her lightest touches, affected him like nothing else ever had. Her restless movements, however, warned him that for Josie, small and light was not nearly enough.
Suddenly urgent, her fingers fumbled with the fastening of his jeans. Eli reached down to help her. Between them, they managed to rid him of the confining fabric and that, too, fell unheeded to the floor.
Her hand closed around him and wrenched a sound from deep inside his chest. His head dropped back to the cushions behind him and his lips arched into her touch. Her graceful, elegant fingers tightened with surprising strength around the base of his erection and milked upward until he had to grit his teeth against the urge to beg. He felt no shame at the idea of leaving himself vulnerable to her, but he didn’t know whether to beg her to stop or to move faster, and he feared that if he opened his mouth, the wrong answer would spring forth.
He suffered the glory of half a dozen slow, taunting strokes and opened his mouth to beg for mercy, but thankfully, Josie showed him none. Gripping him with one hand, she swung her leg over both of his and slowly, slowly—cruelly slow—sank down and enveloped him.
And what had been magical became miraculous.
Her name poured from his throat in a tight, hoarse, rasping shadow of sound. He felt her inner muscles tighten around him, felt her body weeping in welcome, and thought that this was what it must mean to be blessed.
His control broke with a resounding snap, leaving his inner beast free to spring to the kill. His hands closed like a steel vise on her hips, wrenching the reins of their mating from her grasp. Ruthlessly, relentlessly, he held her down as his body pounded up into hers. Her breathing turned into a shuttering, gasping series of breathless pants, and he felt her thighs begin to quiver alongside his, but he ignored her and pushed them both farther toward oblivion.
Again and again their bodies slapped together in a primitive rhythm. Again and again Eli thought the next stroke would be his last, and again and again his beast would roar its displeasure and demand one more. One more. One more.
But there would always be one more, because Eli knew in the deepest recesses of his self that he would never have enough of this woman. Never have enough of his mate.
Never have enough.
But his body was as weak as hers, and they could take only so much. He rose up, slamming deep within her and touching off a shuddering series of internal contractions that dragged him over the edge with her.
Head back, jaw clenched, he screamed his pleasure and dominance to the night, and at the same time surrendered himself utterly to the woman he would never let go.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Wednesday, Josie decided, was a gift from God. Not only had the day started with an amazing bout of lazy, sleepy sex, but by ten o’clock the sun beamed down, the sky and attained the color of a Tiffany’s box, and a late-season surge of warmth brought the temperature up to a glorious sixty-five.
If it hadn’t been for the two wild Lupines locked in her storage room, Josie might have assumed her epidemic of bad luck had run its course. Still, she had definitely had worse days.
To top it all off, on Wednesdays the clinic opened late as a trade-off for their Saturday-morning hours, and on this particular morning, her
last appointment before lunch called to cancel, giving her an unheard-of extra twenty minutes all to herself.
Well, all to herself and the stack of paperwork she needed to catch up on.
And the large, hairy, drooling mass at her feet.
She nibbled a sandwich while she worked, so she had her mouth full when Leah, her receptionist, paged her from the front of the clinic.
“Dr. Barrett?”
Josie grabbed the receiver. She hated talking into a speaker. “What’s up, Leah?”
“There’s someone here to see you. She doesn’t have an appointment, but she says you’re expecting her? Her name is Mary Applewhite.”
For a minute Josie stared blankly into space. She didn’t know anyone by that name, did she?
Through the intercom, she heard a rustling and some muffled voices, then Leah spoke again. “She said to remind you that Sheriff Pace asked her to come to the clinic to consult with you on some patients.”
Another vet? Josie thought briefly, then the lightbulb clicked on and she almost smacked herself in the head. Not a vet, a witch.
“Right,” she said, dropping her sandwich and dusting her hands off on her lab coat. “I’m sorry, Leah, I should have told you she was coming. I’ll be right there.”
Mary Applewhite, Josie decided as they shook hands in the clinic’s bright and sparsely furnished waiting room, looked a little like a witch and a little like a coffee house barista. Her face had that sort of ageless look that said she could have been anywhere between twenty-seven and forty-seven. She wore her strawberry-blond hair very short, in a spiky modern pixie cut, and a series of six earrings decorated her left ear. In the right, she wore only two—one dangling from the lobe, the other a ring around the cartilage at the very top of the auricle. Those things made her look like a barista. The warm smile, silver pentacle necklace, and glint of ageless wisdom in her slate-blue eyes made her look like a witch.
Josie liked her immediately.
Especially since she wore her pentacle and earrings with a pair of faded blue jeans, a snug T-shirt the color of rhododendron leaves, and purple high-top sneakers.
“Come on back,” Josie invited, turning to lead the way. “I’m so glad you were willing to drive all the way out here from Portland.”
“It’s a pretty drive,” Mary said. Her voice sounded more barista than witch, rough and quick, as if she might be a smoker, or had grown up with them. “And it gave me the chance to do a last little bit of wildcrafting before the frost sets in.”
Josie looked her question.
“Collecting wild-growing plants and herbs,” Mary explained. “Always responsibly and always in authorized areas.”
“Don’t worry,” Josie said, grinning. “I grew up here in Oregon, but I’m not a member of the environment police. I swear.” She gave Mary the stool from the desk and grabbed another for herself from the other side of the room. Bruce ignored them completely. “So, um, I’m not entirely sure what Eli told you—”
“Sheriff Pace? He said that there was a concern that two people from your town might have been cursed somehow, or maybe enchanted, and he asked if I would be able to tell if that were true if I met them.” Mary watched Josie calmly, her gaze steady and gentle. “I told him I would. And I will. If there’s some sort of unnatural magic around, I can find it.”
“I apologize, but we don’t have that many witches here in Stone Creek, so I’m not sure how you do what you do . . .”
“Don’t worry. It’s not complicated. Usually, I just have to be in the same room with the person or thing that’s been affected by magic. I can give you a yes or a no based on the energy the thing gives off. Then I can try to tell you what kind of magic was used, and sometimes I can try to trace it back to its source, but I can’t make guarantees about that. That’s a lot more complicated, and it usually requires that I touch whatever has been cursed.”
Josie held up her hands and shook her head. “No, we’ll have to do without that because touching isn’t going to be possible in this case.”
“Fair enough.” Mary nodded and tilted her head to the side as if trying to figure something out. “Why don’t you tell me a little more about what’s going on? Or we can get right to the scrying, if that makes you more comfortable.”
“No. Well—” Josie paused and pursed her lips. “Well, I can’t let you go in blind, but I kind of assumed that Eli had told you a little more about our situation. The problem that we’re having has to do with two Lupines, both members of the local pack.” She raised an eyebrow. “You don’t have a problem with shifters, do you?”
The witch grinned. “I might be human, but I’m not exactly Ms. Average American. Don’t worry. I don’t get all het up over the idea of people getting furry occasionally.”
“Good. Um, these two Lupines both seem to have the same problem, and we’re trying to figure out the source. Each of them shifted from human into wolf form at some point this past weekend, and between then and today, neither of them has been able to shift back. They’re stuck. Now, my theory is that they have some kind of disease—not one that’s transmissible to humans, so don’t worry—but that there’s some sort of bug infecting their systems and making them too sick to shift. Unfortunately, other than one abnormal test result, we’re having trouble finding any evidence about what that bug might be. The leader of the local pack said that the only other thing he thought could be preventing these Lupines from shifting for so long was a curse. And that’s where you come in. We don’t have any experts on that kind of magic in Stone Creek, so we had to look somewhere else for help, and you were recommended to us.”
Josie watched Mary’s face as she spoke. The witch’s sympathetic demeanor never changed, but her expression grew more and more solemn as the story went on. When Josie finally fell silent, the other woman shook her head.
“This is unfortunate. I’ll definitely take a look at the Lupines and let you know if I can sense a curse around them, but it’s not a good sign that they’ve gone so long without changing. Remaining in a nonhuman form for many days can have serious consequences.”
“I know. Eli told me, which is why I really want to do whatever we can to help Rosemary and Bill before it’s too late.”
Mary stood and brushed her hands on her jeans. “I’m ready if you are. Should we go and have a look?”
Josie led the way down the short hall and into the isolation room. The minute the outer door opened, two enormous heads turned and four feral amber eyes glared at the intruders. The larger, lighter wolf—Bill—lunged immediately toward the front of the partition, as if he could throw himself through the metal barrier and take the humans down like deer. Behind him, Rosemary’s salt-and-pepper fur stood up straight between her shoulder blades. She remained near the center of the enclosure, her legs spread and braced, her head down as she snarled low in her throat, her feelings about the other women plain.
The witch stood directly in front of the kennel gate and stared intently at the wolves for all of thirty seconds. Then she blinked, turned around, and headed back the way she’d come. “I’ve seen enough.”
Wondering what exactly Mary had seen, Josie followed her back to the triage room and waited anxiously.
The other woman stood in the center of the room, breathing as if she’d just sprinted the length of a football field. Her head was down until her chin rested nearly on her chest, and she had planted her fisted hands on her hips while she struggled to catch her breath. Josie couldn’t pretend to understand it, but she stayed back and watched until the witch exhaled deeply and resumed her seat on the stool.
Josie joined her, perching on the very edge of her seat and leaning forward.
“It’s not a curse,” Mary said without prompting. “I’m sure of that. There’s no magic in that room, aside from what is naturally part of the makeup of a shapeshifter. Their being is a kind of magic, after all.”
“Oh, but that’s good, right? I mean, we don’t actually want them to be cursed.”
&nbs
p; Mary laughed in a way that indicated absolutely no amusement. “Believe me, there are worse things than curses out there. Much worse.”
A strange flush of dizziness made Josie blanch. She could actually feel herself going pale. “What do you mean?”
“I am a practicing witch, and I do have a fairly extensive knowledge of curses, but that isn’t my only talent,” Mary admitted. “I’m psychic.”
“Psychic?”
“Clairvoyant. I can look at people and see things, things that happened in the past, situations they’ve been in, people connected to them. And sometimes things that might happen in the future.”
Josie felt like she might be having a premonition of her own. She knew that Mary had seen something bad when she’d looked at the Lupines. And Josie knew that she had to ask what it had been.
When she did, the words emerged as a whisper.
“There’s no black magic associated with the Lupines,” the witch reiterated, “but there is something very wrong attached to them anyway. Something negative and . . . malevolent. I can’t see exactly what it is, because—”
“Because why?”
“Because there isn’t much human left inside them.”
“You mean—”
“They don’t have a lot of time before they’ll be trapped. They’re already three-quarters of the way there. Maybe more. You said they first changed this weekend.”
Josie nodded.
“What time? Specifically.”
“Uh . . .” Josie racked her memory. “Bill said Rosemary left after they had a fight in the middle of the afternoon, and that she usually shifted and went to the woods to work off her mad, so maybe . . . between two and four on Saturday? And I was there when Bill shifted. I think it was a little before ten on Sunday night.”
The answer made Mary frown. “I’m surprised, because the male is farther gone than the female. I would have guessed that he’d shifted first.”
