by Erica Ridley
The pace increased with the pounding of their hearts, their bodies slipping, rubbing, stretching.
“I don’t care if you are a tooth fairy.” His voice was husky with desire. “Right now, you’re mine.”
At those words, she came, contracting helplessly around him. With his gaze locked on hers, he thrust deeper, faster. And with a delicious shudder, he climaxed with her.
He held her for a moment, his lips to her hair, their muscles still throbbing gently.
She tightened her hold around his neck. Had that really just happened? She rested her cheek against his chest. His heartbeat thrummed beneath her ear. She tried to calm her own racing heart. He felt so good in her arms. As if he belonged there. As if they belonged together.
With a smile, he collapsed onto the desk, his chest to her side. He rolled her into his arms, one leg slung possessively over her thighs. His heart now pulsed against her breast, their skin slick and warm and their bodies wholly satisfied. She sighed contentedly. Even without a lust charm, she couldn’t imagine ever getting enough of being in his arms.
At that moment he mumbled something incoherent, but she was far too sated to bother asking what he’d said. She stroked her fingers through his hair. Right now she didn’t care about conversation. She just cared about being here, in his arms.
Happy.
Chapter 8
Trevor wasn’t sure which roused him from his stupor—a crick in his back from balancing on the hard desk, or the stiff nipple poking his ear.
Maybe the nipple.
With a satisfied smile, he slowly breathed in. Vanilla, peaches, and the thick musk of sex. Mmm. Raising his head, he rested his chin on a soft, flat belly and gazed across the office. His favorite wrinkle-free dress shirt was balled and forgotten in the corner. A ruined telephone lay jumbled against the wall. His khakis were nowhere to be seen. He tilted his head toward the window.
A shiny little frog gazed back. A were-frog, if he remembered correctly.
Dawning horror chipped away at his fleeting contentment. Slowly, carefully, Trevor peeled his face from the warmth of naked skin and stared at the curvy woman stretched across his desk, her fingers twined with his. He jerked his hand free. Did he really just have mind-blowing office sex with Daisy the undercover spy? With his parking-lot-view window blinds wide open?
“What did you dope me with?” He scooted his naked ass to the other side of the desk and glared at her. She crossed slender arms over bare breasts and declined to answer. His voice shook in anger. “Ecstasy? Acid-laced Viagra? Some fast-acting street drug I don’t even know about?”
“I didn’t give you anything! All I wanted to do was…” Her eyes widened in horror and she clapped a hand to her chest. “Maybe it didn’t malfunction. Maybe I brought the wrong charm. Maybe it was a…”
Charm? She had drugged him. With some sort of pharmaceutical love potion. Er, lust potion.
Trevor vaulted from the desk. All the honest attraction he’d felt for her before she’d pulled this stunt disappeared with his rage at being forced to act on his baser instincts. His fantasies were meant to be just that—fantasies. He should get to decide whether they became reality. Not her. And definitely not like this. He stalked over to the window and jerked the blinds closed. The tiny frog hopped off the ledge in surprise.
By now, Berrymellow would have live video feed of Trevor’s latest professorial indiscretion streaming straight to YouTube. Maybe that’d been his plan all along. Clever bastard.
“Now that I’m myself again…” He leaned against the window frame and willed his brain to catch up to the rest of him. “Why don’t you tell me what’s really going on here?” Arms crossed, he speared her with his most cutting glare. Probably he should throw her out.
And then probably he should find his pants.
“Uh…” Still sitting on his desk, she blushed—everywhere, damn her—and then covered her face with her hands.
Please. His arms locked tighter across his chest. He wasn’t buying the innocent-little-me act. Not while she was still naked, her breasts and belly still sheened with his sweat, the scent of their lovemaking still spicing the air. Christ, that had been amazing. But what kind of spy seduced people for a freaking living? He shook his head. Unbelievable. Well, at this point, quite believable. “Well?”
With a soft sigh, her hands fell from her face to her lap. “What do you want to know?”
“What do I want to know? Everything!” He gaped at her. “Who are you? Why are you following me? How did we end up naked in my office in the middle of a workday? What the hell did you do with Katrina?”
Daisy gave a weak smile, but the expression didn’t reach her eyes. Her shoulders slumped forward. “All very good questions.”
“Wonderful.” His fingers clenched in exasperation. “What are the answers?”
“Answers a human could understand? The thing is…” Her voice trailed off. She rolled forward, tumbled to the floor in a gust of papers and crumpled post-its, and army-crawled beneath his desk.
Trevor shook his head. This was one weird chick, even for a spy.
She backed out from under the desk on all fours, giving him a view guaranteed to haunt his dreams for the next thousand years. Damn it. How could he be so pissed off and turned on at the same time? She played him. She used him. She was not to be trusted.
“The thing is, I don’t have any answers. At least, not any good ones.” She looped the strap of a large handbag over one shoulder and sighed. “I’m just thankful the effects are starting to wear off or I’d never make it back in time.”
“You admit drugging me? And refuse to explain why?” He eyed her bag suspiciously. “What else do you have in there, Tasers and tranquilizers?”
Lower lip trembling, Daisy looked the perfect picture of misery. Trevor didn’t buy it for a second. Nobody accidentally infiltrated your dig, broke into your armed home, and had sex with you in your office. Nothing about her made sense.
“I’m so sorry,” she said, forehead scrunched, eyes downcast. “About everything. I don’t have any drugs or—or Tasers. I’m not even sure what that is. I don’t even have a ForgetMe orb, which is the one charm I actually meant to bring.” Her eyes hardened. “The only thing I apparently do have is what I now suspect to be a wickedly potent Himalayan Lust Charm. See?” She pulled a fist-sized gold-plated peach from her handbag.
He reared back. Of course he could see. Just the sight of the damn thing sent blood rushing through his veins. He jerked his gaze away. He wasn’t horny anymore. He was livid.
As an anthropologist, he should be analyzing which aspects of the classic symbolic peach triggered his animal instinct to mate with such urgency. As a professor drugged by a pseudo-fairy, he should be furious she kept sidestepping his questions. As a man who just had sex with a near stranger on top of a desk, he should at the least be concerned about wild, unprotected sex in the workplace. Although part of him wasn’t sorry at all that it had happened, this was not something he could just let go. He reached for her.
She backed against the desk. Wariness and desire clashed in her eyes, as if she wanted him but was afraid he might throttle her at any moment.
Good. She should be. He might throttle her yet. But first…
His hands trapped her wrists high above her head. This time, he didn’t bother being gentle, and his fingers dug into her skin until she whimpered. The peach fell free, plopped down on top of the scattered telephone and rolled across the floor. If she wanted physical contact, he’d give her physical contact. He leaned in to punish her with a bruising kiss. Or maybe he was punishing himself.
With every ounce of self-control he possessed, he forced himself to freeze when his face was mere millimeters from hers, when their breath filled each other’s nostrils, when their mouths were almost touching. Now what? Even without the effects of the peach clouding his judgment, his body and his brain still had different opinions on what course of action he should pursue next.
Once was enough,
he told himself desperately. You don’t want to kiss her anymore. You want to kill her. Walk away while you still can.
But how could he toss her aside when her every glance, her every shiver, her every touch started an inferno of lust raging through his veins? That infernal peach hadn’t made him do anything he hadn’t already been fantasizing about. Even without it, he still wanted her.
“Um, Trevor?” She twisted her wrists against his grip.
“What?” he rasped, his mind fighting a losing battle with his body. He tilted her over the desk, aching with renewed desire
“I—I can’t do this. Can’t let you do this. Er, again.” Her breath came quick and ragged, her arms limp. “Much as I’d like to stay, I—I—Goodbye.” She jerked her fingers to her face, touched her lips to a small silver band, and disappeared with a tiny pop and a shower of sparkling glitter.
Literally freaking disappeared. What the hell?!
Surprise and gravity united to destroy Trevor’s balance. His arms swiped at thin air just before he crumpled face-first into the corner of his desk and thumped to the floor in a boneless heap. When his head—and heart—stopped pounding, he opened his eyes.
The ceiling looked the same. It was probably the only part of his office left intact. The only part of his entire life still intact. Groaning, he mentally checked himself for cuts or broken bones. If he’d cracked a rib when he landed on the broken phone, he was going to be pissed. And if a disappearing fairy meant his mind was cracked, he had even bigger problems than he did an hour ago. His left eye was rapidly swelling due to its unforeseen encounter with the corner of a desk, but it had been perfectly fine at the moment when the girl he was kissing vanished without a trace.
Either the woman was as magical as she claimed, or he ought to consider seeking some serious therapy. Maybe both.
He rolled into a sitting position and gingerly touched the base of his eye. Enormous. Great. Now he could either swing by a pharmacy for an eye patch or he could walk around campus with Berrymellow spreading rumors that a hundred-pound fairy managed to clock the big, bad baseball coach in the face.
Trevor paused with one hand cupping his eye. Berrymellow might be the more practiced socio-anthropologist, but as a paleo-anthropologist Trevor was no stranger to hypothesizing from evidential clues.
If Daisy could disappear in a shimmering burst of fairy dust… if her clothes popped on and off with a magical flick of her wrist… if she’d been just as helplessly horny as he, thanks to something called a Himalayan Lust Charm… then maybe, maybe, she wasn’t a Splinter Cell after all. Maybe Berrymellow had nothing to do with her arrival or subsequent actions. Maybe Daisy really was a tooth fairy.
Trevor sighed. Or maybe he was going quietly insane.
But then, he wasn’t the only one who saw fairy people. Alberto and Katrina both interacted with Daisy in Costa Rica, albeit briefly. Even that prick Berrymellow spoke to her, saw her here, in his office. If Trevor was going crazy, there had to be a hefty helping of group hypnosis floating around. What he needed was—
A soft ribbit interrupted his racing thoughts.
One hand still cupping his throbbing eye, he poked his head up over the desk ever so slowly, hoping against hope he’d heard incorrectly.
No such luck.
From his seated position on the glittery base of what had to be a hot pink magic wand, Bubbles the lime-green were-frog looked Trevor in the eye. And belched.
When Daisy materialized on her best friend’s front lawn wearing nothing but a knockoff handbag, she’d sort of hoped Maeve wouldn’t be standing right in front of her.
“You know what?” Maeve said with a swish of her tail. “Just in case I’m forced to testify again, I’m not even going to ask.”
“Good call.” Daisy reached into her purse for a handful of shimmering clothes powder so she could at least not stand around naked. It was one thing for a winged horse to be au natural, but an apprentice tooth fairy? Not so much.
Dress back on and sack of teeth in hand, she reached to her shoulder for her where-frog.
No Bubbles.
“Ah, crap.” She closed her eyes. Today couldn’t get any worse. “I forgot Bubbles.”
Maeve nickered in disbelief. “You’ve had Bubbles since you were four years old. How could you possibly misplace him?”
“It wasn’t a matter of me forgetting Bubbles so much as nobody forgetting anything.” Daisy’s fingernails curled into her palms. She couldn’t wait to hear Vivian explain that one. “I needed the orb in order to have Trevor forget, but he got naked and remembered everything, and since Bubbles was on the other side of the room when Trevor put me on top of his desk so we could—”
“Like I said.” Maeve sidestepped backward. “Not even going to ask. Too busy grazing. La, la, la. Goodbye.”
“Hopefully Bubbles can hang tight until I can go fetch him.” Daisy rifled through her bag. No magic wand, either. Cripes. Guess she really did show up with just the skin on her back. Well, and with a bagful of random teeth nestled in her handbag. “Will you give me a ride to the office, please?”
“No. I’m grazing.” Maeve gnawed at some grass as if to prove her point. “Why don’t you use your Tooth Fairy ring? Isn’t that how you got here without Bubbles?”
“I can’t. It’s a homing ring, not a universal teleporter. It just brings me back to Nether-Netherland if I get stuck somewhere else. I chose here instead of the office for obvious reasons.”
Daisy pasted on her most winning smile, even though the word “office” would conjure completely new images in her brain forevermore. Images involving intense brown eyes, hot sticky sex, and a warm stubbled cheek resting against her chest. Too bad none of it had been of his own free will.
A rancid what-have-I-done feeling curdled in her belly. “How am I going to earn my wings if the Elders find out I just had wild, sweaty office sex with a human?”
“I can’t heeeeeaaar you…” Maeve sang out. She backed up a few more steps, turned and ambled off, presumably to entertain Katrina. Or escape Daisy.
She sighed. Just as well. Unlike the unfortunate Himalayan Lust Charm incident, Katrina was one hundred percent Daisy’s fault. Maeve was helping. Like a good friend. The least Daisy could do was not drag Maeve down with her.
Resolute, Daisy kicked at the springy grass with her bare toes and made her way toward town. Every step reminded her more and more acutely of her missing where-frog.
Poor Bubbles. Too bad he didn’t have a homing ring of his own. He might be afraid for his life, surrounded by all those bones and books and safety goggles. Daisy grimaced. Once she got him back, he’d be in a mood for weeks. Probably pop her to the wrong places on purpose. She’d have to think of a really good way to make it up to him.
And she’d have to think of a great way to make it up to Trevor.
Her stomach clenched in self-recrimination. He was an innocent human. He hadn’t understood what was happening, hadn’t known who or what she was, hadn’t wanted to make love. She’d meant to erase his memory—and likely he wouldn’t have been thrilled with that either—but she hadn’t meant to spring a Himalayan Lust Charm on him.
That he’d admitted already possessing an attraction toward her was gratifying and all, particularly when she’d found him sexy (if infuriating) right from the start. But outside of the sexually charged tussle in his bedroom, he hadn’t acted on his feelings. Thanks to the ForgetMe spell that wasn’t, he’d been forced to. Before she wiped his memories, she had a lot of explaining to do. Even if he wouldn’t remember it, she wanted him to know she never meant to cause him any harm.
The person who she needed to confront first, however, was Vivian Valdemeer.
“What’s going on in there?” Relentless banging accompanied Berrymellow’s words. “Open up! I heard a crash!”
Galvanized, Trevor yanked on his t-shirt and dug his crumpled khakis out of the trash, cursing when his feet got tangled in the pant legs. Could the situation possibly be any worse? When Dai
sy’d set out to screw him six ways to Sunday, she’d done it in every sense of the word. His dig was screwed. His career was screwed. The safety of his students was screwed. His professional reputation was screwed. He’d been screwed. Or, at least, magically encouraged to do the screwing. And he couldn’t forgive her for any of it.
“If you don’t open the door right this second,” Berrymellow shouted, “I will march straight to Dr. Papadopoulos and tell her you’re perpetrating violence on the student body or, worse, engaging in hanky panky at work.”
Trevor fumbled with his zipper. Hanky panky was worse than violence? Nice. Glad to see Berrymellow had his priorities straight. Why couldn’t he have been the one plagued by tooth fairies?
Giving up on his shoes, Trevor ran his fingers through his messy hair and failed to smooth any of it down. Screw it. He twisted the lock and cracked open the door. “What?”
Berrymellow stumbled backward. “Your eye!”
Shit. In his hurry to clothe himself, Trevor had completely forgotten his charming new shiner. Yet another lovely gift from the friendly neighborhood fairy. “I, uh… walked into a wall.”
With a snort of derision, Berrymellow recovered his poise. For a moment. He shoved open the door and immediately went slack-jawed at the state of the office.
Trevor rolled back his shoulders and tried to see his workspace through Berrymellow’s eyes. It wasn’t pretty.
Phone, broken. Desk, cockeyed. File folders, red pens, safety glasses, student papers, scattered willy nilly. Shiny gold glitter still shimmering in musk-scented air. Royal blue dress shirt, pooled in the corner. Left loafer, lying against a potted plant. Right loafer, nowhere to be seen. Mysterious female “student,” likewise absent. Professor Trevor Masterson, bruised, sock-footed and decidedly rumpled. Poking from the professor’s back pocket, some sort of hot pink magic wand. North-facing windowsill, garnished with a tiny green were-frog.
