How to Marry a Warlock in 10 Days (13 page)

She didn’t want to stop taunting him, though. Not only did it turn her on to see his desire, but it was a rush like no other she’d had before to be in command of his complete and utter attention. No one had ever made her feel that way.

Middy knew that it wasn’t love and it wasn’t going to be, but this was enough for her. She wasn’t looking for love.

She wanted passion, adventure, excitement, and Dred was all of those things. Just these last few days had been filled with more of all that than she’d had in the whole of her quiet lifetime.

“What if I give you permission to be a bastard?” Middy said and kissed the corner of his mouth.

A low sound came from the back of his throat, almost like a growl. “That would be a sin. You should know only pleasure.”

“How can I know the beauty of the pleasure without the pain?”

“Indeed, you are a devil. I’ve never wanted another witch the way I want you.” Dred met her eyes and pushed a curl behind her ear. “Perhaps once I’ve had you, I will never feel that again.”

Middy didn’t think the word
feel
should have anything to do with Dred Shadowins. He was a bastard extraordinaire.

He wasn’t supposed to have feelings. She saw an out and latched on to it. “Perhaps. Or you could just wait for ten years until the next generation of witches is ready for your attentions.”

“You’re heartless,” he sighed dramatically. “We haven’t even had our mad affair and you’ve already moved on.” He whispered a grooming charm and was immaculate again.

Middy liked it when he looked rumpled and well-used.

She wondered if warlocks liked that look on a witch, too.

“We should talk about that,” Middy said, veering back to the subject.

“Talk about what?” He scowled.

“I don’t want you to see anyone else during our little charade.”

“You either.”

“What?”

“It’s fair. No sneaking around with Belledare.”

“Tristan is a douche bag.”

“He seems to have reason to think that your feelings are of a more tender nature.”

“Like hell,” Middy said as she used her own grooming charm.

“Are you ready to put on your happy bride face?” Dred smirked.

“Not until I get my ring.”

“Merlin’s Blue Balls! You’re still stuck on that? Fine.”

Dred pulled something off a chain around his neck and jammed it on her finger rather unceremoniously. “That was my grandmother’s. When this is over, I get it back.”

Middy looked down at the simple band and took it off so she could inspect it. There was an inscription.
“Altig Mig
Hjerte.”
The scrolling letters were beautiful and she felt a warm pulse coming from them when she slid the ring back on her finger. Then she felt the letters on the ring burn into her wrist, tangling in the vines of the engagement tattoo.

Sweet Circe’s Tampon!

What if they didn’t come off? She’d heard stories of witches who’d lost their warlocks to death or other witches, which amounted to the same thing in Middy’s mind, but the tattoos had never faded.

“Uh, Dred? What does the inscription mean?”

“It’s Danish. It means ‘Forever, My Heart.’ ”

She stole a glance at Dred and put the ring back on.

The scowl on his hard features told her that maybe she shouldn’t tell him that the words had become part of the marriage tattoo.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Chancellor Snow, in the Library, with the Candlestick

Three days at the house party and he still hadn’t fucked her.

It wasn’t as if this was some revelation that had hit him like the hammy fists of an angry troll. No, Dred had spent three agonizing, horrible nights with his cock posing as an alert and anxious soldier—ready to go to war. The thing seemed to be under the impression that it was auditioning to be a cannon.

There had never been any question of sleeping arrangements. Not that he would have offered to take the floor.

He’d been fully prepared to demand that they share the bed since she was in such a hurry to engage in certain activities.

He’d expected her to demure, but she hadn’t even asked about arrangements when she’d seen the bed. In fact, he was sure she hadn’t given it a second thought. Middy had smiled her innocent smile, donned her pink,
sheer
night-gown, and gone along her merry way, which included dragging him down the primrose path to Hell behind her.

Things were completely fucked. He was the cad, the mil-lionaire playboy who, wait, make that
billionaire
playboy, who didn’t give a shit about anything. Especially not what happened to witches after he’d made them scream in tongues unknown to gods or warlocks.

So, he’d let a little of his devil-may-care attitude slip by spying for the council. A warlock had to care about something. That didn’t mean he was going soft.

Maybe he owed Middy something. That was it. Per her demands, he owed her a ride on his wand. So what was the holdup? Why didn’t he just fuck her seven shades of blue and call it day? Merlin knew he wanted to. So why wasn’t he wand deep right now? This very second he could be enjoying her gasps of pleasure and the tight sheath of her virgin body.

He’d done his part. He’d told her up front what to expect and why this whole thing was a bad idea. He hadn’t promised her anything and she hadn’t asked for it, at least out loud.

After he’d pulled all of her layers away, she was still a witch. Could she really be that different from the rest of her kind? Her mouth hadn’t formed the words, but it was still there in her eyes. Middy wanted to be loved. She deserved nothing less. Dred just didn’t have that to give.

He’d tried to reiterate that it would be nothing but a bodily release for him, but she’d given him her carefree Middy smile and told him not to worry, that she didn’t have expectations. What bothered him was that he wanted her to have expectations; he wanted her to know that she deserved to have them.

So he’d tried to keep his hands to himself. He’d done his damndest to do the Right Thing. It was easy for his brain to confuse what exactly the right thing was when it was three o’clock in the morning and she was soft and pliant, pushing her rounded curves against his cock, and begging for his touch. Especially with that sweet, feminine scent of hers, the silk of her hair, and the eagerness of her body wrapped around him like a shroud.

Dred argued with himself that he had to fuck her at least once. He’d sworn. A magickal bond bound him to her until he did. And what really pissed him off was the cold chill down his spine when he put fucking and Middy in the same sentence. As if she were too good to be fucked, as if it ought to be called something else.

He had a stray, niggling thought that maybe he was feeling guilt.

This was not a revelation he cared for. Not one damn bit.

Not that he even knew what he was feeling guilty for.

Fucking was fucking. He didn’t see why it had to stop being fucking just because he happened to like the witch he was doing it with. Or not doing it with as the case had come to be.

It was just stupid. She wanted to be fucked. He wanted to fuck her. What was the problem again?

Last night had been the worst; she’d been having some sort of sex dream and it had obviously been about him.

She’d been writhing around, pushing her ass up against him, and making small sounds that had become his name.

Dred had thought that it couldn’t get any worse than that, but it had.

She’d cried out in need, her fingers had moved between her thighs, and she’d been flicking her clit and pleading with him to make her come.

If Dred had been a lesser warlock, he would have given her what she’d begged for so prettily. Instead, he lay beside her, watching her hands travel her body and do all of the things that he wished to do. He remembered the taste of her, how she’d come for him, and only him. Not to some magickally altered version of himself, but him. In the flesh.

She’d arched up for his tongue, spread her legs for him and Dred had to admit, he loved hearing his name on her lips.

He also loved kissing her afterward, watching her face as she tasted her own pleasure.

That witch was a fantasy made real.

She was the archetype virgin Jezebel that all males, mortal and warlock alike, sought. She was untried flesh, unmarked territory, yet her body was like a Stradivarius violin—he knew it would sing with the touch of a master.

And a master he was. He’d studied the ancient and for-bidden tomes of sex magick. With a touch, or a breath, he could ruin her for any other warlock for all time. He could make her believe anything he desired, make her do anything he desired just by playing the right chord within her.

With what he had learned, he could invoke a magickal orgasm that was indeed
la petite morte,
the little death. It would stop her heart.

He had all of this power, but when he was around her, it was as if he was still just a warlock trying to get his wand wet.

Dred felt another moment of ball-breaking clarity coming on. He didn’t want it. That was the bad thing about being honest with yourself—it was always brutal. Dred wanted to be the good guy. Yeah, that was a revelation that had been a canker on his ass for some time now. He wanted someone to see that there was good in him and that night in Shale Creek hadn’t taken what was left of his soul back into the Abyss.

No, not someone. Middy Cherrywood. He felt warm around her and he felt it in places other than his cock. He wasn’t sure what that meant, and he wasn’t even sure if he liked it, but he didn’t want it to stop until he could decide.

He knew when the drunken revelry of the sex magick had faded and the sun was bright on what she’d done, she wouldn’t look at him the same way. It was for purely selfish reasons that he didn’t want to complete their bargain.

His cock had other ideas. Other ideas that in any other circumstance, with any other witch, would be the right ones.

He’d always had such tight control of his body; it was something he’d learned when he was captured in the war. Not something he cared to remember now, sitting in his aunt’s library waiting for his Uncle Roderick.

Uncle Roderick was the man he believed to be responsible for his capture after Shale Creek. Dred would have been content to disappear into the night with no one ever knowing he’d been there. Roderick had been the only one who’d known his location. Roderick was also the warlock he believed to be smuggling dark objects. If it wasn’t him, it was someone in his employ. He’d tracked dark signatures of magick back to Snow Manor. Dred knew for a fact that Barista wasn’t involved. She’d lost her first husband to a dark object mishap. So perhaps Roderick had a mistress who was helping him?

Dred drew a copy of Gaston LeRoux’s
Phantom of the
Opera
down from one of the immaculate shelves. He still had a raging case of wood, cherrywood, to be precise. He opened the leather-bound tome and sat down at the massive desk in the middle of the room.

Roderick had always called it his “reading table.” Dred was sure that it was more like his “drilling the maid table.”

There was no other reason for it to be so large. Unless it was hiding something.

“I wouldn’t have thought to see you reading such drivel,” Roderick Snow said as he entered the library.

“I’ve always found the Phantom’s plight engaging.” Dred leaned back in the chair and dropped his booted feet like two bricks on the surface of the desk.

Roderick eyed his nephew with blatant disapproval. “Really? I’ve always found it trite. He was a weak man.”

“How’s that?” Dred let the pages flutter closed as if they held only a passing interest.

Roderick leaned over the desk. “He had everything he wanted, but he let it go. Christine had agreed to be his forever. It was her choice. Not a pleasant one—” Roderick’s sharp features bloomed into a smile that was more like a bird of prey opening its beak for a fat mouse. “Still, it was her choice and he let her go.”

“I see, but I beg to differ.”

“Really? Did you fall for poor little Christine’s sob story, too? An innocent ingénue who had enough foresight to move herself from the
corps de ballet
to diva to vicomtessa.”

Dred snorted. “Certainly not. But I wonder why he wanted her to start with. A well-schooled whore would be better suited to a man of his depravities.”

“Your choice of bride-to-be belies that philosophy.”

“Does she?” Dred tossed the question back with little interest. If Middy Cherrywood was to be his bride in truth, he wouldn’t have cared less what anyone thought about it. Least of all Roderick Snow.

“Is she another Christine then, forced to the beast?”

Roderick made a show of glancing around the library. “Or would that be the Butcher of Shale Creek?”

“The beast? Yes, a beast in Armani.” Dred sniffed as if he’d stepped in something unmentionable. “In case it’s escaped you, Roderick, your nephew has great magick. Witches seem to find me attractive, regardless of what was done in Shale Creek.”

“That’s what I thought we’d chat about, Mordred.”

“My magick or the Shale Creek Hand of Glory?”

“Why limit ourselves? Both are very interesting topics.”

“Are you looking for some pointers then, Roderick?

Something to keep the young witches interested in you, Chancellor Snow?” Dred said this last with a knowing sneer.

“Perhaps,” he said.

If Roderick was stung by the barb, it didn’t show. Dred watched him carefully and decided that this was further proof that Roderick had a mistress and that she was much younger than Barista.

“What is it you really want, Uncle? It’s not as if we’ve ever been close. You don’t have to make a show of it now because you want something.”

“Straight to the point. I admire that in a warlock. But don’t you like the game?”

“I prefer a different sort of game.” Dred smirked.

“Ah, but this has a darker quarry.” Roderick’s mouth twisted into his own smirk. “I want the Shale Creek Hand of Glory.”

Dred smiled then. “I’m afraid that’s impossible.”

“Nothing is impossible.” Roderick’s features hardened.