Page 30 of Which Witch is Willing?
That goddamn talk a nun out of her starched knickers and sell a glacier to an Eskimo sinfully smooth drawl.
Her usual ritual of feigning indifference in Nick Kingswood’s presence would be a hell of a lot easier without that voice. Not that the sight of him helped any.
“And how exactly were you gonna help me?” Moira asked. “Hold the stick?”
Nick’s eyelids lowered, his wicked mouth tugging up at one corner. A subtle suggestion that he’d have been willing to do that and more.
Much, much more.
“Enough already.” Claire pushed herself up from the sofa, the pregnancy test poking up from the hip pocket of her curve-hugging black jeans. Her face was drawn and pale, her lips as bloodless as her cheeks. “Can we just get this over with?”
Moira glanced down at the pregnancy test clutched in her own sweaty hand. It had taken every ounce of her meager self-restraint not to peek at the little window on the walk from the bathroom to the living room, which had felt more like a walk from a jail cell to an electric chair. “Y’all ready?”
“Ready like for a vivisection.” Aerin sighed and stood, picking up her test from where it rested face down on the end table and holding it out at arm’s length between her thumb and forefinger.
“Oh my hell, this is so exciting!” Tierra, swathed in layers of loose-fitting skirts and scarves, clutched her hands against her baby-swollen boobs. “I’m going to be an aunt!”
Killian Bane dropped a possessive hand over her shoulder, his obsidian black eyes drawn to the globe of her belly as if it housed a magnet rather than a miniature immortal. “You’ll be a mother first,” he said. “Or have you forgotten about the babe, my gazelle?”
Dark-haired, built like several brick shithouses, and capable of a sphincter-tightening glare, Dru made a sound somewhere between a gag and a grunt. “It’s a fucking baby, all right? B.A.B.Y. We’ve all been around long enough to pick up the nuances of modern English language. Well, all except for Julian. But he makes that shit work for him.”
Darkness seemed to gather around the region above Bane’s head. A pretty impressive trick, Moira had to admit. “It’s my child and I’ll call it what I like,” he said.
“I know what I’m going to call it,” Nick said. “Road kill. Because it’s half Death and half gazelle.”
Julian covered his lips with one gloved hand, the fine lines stretching from the corners of his pale blue eyes deepening to an almost imperceptible degree. To anyone else, it might have looked like mild shock or dismay. But in the time they’d pretended to be a budding couple, Moira had learned a thing or two about interpreting his infinitely subtle expressions. This right here was amusement.
Bane’s fists tightened. From the way his jaw flexed, he might have been trying to chew a rock. “So help me—”
Moira stuck two fingers in her mouth and whistled the way she’d used to when she had to call Uncle Sal home for supper from three bayous over.
“Look, we can bust out the kitchen scale and weigh your sacks after this is all over, but for right now, we need to figure out which one of us is baking a bun and what the hell we’re supposed to do about it. So y’all two quit ruffling his feathers and hush up.”
An uneasy silence returned to the room.
“All right,” Moira said, turning back to Aerin and Claire. “We flip on the count of three.”
They counted together. Same voice, three slightly different accents.
Well, two slightly different accents and one alien-strange Southern bawl.
“One, two, three.”
They flipped.
They looked.
Three, big fat NOT PREGNANTs across the board.
Moira exhaled all her breath in a huge whoosh as Aerin fist-pumped the sky.
“Ha! Suck a bag of dicks, Paladin’s Planetary Magic!”
Claire folded forward at the waist, hands on her knees, loose hair falling around her face. Moira had never actually seen anyone gag with relief before, but she was pretty sure that’s what exactly what Claire was doing.
Moira pressed a hand between her sister’s shoulder blades. “You okay, sugar?”
Claire nodded, slowly rolling up to standing again. “I’m just…relieved.”
