Page 120 of Which Witch Is Wicked?
“Here I am, bringing you three-cheese grits, coffee, homemade biscuits and sawmill gravy, and you’re trying to provoke me?” Nick set the warm tray across Moira’s legs.
She had to swallow against the rush of saliva that flash-flooded her mouth as the inviting scents of eggs and sausage tickled her nose.
Nick made quick work of clearing the newspapers and magazines from the coverlet, dumping them into a pile in the armchair. When he came to the side of the bed where the remnants of the broken lamp littered the floor, his eyes flicked to Moira, tightening with laser-like focus on the spot near her hairline where her skin felt stiff with dried blood.
The affected expression of congeniality fled Nick’s face like a child’s chalk drawing washed away by a downpour, his emotions all running together like the smudged pastel colors. Courtesy and rage. Pride and bloodlust.
“What the fuck happened here?” Nick did not blink as he waited for Moira’s answer.
“I think I might have called your friend something likeLoose-Britches the Slutty Soul Sucker. She wasn’t especially appreciative of my creativity.”
Nick knitted together curses in several languages while stalking off to his bathroom. Moira heard the tap running, but refrained from any spontaneous practice of water tricks, still hoping to gain access to the breakfast waiting on her thighs.
Nick returned and seated himself next to her on the bed, first applying a hot washrag to loosen the blood on her wound, then a cold compress to relieve the pain.
That Nick would know of battle wounds and how best to care for them made perfect sense to Moira. Why he would take the time to tend to her when her death was his ultimate goal did not.
The contradiction left her searching for familiar territory, which the tray helpfully provided.
“You fold that napkin yourself, did you?” Moira asked, looking at the perky linen swan investigating the bowl of cheese grits.
“I certainly did,” Nick said proudly, tossing the washrags on the floor among the glass shards.
“How many YouTube videos did you have to watch before you got it right?”
There it was. The reddening of his skin just where his thick, brick-brown hair met his forehead. His whisky eyes darkening. That wicked mouth taking on a cast of cruelty Moira found far more arousing than she should. Lord, but he looked fine when he was angry.
“I wastaughthow to fold napkins by an exceptionally accommodating chambermaid at an all-night soirée given by Louis XIV, if you must know.”
Moira craned forward toward the tray and regarded the mound of green stems piled atop her omelet. “How come there’s weeds on my eggs?”
Nick’s color darkened from red to a charming mauve, and Moira had to bite back a smile.
“Those aremotherfucking radish microgreens, and they are amotherfucking garnish.”
“Ohhh,” Moira said, feigning ignorance. She’d known that of course, as men far wealthier than Uncle Sal had found their way to her in Stump Bayou. Men smelling of leather and aftershave who had taken her as far as New Orleans to wine, dine, and ’69 her. She’d healed them from impending heart attacks mostly, these men. And from the occasional spunk sack or ass cancer, and that Gonnaherpacephal AIDS they picked up from hookers sometimes. “Fancy. I might even like to eat it. Trouble is, some asshole chained me to this bed.”
“Oh, but I’ve thought about that already,” Nick said felicitously, picking up the spoon and scooping up a bite of the grits. Cheese stretched in tantalizing strings from bowl to spoon. “Open wide for me.”
The grits were hot. The request was hotter. It brought to mind the exact length and girth she’d first snuck a peek at on their unintended flight together and let slide beneath her rain-slick palm when they had near-devoured each other on the dock. Moira was no stranger to men, but shewouldhave to open wide to accommodate Nick Kingswood.
Very, very wide.
“You have got to be out of your mind.” Her throat had gone dryer than a nun’s twat. She eyed the dew-beaded glass of orange juice with growing lust.
“Come on, Moira. How bad do you want it?” Nick hovered the grits close enough for the steam to warm her mouth then dragged the spoon slowly, suggestively across her lower lip, at which point she snapped her jaws over it like a starving jackal.
“Thif doen’t meam I like you,” she informed him, her mouth closed around the spoon. Moira’s eyes rolled back in her head as the buttery, cheesy, creamy grits melted on her tongue.
First came the memories.
Then came the tears.
Her ten-year-old self, grasshopper-skinny legs pulled up under her T-shirt to keep them warm. Sitting at the simple wooden table in their tiny shack’s galley kitchen over a bowl of cheese grits Uncle Sal had made just for her. The fragrant steam curling into her face. Her uncle seated across from her, drinking muddy black coffee and poking a thumb hole in one of last night’s biscuits to squeeze a golden pendant of cane syrup inside. He’d have preferred the grits, but there hadn’t been enough for both of them. There never was, it seemed.
Nick paused with the spoon halfway to her mouth. “What is it?”
“It’s kind of fitting,” she said, head sunken into the pillow, feeling the twin streams slide down to dampen the hair at her temples. “That this should be my last meal.”
