(Anthology) Forever Read online

  On the third day help had arrived. Just in time. The gators had started to move in for the kill. His rescuers carried him out on a stretcher, and the doctors had set his leg as good as new. Through it all, he’d never once mentioned hearing the girl’s voice. And the police never learned who’d placed the anonymous tip or who had told them of his whereabouts.

  He couldn’t enter her again; Catherine’s paranormal powers were just too much for him to digest. Instead, he brought her to climax with his hand.

  Afterwards, she curled up on her side and refused to look at him.

  Chapter Seven

  In the moonlit room, Hawk looked savage.

  The stark planes of his angular face were tight; his black hair had come undone from its leather tie and fell neglected almost to his shoulders.

  She was vulnerable to Hawk’s needs, to his probing looks, to his questions, to his curiosity. She’d answered his queries, but he hadn’t accepted her answers. Not really. How could he, when she didn’t totally accept them herself?

  His deft skill as a lover had taken her to the edge of physical release and beyond. The pressure inside her had been direct and specific and not easily refused. When the rolling waves of mysterious excitement grew, she let herself go, giving herself over to pleasure. The upheaval of her senses was cataclysmic and frightening. The region she’d passed through was uncharted, shattering, and violent.

  And Hawk had made her go there alone.

  She couldn’t bear to lose her sense of self without him again.

  “Do you have a familiar?” Hawk asked her finally.

  She was on her belly where he had placed her and he was kneading her buttocks. “You mean, like a cat?”

  “Yes, like a cat.”

  “Animals frighten me.”

  She respected animals, but from a safe distance. Despite the bad rap witches had gotten through the years, the closest she’d ever gotten to a warty toad was a poor frog stuck in a bottle of phemaldyhide in Biology lab. That sight had upset her so much she’d led her first peaceful demonstration in high school protesting frog dissection. She’d saved many amphibian lives. The fact that she couldn’t stand the noisy croakers was beside the point as far as she was concerned.

  In her life as a witch, she had never dropped so much as a dust bunny in a boiling hot cauldron. She didn’t even own a cauldron, preferring a wok for vegetable stir-fry night at the coven. She certainly didn’t have the familiars often alluded to in witch stories.

  As a textbook witch she was a textbook flop.

  She’d begun to think she was a textbook flop as a woman too, that she couldn’t feel what other women felt, respond the way a woman should respond to a man.

  Until tonight. Until Hawk.

  She purred when he stroked her buttocks, and when he said, “Raise your hips,” she complied with embarrassing speed.

  “I’m not a merciful man, Catherine,” he told her as his finger swept deliciously over her slightly elevated derriere. “I want you to know that it’s not entirely my concern over hurting you that is keeping me from taking you again.”

  John Hawk was a one-man killing legend. But she knew that John Hawk was also a man of peace, an agent who abhorred violence and resorted to force only as the last alternative. Which man was touching her now?

  “You were a virgin, yet you seem knowing, experienced—” he rasped, his fingers slipping into the demarcation between her buttocks.

  Catherine trembled at what Hawk was doing to her…and at his perceptiveness.

  Physically, she had been a virgin when Hawk took her, but because of her psychic connection to her ancestor Euphremia Prim, she was no innocent—

  Psychic connection…

  When she’d first realized that she possessed psychic powers, the knowledge broke her.

  It also freed her.

  Clearly, she was different. Clearly, she wasn’t a normal woman. With the acceptance of that basic truth, she had known peace. Real peace. Peace of mind. She no longer questioned what kinds of recessive DNA formation had gone into her making. Or what kinds of chromosomal quirks were floating around inside her brain. She was what she was: a screw loose; shaky neurological circuitry; synapses spread too wide apart—a witch with duties, responsibilities, visions…

  She also accepted that in the year 1644, the CIA agent’s ancestor had been a great warrior amongst his Wamanoag tribe…and her ancestor, Euphremia Prim’s, lover.

  “Come up some more,” Hawk demanded. “Stretch like an obedient cat for me.”

  Dutifully, she came up for him, lifting herself up onto hands and knees, and stretching her back. Her breasts ached, the nipples hard and elongated, needy. She shivered with anticipation and her nerve endings tingled as wave after wave of desire swept over her.

  He reached underneath to catch her full breasts. When he fondled their weight, then pinched the tips, she bit her lip in pleasure as rays of light broke within her. Her nipples were highly sensitive, and Hawk’s sensual mastery was undoing her.

  When she thought she might scream in delight, he stopped playing at her breasts to slip a hand between her legs, a finger gently penetrating her woman’s core.

  He was going to make her come again. Alone. She didn’t want that. She didn’t want another lonely climax! The pleasure he gave her was less than what it should have been because it was without him.

  But too weak to resist, she took what he was offering—

  A few strokes later she was moaning, her bottom moving in time to the thrust of his finger, faster and faster, her breasts swinging heavily back and forth. Her hair fell forward over her face, her neck dipped, every muscle in her body strained to capture the light.

  Her climax was intense, the light blinding. Oh, how she wished she could share it with the man who was her life mate!

  Afterwards, she collapsed spent on the bed, and cried.

  Through her tears, through her snarled hair, she watched as Hawk rose from the bed.

  He was all bronzed masculinity, all sinewy male strength, his muscles long and sleek despite his recent bout with malaria. His manhood thrust boldly at a right angle to his flat abdomen as he dragged on his pants. He didn’t zip or snap—too uncomfortable because of his erection she suspected—and his black-nest of pubic hair showed through the gape.

  Hawk was beautiful. His naked bronze chest rose tight and toned above the low slung khaki trousers, and she cried all the harder because she was tear-stained and semen sticky and covered in her virgin’s blood.

  “May I have some privacy while I wash?”

  Taking up his shirt but not putting it on, he said, “You want to wash, you can do it in front of me.”

  Chapter Eight

  It was a testy Hawk who leaned his shoulder blades against the bathroom’s doorjamb. “No shower. Wash at the sink. And this time, do not turn your back on me.”

  He’d never stayed with a woman while she performed the necessary ablutions after sex. Always before, he tugged off the condom and trashed it the same way the woman eventually got trashed. He had no time for women in his life; he only squeezed in sex once or twice a month because a physically frustrated CIA agent might have his mind on his erection, not on the job. And so it was with a sort of quizzical enchantment that he got ready to watch Catherine cleanse herself.

  “No wash rag. Use your hand.”

  Catherine filled the basin, and as instructed, remained facing him as she dipped her hand in the water.

  In the European fashion, Catherine shaved neither her legs nor her underarms. He liked that. American women were too sanitized for his tastes; they removed the scents and sights that made a female a female.

  As she began to wash her body, her full breasts swayed. The movement was so womanly, so erotic, so carnal that he had a hard time sucking air into his lungs. Mercy! But he lusted over Catherine’s round voluptuousness.

  He noticed, but only in a distracted way, that the pink heart on her left breast had quieted down; the birthmark was no longer
pulsating. He noticed, and not in a distracted way at all, that her large nipples were still hard, and very, very elongated. The evening was almost over and he hadn’t had his mouth on them yet; that frustrated the hell out of him.

  He hadn’t tasted her between the legs either. Normally, he didn’t take the time to go down on a bed partner, but cunnilingus with Catherine was a foregone conclusion. Would she let him taste her?

  When she started to wash her breasts, he could no longer stand by and just watch. He had to touch her.

  “Let me,” he said, quietly, as he dipped his fingers in the water and then touched her.

  Her flesh was soft and silky; her breasts were those of a fertility goddess. His wet fingers slid across her enormous nipples and he trembled.

  He smoothed his hand over her belly—a woman’s lush belly—and then skimmed his fingers downward to her near-white pelt.

  He gently parted her swollen folds, and proceeded to cleanse her opening with his two wet fingers.

  She winced.

  “Christ,” he whispered, concern for the pain he’d caused her deepening his voice, as hitherto unknown emotions threatened to unman him. He accepted that he had caused her hurt, accepted the horrible responsibility for what he had done, but accepting was not enough. In that prisoner’s cell, the image of Catherine had kept him alive, and in return, he’d brutalized her. No, acknowledging his culpability was not enough—

  This night would forever shame him.

  Something hard and inflexible shattered inside Hawk.

  When had he become so intolerant, so closed off, that he couldn’t simply accept that some things—some beautiful, lovely things—could not be explained rationally.

  Like Catherine. Why was he trying to put her in a neat little compartment? Was he such a coward, such a fool, that he couldn’t merely accept her in his life as the gift she was?

  “Don’t douche,” he said softly when she reached for a floral package. “I want to be able to smell your musk.”

  She nodded and placed the silly idea back on the shelf.

  He handed her his shirt. “Here. Put this on. But don’t button it.”

  Catherine shrugged into the cotton sleeves. “I’ll make us a cup of tea. We can have it by the fire in the front parlor.”

  And like the perfect witchy-hostess, she swept passed him out the bathroom door, the tails of her borrowed shirt, flying.

  At least it isn’t a broomstick, he thought, and chuckled. It was the first time he’d felt genuine mirth in over a year: another gift given to him by Catherine.

  While Catherine banged around out in the kitchen, filling the kettle with water, placing it on the old-fashioned stove with a metallic clunk, he stumbled back to the bed.

  The impression of Catherine’s head was still on the pillow. With his sharpshooter’s vision, he saw a strand of her golden hair decorating the pillowcase.

  Without a thought as to how crazy it made him, he plunged his hand toward the single stand.

  He captured it. The silky texture tickled his coarse fingertips as he pocketed it.

  His muscles were quivering with leashed strength. He wanted to rush out of the bedroom, race to the kitchen, and bring Catherine into his arms. He wanted to kiss her forehead first, and then drop small kisses down across her cheekbones to the corner of her lips. He wanted to explore her mouth’s interior. Unhurriedly. He wanted to tilt his head to accommodate the difference in their statures, and then lift her up onto her toes until his hardness nestled against her belly. He ached for Catherine.

  By the time he got himself together, the witch was already seated cross-legged in front of the hearth in the parlor. He took a seat across from her, and she served him tea in a china cup like they were having a friggin’ tea party. Drinking tea. Munching on hard biscuits spread with raspberry preserves. The fire at their backs.

  Finished with the snack, Hawk leaned back, arm slung over his raised knee, watching Catherine delicately lick her lips clean of the raspberry preserves. Her small tongue darted across the fullness of her red-tinted lips, capturing every remnant of the berries.

  He envied the raspberries.

  Raspberries and woman, an irresistible combination…

  “Let’s pretend we’re eating at a fine French restaurant and this is our dessert,” Catherine said.

  “You do that a lot, don’t you?”

  “Do what?” she asked between swallows.

  “Pretend. Make up stories.”

  She grinned, a gamine, playful acknowledgement of his words, completely negating the seriousness of his question. “A storyteller’s occupational hazard, I guess. There’s raw material everywhere for fantasy.”

  “You admit to living in a fantasy world?”

  “Hardly! But I was raised by two elderly aunts. Though I loved them dearly, sometimes being a child in a house without other children gets lonely. I often made up imaginary friends to keep me company.”

  “Didn’t you have real friends?”

  “Some. Not many. Kids weren’t allowed to associate with me because of my, shall we say, less than usual upbringing.”

  The last bite of biscuit was popped into her mouth.

  Her green eyes twinkled. “Mmmm, delicious!”

  He laughed at her enthusiastic nibbling. Then, “You know, I can’t recall the last time I shared food with anyone.”

  “Being isolated during imprisonment must have been particularly trying—”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  He eyed the slender ribbon of flesh revealed by her gaping attire.

  “Open the shirt, Catherine.”

  She did, and her full breasts spilled out, their flagrantly huge nipples thrusting.

  “The shirt is still covering your legs, Catherine.”

  Licking a bit of raspberry preserve from her fingertip, she wiggled a bit and the tails of the too-large shirt parted, revealing her lush femininity, fully displayed in her crossed-legged pose.

  He pushed the jar of preserves across the floor at her.

  “Coat your nipples and clit with the raspberry preserves, Catherine.”

  As instructed, Catherine dipped a finger in the jar and circled her huge nipples.

  When they were bright red, and sticky, her finger went between her legs to the top of her sex.

  She smeared her clit, until the plump nub was scarlet.

  He could hardly speak in his excitement. “On your back,” he gasped.

  After gracefully reclining, she asked serenely, “I imagine you’d like my legs open?”

  He managed a jerky nod of his head.

  Smiling, she bent her legs at the knee and opened them wide. “Is this what you had in mind?”

  He didn’t attempt an answer; he crawled over to his raspberry tart and mouthed the preserves from one turgid areola, licking her sweetness in a circular motion. Done there, he moved to the next nipple, suckling her until the sticky preserves were gone.

  He kissed his way to her white-gold fleece, his tongue darting inside the swollen folds, seeking and finding the sticky passion bud.

  “Hawk,” she cried, winding her fingers into his long hair. “It’s happening again.”

  He made a meal of her clit, rasping the plump nubbin with his teeth long after he’d swallowed the last of the raspberry preserves.

  Craving. Wanting. Urgency. He had never felt this way before about a woman. He had never before known the desire to throw a lover on her back and kiss his way up her body--

  Writhing on a fiery bed of nails, desperate to make love to Catherine but unwilling to hurt her again, he dragged himself to his feet. Hands gripped into fists, the head of his bulging cock weeping seed, he watched as Catherine, in the aftermath of climax, curled herself into a tight ball and wept.

  He felt like doing the same.

  Chapter Nine

  Hawk’s shirt comforted Catherine as she recovered from another lonely climax.

  Hawk’s scent was woven in the cotton; his warmth clung to t
he fibers. She pretended his arms were around her, not the shirt’s empty sleeves.

  Hawk had pleasured her, and then retreated from her; he was standing way across the room, his expression bleak.

  She had to help him!

  Dying a little inside, but keeping her tone light, she said, “You don’t want to be attracted to me, do you, Hawk? You want me to fix it. To take the attraction away.” She forced out a small chuckle. “I usually get requests to cast love spells not remove them, so this will be a first.”

  Catherine clutched at her empty womb. “I will try to sever our psychic connection! I’ll give myself over to incantation…”

  But the pull between them was much stronger. Could she really do anything about it? Some forces were too powerful even for a witch. But for Hawk, she must try!

  Poor Hawk! He looked so pained. His bronzed skin was stretched tight across his prominent facial bones; his body was vibrating with sexual urgency that he refused to give in to; his blue-black hair fell into his tortured face. She longed to brush her fingers through his hair. She longed to grab a fistful of it and pull him closer. She longed to comfort him with her body. But clearly he wanted no part of her.

  “I know you think we’re wrong for each other, Hawk,” she said quietly. “That we’re two opposing forces. That a man like you couldn’t possibly become involved with a witch!”

  Hawk laughed. “They say opposites attract, Catherine.”

  She laughed too. “Oh, yes, I know. They say a lot of things and I bet you wish to hell that they’d shut up and leave mismatched people alone. And I suppose you’re right: opposites have no business getting involved in any romantic entanglements. It’s not practical.”

  “Catherine, in case you haven’t noticed, I haven’t said anything. You’re the one doing all the talking here. And as far as I can see, practicality has nothing to do with this, with us. We could try to find a common meeting ground—”

  “I know where that would be! Between my legs!”