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Audrey
Fightingacenturies-oldcursetook a lot out of a girl. Not to mention all the energy I’d expended combining my powers with Wes’s to electrocute various plants, vines, and insects that hung around the clearing. I somehow managed to drag myself home, where I fell into bed with my shoes on and mud all over my back.
I didn’t sleep soundly for long, though. Restless dreams filled with shocking green light and old hurts kept me tossing and turning most of the night. More than once I reached for Wes, like I expected him to be there, and kicked myself when disappointment flooded me. Even though the curse had done a number on me by dragging me back to the past, I had to move forward, so that’s what I was going to do. It had been four years. Both Wes and I had done a lot of changing in that time. It was time to let go.
The next evening, I asked Ella to close for me so I could get ready for dinner. I’d definitely be giving her a raise this year for all the extra work she’d been putting in for me.
I reached for my lip gloss and knocked my eyeshadow palette off the counter, cracking my favorite color into powdered dust. Not that I was nervous or anything. It was just dinner. With Wes. No big deal. I was totally calm and collected.
I’d put on music, then turned it off when it made me antsy. Clothes hung from every surface in my bedroom. Over the walnut headboard, across my lavender comforter, over the back of the padded white bench I’d placed at the foot of my bed. More clothes spilled out of my dresser and were piled up on my cozy reading chair. It took me twenty outfit changes to finally decide on a simple black dress. A classic that didn’t make suggestions one way or the other.
He hadn’t said where he was taking me. We had several restaurants in town that were open later on the weekends, from upscale to low key, but it didn’t matter if we ate peanut butter sandwiches on opposite sides of an amphitheater. If we were spotted within the same vicinity as each other, people would know we were on a date. Or a not-date, in this case. Which was why there was no reason for my pulse to race into my throat when I heard the knock.
I kicked a lacy black bra into my bedroom and shut the door. Aside from the mini-tornado of clothes I’d let loose, I usually kept my condo neat. I’d gotten the red velvet couches from an old swinger who gave up her cottage to move in with her daughter on the mainland. My shelves were stuffed with books on metaphysics, island lore, and paperback romances. Crystals used for various types of energy decorated my tabletops; a painting of fall on the island, which I’d gotten from my grandma for my twenty-fifth birthday, hung on the wall; and I burned more candles in a month than the fire department was probably cool with.
It was cozy and comfortable and all me.
I flung open my front door, and my heart quivered when Wes, dressed in dark jeans and a button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up, handed me a bouquet of snapdragons. My favorite flower. So much for this being a not-date.
“I love them, thank you.” I pushed up on my toes and kissed his cheek, my magic stirring at just that tiny bit of contact.
He leaned against my door-frame while I grabbed a vase from my kitchen. “You look beautiful, as always. I hope you don’t mind if we skip going into town.”
“You don’t want to go to dinner?” While I was hungry after working straight through my normal dinner break, my body was more than happy to stay indoors and participate in other activities. Which was why it would be better if we went out.
“We’ll still have dinner.” He picked up a picnic basket that had been just out of view by his feet. “I thought it might be…easier if we didn’t have to deal with people openly staring at us in town. Unless you’ve got your heart set on fielding gossip for the next week.”
“No, somewhere private would be good.”
I toed on my black ballet flats and locked up my condo. Wes placed his hand on the small of my back. Tingles of heat spread through me, and I let out a soft sigh.
“Sorry.” Wes removed his hand. “Habit.”
We reached the short sidewalk that ran next to my shop. Moonlight illuminated the street just beyond the shadowed corner behind the building where we stood. I looked up at his strong profile, his warm eyes, the wind-blown hair that I itched to run my fingers through, and I wanted his hands on me. Neither of our lights glowed. Magic had nothing to do with what I was feeling, yet I wanted him so bad it was like an ache deep inside me that wouldn’t stop throbbing.
I reached up and rubbed his jaw, feeling that delicious burn of his stubble against my palm. “You can touch me. I want you to.”
His gaze was dark and intense as he rested his forehead against mine. “Where do you want me to touch you, baby?”
Maybe it was where we stood in the shadows, as if we were apart from the rest of the world, or maybe it was the moonlight, or the snapdragons, or a combination of all three, but it made me bold. Fearless. Like I could take what I wanted without overthinking the consequences. I took his hand, running it up the inside of my thigh and under my dress.
I pressed his fingers against the already damp lace. “Touch me here.”
He let out a shuddering breath. Slowly, he pushed my underwear to the side and dragged his finger up my center. It felt amazing. I whimpered as I leaned against the brick.
“Is this what you want?” He trailed kisses up the curve of my neck. The feel of his breath against my ear sent a fresh wave of shivers through me. He moved his finger in a circle, teasing my clit, drawing out my desire until I fisted my hand in his shirt and began to move against him. “Like that. Show me what you need.”
He dipped his finger inside me, pumping in and out before adding a second finger. He flicked his thumb against my clit, and I cried out as I grasped his shoulders, pumping my hips faster. “More, Wes. Please.”
“You’re so gorgeous when you let go, you have no idea.” He added a third finger, stretching and filling me, hitting that spot deep inside. God, yes. It felt so good. “That’s it, baby. Come apart on my fingers. I want you to watch me lick them clean, so you know it’s your taste I’m dreaming about when I’m fucking my hand at night.”
“Now.” The vibration that started in my toes continued to build until it exploded in a torrential downpour. “I’m coming now.”
Raindrops the size of quarters splashed the ground as I crumbled against him, shaking and sobbing out his name. Once he’d wrung the last gasping tremor from me, he lifted his hand to his mouth, and with the rain beating down on him, he sucked the taste of me off his fingers. So hot. My inner walls pulsed, wanting more, even after I’d just had the most incredible orgasm.
I reached for the button of his pants, and he grabbed my wrist to stop me. My rain slowed to a drizzle as I looked up at him in confusion. “You don’t want me to?”
“Not tonight.” He picked up the picnic basket he’d dropped at his feet. “Let’s get out of this rain before it drowns us. That was one hell of an unleashing.”
