Page 122 of Which Witch Is Wicked?
Another thin attempt at levity. Nick refused to be distracted.
“You think you can throw a few cowardly excuses at me and I’ll clamber to obey like one of your hang-dog backwater boyfriends?” A cracking sound heralded the headboard splintering beneath his grip. “You couldn’t be more mistaken.”
“Let me get this straight. Just this morning, it was all, ‘Damn you woman, you will surrender!’ And then I surrender, and now it’s all ‘You don’t know the meaning of the word!’ Would you tell me what the hell you want from me so we can move this along?”
Anger bloomed roses in her cheeks, the precise color of an ass slapped good and hard. A dark thrill rolled down Nick’s abdominal muscles and drove blood into his cock.
“I said I wanted you to surrender tome. Not to the self-destructive thoughts in your own head or some half-baked savior complex you’ve convinced yourself is for the greater good.”
Moira’s ever-shifting oceanic eyes took on the dangerous blue-gray of waves whipped into a squall. Resentment radiated from her with the force of the tsunami she’d sent to rid herself of him the last time he’d dared speak a truth she didn’t want to hear.
“Yes, youtastedme that day on the dock, Moira,” Nick continued. “But I tasted you, too. I know what you hide beneath those smart-ass quips and yourI don’t give a shit‘bout nothingexterior. You may hate me because I’m an arrogant bastard who wants to own you, dominate you, and make you beg for the pleasure I want to give you. You may even hate me because you know that I’m willing to carry out what I was created to do even when my brothers are not. But here’s the real kicker.” He cupped her chin to turn it toward him, wanting to observe the delicate and subtle shifts in her fathomless eyes. “Deep in the engines of your mind, whatever loathing you may harbor for mepalesin comparison to what you feel for yourself, and when you say ‘I surrender’ what youreallymean is that you want me to relieve the burden of being you.”
His verbal arrow had hit its mark. Blood drained from Moira’s face into some internal wound—one he’d had to cut through a lifetime of scar tissue to hit. And yet, behind the hurt, a small, blue flame of anger flickered, waiting to be fanned into rage.
The airless space between them vibrated in violent silence, the kind of preternatural quiet that only the last seconds before battle could bring.
“You want me to play executioner now that you’ve become your own judge and jury, Moira, but I am not yours to command.”
“I’m not commanding you to kill me. I’m asking you. And pretty damned politely, too. But if you’reunable to perform, I’d bet one of those brothers of yours out there just might be. I’d bet that big ol’ hunk Dru would be more than happy to—”
A resounding crack as loud as a gunshot echoed through Nick’s chambers, and the headboard behind Moira split down the middle. “None of my brothers would dare touch you. You belong tome.”
“Then finish what you started when you shot the arrow that nearly killed my sister.”
The pleading note in her voice scraped against his resolve like nails on the inside of a coffin, a sound Nick wished he did not know.
“I’ve got to think there would be something in it for you,” she continued. “I mean, you’d get to be the one who ends the Apocalypse. Doesn’t that get you a gold star or something?”
“I don’t give afuckabout gold stars,” Nick answered, lowering his mouth close to her ear. “But we can talk about theor something.” He allowed himself to drink in this image of her, beginning with the wine-dark hair spilled on his pillow and ending in her delicate, shackled ankles and bare feet. “Iwillend you, Moira de Moray, as you ask, but on one condition.” He savored the momentary flicker of fear in her eyes.
She was right to be afraid.
“What?” she asked.
Her ear was as warm and silky beneath his lips as a sun-rinsed shell on the beach.
“I will fuck you until you understand the true meaning of the wordsurrender. Then, and only then, will I kill you, Moira de Moray.” He nipped at her earlobe, gratified by the involuntary answering shudder rolling through her body.
Moira turned her head and blinked at him. “I’m about to die, and you’re really going to use that as an excuse to extort sex from me?”
“Absolutely,” Nick said.
The disbelief written on her features amused and delighted him. If she believed this request depraved, she had much to learn about his tastes and sensibilities.
Teaching her would be a pure pleasure.
“Well, Moira?” Nick dragged a finger across the fullness of her breasts above the line of her tank top. “Yes?” he asked, pausing to draw an ‘X’ directly over her heart. “Or no?”
8
Is there anything you wouldn’t do to save your sisters?
Aunt Justine’s question rolled through Moira’s head like thunder.
Moira hadn’t necessarily reckoned that saving her sisters might include agreeing to do the horizontal hokey-pokey with one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. With Conquest himself, no less.
Not that she hadn’t thought about it. Hell, she’d finished what they’d started on that rainy, windblown dock at least a hundred times in her mind, in dozens of dreams, and even a couple times in the hot respite of the claw-foot bathtub.
