Page 35 of Which Witch is Willing?
He looked into the abyss, and met with his own cavernous want. He wanted to have a child with this woman. He wanted to see her belly round with his seed and know he’d caused this thing to be. He wanted to see her waddle. To rub her swollen feet.
Worse, he wanted her to want this as much as he did.
“You want to stop lookin’ at me like I’m a smoked turkey leg you’re fixin’ to shove down your neck hole without chewin’?”
It was this sentence that did it.
The pure auditory displeasure of it. The offensively crude diction and imagery.
His donkey-like bray of laughter startled them both and sent her damnable pig scampering in the direction from the porch. The walking pork sack was neither a fan of loud noises nor Nick, and especially not loud noises from Nick.
Nevertheless, Nick found himself unable to stop.
It was the hardest he’d laughed in years. Centuries, maybe.
“You gonna tell me what’s so funny, or do I have to set Cheeto here to broil?”
Nick shook his head, one hand pressed against his aching abdominals, the other knuckling a tear away from the corner of his eye. “Irony,” he finally managed to gasp.
“Irony?” Moira’s sapphire blue eyes narrowed at him. Not, he knew, because she lacked an understanding of the concept. Presuming there was any correlation between her backwater bumpkin dialect and her IQ was a dire mistake and one Nick had only made once.
“I could have had any woman in the world,” he said. “Any woman. Cleopatra. Catherine the Great. Marie Curie. Frida Kahlo. Joan of fucking Arc. All women who would have paid dearly for the pleasure of jumping on my dick.” Nick reached up and loosened his tie, suddenly aware just how much the unaccustomed feeling of laughing had made his throat feel swollen and strange. “I mean, why do you think Elizabeth was the Virgin Queen? Because I fucking turned her down. That’s why.”
“I’m assumin’ you have a point and are plannin’ on arriving at it sometime before the actual Apocalypse?”
Nick exhaled a long breath, taking a step closer to her. “My point is, for millennia, I’ve been persued by the world’s most remarkable women. Queens. Literary geniuses. Famous artists. All these women, and the woman I want is you. You. You, who come from a part of the country where road kill is a food group and the swamp is deeper than the genetic pool. You don’t see the humor in that?”
“Right now, the only funny thing I’m seeing is how you’d look with a tire iron shoved up your ass.” Moira’s delicate chin tipped up a notch as the solid country stubborness that irritated and turned him on in equal measure stiffened her spine.
“Look, it does neither of us any good for you to pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about. Before you’d left the bayou and you didn’t know that the world beyond the borders of the swamp was full of people with complete sets of teeth, I could almost understand you being nostalgic about the suckhole from whence you sprung. But now that you’ve been in actual civilization—”
“Actual civilization?” Her eyes, usually a placid sapphire, flashed like lightning on the open ocean. “And what would you call the people who raised me? Gator bait?”
“No. Well, yes, but that’s not what I’m saying at all.”
“And what exactly are you sayin’, Nicholas Kingswood?” The animated pork chop was back, its beady little watermelon seed eyes narrowing at him in concert with his mistress’s.
Gods, he loved it when she used his full name.
“I’m saying that despite your repellent upbringing and your hideous grammar and your appalling choice in clothing, it’s you I want. I could have had any woman in the world, but it’s you. It’s always been you.”
There.
He’d done it.
He’d said it.
She was apparently as shocked to hear it as he had been to say it.
Staring at him, her plush lips tightened into a perfect ‘O’, a shape that stoked a heat deep in his belly thinking of the puzzle piece he might fit there.
Understanding something of pride, he took the first step, holding his arms out in open invitation for Moira to rush into them.
“Why, Nicholas Kingswood,” she whispered, floating over to him with more grace and poise than he’d imagined her capable of.
The heat of her body found his skin through his shirt as she closed in, bringing with it her signature scent of rain and wild muscadines. A shivery rush slithered over him as her lips brushed his ear.
He prepared himself for the sweet words that unnamable and unacknowledged part of himself had been so longing to hear.
