(Anthology) Forever Read online

  “Well, I come from a long line of women who considered themselves to be witches. You might even say witchcraft is the family business the same way plumbers usually spring from the loins of plumbers, and military personnel spring from the loins of other military personnel, and so on and so on. Currently, I work several part-time jobs.” She counted on her fingers. “Let’s see, there’s my retail job at The Herbal Emporium. There’s my seasonal job at The Village as a ‘first person’ interpreter—”

  “You have a damned show on cable,” he accused.

  “If you’ve discovered that, then you must also know that I tell stories at the library, at all the local schools, and at churches on a contractual basis. It’s not exactly steady work, but I go wherever I’m invited. If I’m requested to come in historical costume, I do. If not, I wear my civvies.”

  “That historical woman you represent at The Village had ties to witchcraft—what’s her name?”

  Catherine started to gradually ease her gown down over her belly. “I am the first person interpreter of Mistress Euphremia Prim. She was an ancestor of mine and also a healer and a midwife. Mistress Prim performed countless good works in the community during the seventeenth century. There are documented accounts of how this woman used various herbal remedies to help her friends and neighbors. “

  “She was a witchy-woman,” he accused. “Just like you.”

  Catherine sighed at the finality of Hawk’s condemnation.

  “You must understand, that I grew up in a coven, raised by my great-aunts Caprice and Constance. They ran séances out of their old Victorian home. As a child, I felt more comfortable around Tarot cards and crystal balls than I ever did around dolls—unless, of course they were voodoo dolls, but that’s a whole other discussion. Does that make me a witch?” She shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “You lead a coven, don’t you?”

  “Coven. Commune. Sisterhood. Social club. Religious affiliation. What does it matter what our organization is called? It’s only a name. What’s in a name?” she asked, inching her gown lower; at least she could be covered during his interrogation!

  “Put that gown back where you had it,” he commanded. “Up around your waist, thighs open like before. Don’t bother trying to hide it, baby. I know everything about you, including that you’re a natural blond with a very sweet pussy.”

  Their coupling was a forgone conclusion, but as a virgin, she was naturally apprehensive. Hawk was such a large man. He was cocky, aggressive, disturbed…and yes, angry too. She didn’t blame him for his anger. Not really. She had, after all, taken away his free choice when she’d summoned him to her.

  Having grown up in a matriarchal society, she wasn’t accustomed to men, never mind angry men. She didn’t know how to diffuse Hawk’s anger, to soften his aggression, to temper his cockiness…to save herself.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, taking a stab at placating him out of his foul temper. “I won’t try to hide anything from you again.”

  “Good attitude. So keep talking. Tell me about how you own and operate a damned witch store where you sell homemade black magic candles and all the rest of that occult hocus pocus.”

  “The Herbal Emporium on River Street

  is hardly a witch store,” she protested. “And all I do is tell stories—”

  “You’ve been leading law enforcement officials to kidnapped kids for years,” he accused. “You’re more than an ordinary storyteller.”

  Catherine’s shoulders ached with tension. “You’re absolutely right.”

  “Now we’re getting someplace.”

  “I am more than a storyteller; like my ancestor, Euphremia Prim, I am also a healer. I help people find their mind-body connection. And I assure you, there is no hocus-pocus involved in the process. Many fine medical doctors have come to espouse hug therapy and accept the power of human contact. Hospitals use massage in the treatment of premature infants. I offer myself as a conduit to my clients so that they might self-actualize and become more centered and focused. I use meditation, touch, and herbs. Aromatherapy, as well. And I can heal you. I know that you’re suffering. I know what those animals did to you. I can help you. You have only to touch me, Hawk.”

  “Oh, I intend to do more than touch you.” His smile was ominous. “Get undressed. Take it nice and slow. I’m an infinitely patient man, Catherine. I’ve dreamt of this moment for over a year. Thinking about you naked is the only thing that kept me alive.”

  Oh, yes, Catherine knew. But appearing as a vision and appearing in the flesh were two different things entirely.

  Hawk had been tortured in prison by the criminal forces that had taken him hostage. He hadn’t broken, no matter what had been done to him, but he had not come away unscathed from the experience.

  Any softness inside Hawk had been killed. Lines of suffering now etched the skin around his black eyes. The planes of his jutting cheekbones reminded her of cracked granite. Or marred stone. He was only thirty years old but pain had forever marked his face, marked the man.

  No, Hawk would not be gentle when he came into her body. In his anger, in his pain, he would hurt her.

  Arms folded over his beat-up leather jacket, he watched, scowling, when she removed her leg from the top of the bed where it had been perched.

  “I cannot undress with my leg raised,” she explained, proud that her vocal cords didn’t tremble.

  She feared him, and still she’d still do anything to make all traces of Hawk’s pain disappear, to ease the furrows in his brow, to assuage his angry tension. If she could have chanted some witch incantation to make him the carefree man he once was, she would have done so in a heartbeat. But some things are just not possible.

  But this was possible. This was something she could do for Hawk.

  Sex is what Hawk wanted from her; sex is what Hawk would have from her.

  She unlaced her gown and pulled the separate bodice over her head. Next, she removed the skirt, which left her in petticoat, plain linen shift, and corset. When they too were dropped to the floor, Catherine turned her back.

  “I didn’t say you could do that,” he muttered, thickly. “Turn back around.”

  She shook her head.

  “It’s going to happen,” he apprised her. “Nothing you say or do or conjure up will prevent me from getting inside you.”

  And she almost cried, because in the ultimate irony, she would not be the one who resisted their relationship.

  Although their lovemaking was written in the stars, preordained in her womb, their destiny to have a body as well as a mind connection, Hawk would fight the pull, deny the attraction they both felt.

  She was cursed to walk a different road in this life. It would take a special man, a blended man, a man not easily intimidated by things he couldn’t fully understand, to walk that road beside her.

  That man was John Hawk.

  Unfortunately, the CIA agent believed their attraction was a cruel hoax, a trick of smoky mirrors. He believed they were a million star-thoughts away from each other. He had already decided that a man who lived in a world of certainty could never walk beside her in the valley of the grays. He would fight their fate and he would fight her. He would try to break the awful pull between them.

  And he might just win.

  Their coming together this time was inalterably fixed, but that was as far as her magic extended; any subsequent occasions were beyond her power to manipulate.

  As a witch.

  But not as a woman.

  It was up to Catherine, the woman, to convince Hawk to come back to her. It was up to her to seduce him with her body so that he wouldn’t be able to give her up.

  Nude, arms crossed in front to protect her birthmark, Catherine said softly, “The penetration cannot be done face to face until it is completely dark outside. Until then, you may not touch me above the waist. These are the only requests I will make of you, the only time I will deny you anything.”

  “Lady, where do you get off negotiat
ing with me?”

  Her voice was dignified. “It’s only a small concession, Hawk.”

  She took two steps back.

  Catherine wanted to brush her bottom against Hawk’s erection, to entice him, to tempt him…to temper his male anger with her female softness. But making the first move was not ethical. And so she whispered once again, “Touch me.”

  She took another step back.

  Finally, thankfully, he placed his palm on the curve of her bottom.

  Catherine’s eyes closed as a current of psychic energy passed from Hawk’s body to hers.

  Oh, God! Hawk was more troubled than she’d originally thought. The sights he’d seen, the things he’d had to do to save others! No wonder he’d been calling out to her!

  Hard fingers hurtfully gripped her naked flesh.

  She didn’t pull away.

  His voice was fraught with tension: “Listen, I know that you’ve been feeding the FBI, the CIA, and local police department’s information for years. I broke into your folder. Inside is an account of every child abduction and murder case you’ve been involved with since you were a young girl. Your success rate in finding lost kids is nearly one hundred percent accurate. You’re a psychic. Why can’t you admit to that?”

  “Because I know what the CIA thinks of psychics.”

  “What? That you’re all a bunch of soothsaying, horoscope-predicting, tea-leaf reading, mumbo-jumbo, talking fruit cakes? Quacks, who are as nutty as bed bugs?”

  “I’ve been called worse. I’ve been called a charlatan, a heretic, and a conniver. And I know agents only believe in what they can see with their own two eyes. Cold, hard facts. Evidence. So I will say that women’s intuition led me to know where you were,” she replied, giving the usual stock answer.

  “Nothing cold and hard here. Your skin is as soft and warm as sun-heated silk. Now, tell me, dammit, how you knew where to find me in the jungles of South America. Tell me how you got the exact coordinates of that shack where I was staying. Tell me, and I’ll leave you alone.”

  “Oh, Hawk—we both know that there’s no way you’ll leave me alone tonight.”

  Chapter Four

  Hawk’s gaze glinted at Catherine’s rounded curves.

  It took all his willpower to remove his hand from her sweet ass; if not for his military training, he might not have been able to do it at all.

  In his world, discipline was God. He gave orders and he expected those directives would be obeyed without question. If a direct command was ignored or disobeyed or defied, there would be consequences proportionate to the transgression.

  Catherine was ignoring him, disobeying him, defying him. She was not answering his questions!

  “I could end your life in under sixty seconds,” he said, two hands already at her neck, wrapped around the slender column, four fingers pressed together at her throat, his thumbs meeting at her nape under the cap she wore.

  “In the same amount of time you could be moving between my parted thighs. You need what I can give you, Hawk.”

  “What are you a sex therapist too?” he asked, his cock bulging against his zipper even as he tried to ward her off with sarcasm. “Take off that hat thing you’ve got on over your hair.”

  “My coif?” she asked coolly.

  “Yeah, your coif.”

  Hawk made men twice Catherine’s size tremble in fear, and here she was issuing ultimatums, standing up to him, questioning his authority, not a tremble to be heard on her vocal cords. He didn’t like it.

  Catherine removed her coif, and her thick mane toppled down her bare back like a blond waterfall.

  Amazed by its length, its color, how silky it felt against the back of his hands, he asked, “Have you ever cut it?”

  “Never.”

  From out of nowhere came an image of her above him, riding his cock, her hair enclosing them in a spun-gold tent. Hawk broke into a cold sweat and it wasn’t his malaria returning.

  The rolling landscape of Catherine’s body was too overtly lush to be strictly fashionable, too flagrantly sensual for today’s unisex look. The witchy-woman had been built for earlier times, when earthy bodies were celebrated, when women were built as women should be built.

  As his erection showed his appreciation, Hawk let go of his chokehold on her neck and smoothed his knuckles over the gold fan of hair. When he fisted it into a thick ponytail, once again he had a clear, unobstructed view of her straight spine, her luminous skin, her admirable bottom.

  There wasn’t a sign on her curvaceous body of sun exposure. Not a freckle. Not a tan line on her moonwitch skin.

  Catherine was his wet dream, and he was tired of sleeping on the soggy spot alone. The green-eyed witch had been tormenting his thoughts for a year, and the only way he was going to get her out of his head was to put his cock inside her and leave it there for a good long time.

  Hawk sucked in his breath as the atmosphere became charged with expectancy. White-hot current electrified the air, man-to-woman awareness flying back and forth between them. He was suffocating, smothering on his own lust, and he knew he wouldn’t be able to fill his lungs again until he had filled her with him.

  “Get up on top of the bed,” he said, appalled and aroused all at the same time, and reluctantly released her.

  Blood humming, pulses racing, gaze smoldering, nostrils flaring at the trail of her old-fashioned, rose-petal perfume, he watched her body undulate as she walked to the bed. Catherine was a provocative barefoot courtesan from the pages of a dangerously hot, tantalizingly explicit, adult novel.

  Her loose blond hair rippled around her bottom as she did what she was told to do. Raising a knee to the coverlet, her arms extended in front, revealing her lush femininity in a way even Penthouse wouldn’t print, she started to get atop the bed.

  He hadn’t gotten laid in almost two years, and fuck, he was horny. No doubt about it, he needed some bad.

  “Hold it right there,” he growled, as his cock led him to her; he had to sample her honey.

  Her slit was wet, dripping wet, and he was dangerously angry for the conditions she’d imposed.

  “Bend over,” he rasped.

  She did without question.

  “You don’t want it face to face, huh?” he growled. “Is this how you want it?”

  Gasping for life-sustaining oxygen, he unsnapped the waist of his trousers, ripped the zipper down its tracks, and got her blond mane out of his way.

  He loved her hair, but mercy, did he want to fuck her ass.

  Holding her in place, lest she try to escape, he let his cock do what cocks do best.

  The blunt head, already moistened with pre-come, rubbed its lubricated way inside the seductive crevice of Catherine’s inviting ass. He hadn’t even kissed her, and here he was partnering her in the backdoor tango.

  And she was letting him.

  Christ, but she felt good.

  She spoke up when things got a little too randy. “The first time cannot be an anal penetration. The first time must be vaginal.”

  More conditions!

  And without being told she could, Catherine shook off his hold and knelt on the bed faced away, arms crossed over her chest.

  He felt his heart fission. He didn’t want it to be like this! What was going on? Why couldn’t it be sweet and tender? Dammit! He wanted to go the missionary route the first time with her!

  He considered himself to be your average testosterone driven male. But within him lurked this horrible, overwhelming, embarrassingly sentimental urgency to see Catherine’s face, to commit every nuance of her expression to memory when he entered her body, to feel her heart beat against his chest as they moved together as one.

  At least he could get naked with her, he supposed.

  Hawk took off his boots and stripped to the skin.

  At least he could feel her flesh on his flesh.

  Unless she had conditions about that too.

  Naked, he got up on bed behind her, towering over her, his big bronze hand
s bracketing her flared hips, her round bottom softly yielding to his hard need as she swayed against him.

  In suspended animation, the ache in his testicles growing more insistent, more compelling, he mouthed the side of her neck.

  Catherine of the pearl white body and spun gold hair be mine tonight. , he thought with a sigh. Sex as communion. Sex as sustenance. Sex on a higher level than physical release…

  Looks like they’d both be settling for a whole lot less.

  Catherine looked over the slope of her shoulder at him, her cat-green eyes crossing the silvery silence to look inside his heart.

  The moment seemed to stretch into forever…

  It ended when he penetrated her vagina, back to front.

  Catherine whimpered, but she didn’t scream.

  She should have screamed. He sure as hell wanted to.

  In his own defense, whoever heard of a virgin witch?

  Hell! His own defense! He had no defense! There was no excuse for what he’d just done. He’d just ripped through Catherine’s virginal membrane. No tenderness. No consideration. No idea why. And he didn’t stop, couldn’t stop, not to ask if she was okay, not to inquire why she’d let him have her virginity. He kept pushing, thrusting…punishing her.

  For what?

  Yeah, he was pissed that she’d been leading him around by the nose, interfering in his life, forcing him to keep on living when he would’ve just as soon died, but the rational part of him didn’t want to do this, didn’t want to hurt her.

  He was never ungentle with a woman, never brutish. He knew his own strength and what that strength could do to a female. This felt like ancient history to him, like he had done this ignoble act before, like he was repeating the same bad mistake, like he was forever doomed to repeat a past sin.

  And though he wanted to, with everything that was still decent inside him, he couldn’t bring it to an end. He was powerless, and he hated being powerless.

  Without losing a beat, he eased her down to her hands and knees, crawling over her, mounting her, still driving into her, every muscle in his body working at making her pay—