MakeMeWet (3 page)

“Maille?”

Her hand dropped quickly to the latch and the door popped
open. Her tour-guide voice was back. “Yes, sorry. Towels over there on the
bench. Robes on the hooks here by the door.”

She had the bored air of someone bent on making the unusual
seem un-notable. As if it were ordinary to have black silk robes embroidered
with silver crescents or purple velvet robes embroidered with gold six-pointed
stars hanging in your sauna. As if everyone’s sauna had stacks of towels
arranged in the perfect order—red to violet—of chakra colors. Surely a
pentagram stained-glass ceiling was standard.

Why fill a home with elements of magick when—if the hint of
rose staining her neck and cheekbones were any indication—the sacred objects
embarrassed her?

It wasn’t his job to probe her beliefs. His assignment
involved probing meant to be pleasant. Not that you could tell that from her
eagerness to escape him. She’d started backing up as soon as he stepped inside
the sauna. She hovered on the path, half turned toward the house. His little
sandpiper was back. Passion had fled.

“If there’s something you need that you can’t find, I’ll be inside.
The kitchen door is just there.” She pointed to an area obscured by a rose
trellis.

He caught her wrist before she escaped and gave a gentle
tug. “Come on, love. I’m feeling a bit dizzy yet. After that bashing around out
there on the rocks, I’m sure I need watching. Can’t have me fainting in the
shower, can you?”

“Well…” She wouldn’t look at him. As if that could change
course, undo what had already been set in motion.

He trailed a finger along the sensitive skin where he’d
sealed magick with kisses.

She looked up into his eyes then. Hers were startlingly
clear, as if she were somehow immune to his enchantments. With a shiver, she
slipped her wrist from his grasp, threaded her fingers through his and turned
to lead him to the garden shower.

The “shower room” turned out to be an artful enclosure of
barely frosted glass etched with scenes of ocean life. A bed of decorative
colored stones, arranged in a rainbow serpent mosaic, circled the shower.
Scents of sea lavender and mint wafted from clusters of greenery around the
base. The entire garden exuded peace and power.

Ronin held the door and Maille stepped in ahead of him, but
she lingered at the door in full sandpiper mode.

Ronin adjusted spray and temperature. Maille’s nervous dance
from foot to foot slowed as he squirted his chest with herbal-scented shower
gel and lathered, hands gliding down over his belly. She went completely still
when he grasped his cock and lathered his balls. Her fingers curled
reflexively. He had her full attention.

Here in his element, he could work a spell that had nothing
to do with magick. Catch her in the net of her own hunger.

He pressed his advantage.

With a graceful bow, he bent, catching her hand, brushing
her knuckles with his lips. “May I have the honor of this dance, lady?”

Ah, there it was, quick as the first green flash of dawn
breaking the horizon, her smile appeared and vanished.

With a practiced turn of wrist and twirl of bodies, he had
her in his arms, a move that had served to bring many a coy female to his bed in
the time before he was cursed. With a dip of knee she was arched over his arm
and her body displayed—a feminine wonderland he’d had to fight through gowns
and corsets to reach in the old days.

Slow.
The thought formed and faded as he surrendered
to the compulsion to press lips against her arched throat. And then the taste
of her skin consumed him, a combination of salt and sweet that had his greedy
tongue painting a trail from the nook between her collarbones to the valley
between her breasts.

Her whimper, a soft animal sound that twisted his groin,
submerged his brain in a dark tide. With effort his patience resurfaced. Lust
simmered, barely controlled when he snatched her upright to stand in front of
him. Their eyes locked as he started to turn, and turn, a slow waltz under the
water.

Clumsily she followed his lead, until she gave up watching
her feet and just let her body connect with his, skin to skin. His cock pressed
into the silky warmth of her belly. When she closed her eyes, tipped her head
back, he longed to spill his seed over her glistening body.

Goddess, he wanted inside her. Now.

Her hands slid up his chest and fisted in his hair, pulling
his face to hers. Her lips opened under his with an eagerness he hoped to find
when he went probing lower down. He turned her and she moved easily, intuiting
the direction he’d take.

He backed her against the glass wall, his hands sliding up
her arms to capture her wrists, while his tongue caressed hers, coaxed her to
kiss back. Her body warmed under his attention and her desire rose, filling his
nostrils with sweet incense, turning his blood to liquid fire.

He broke the kiss and dropped to his knees, dragging her
hands downward, pinning them against her hips while he buried his nose in the
slick folds of her pussy. A swipe of his tongue along her slit plucked a
full-body shiver from her.

He would die. He would die. With a flip of his middle finger
at all the immortality curses Mere could spout, he would die right here on his
knees with his face pressed into the heaven between Maille’s thighs.

As if Maille had somehow turned the tide, turned selkie
pheromones back on him, he couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe. Waves of lust
sluiced through his body, unraveling his moor rope. Leaving him clutching at
the last strands of control.

“Don’t stop,” she whimpered. The wrenching, sweet agony in
her tone restored sanity. A drop.

Just enough.

“You have me, love,” he said between licks, “any way you
want.”

Pleasure shuddered through her, even as she turned her head
from side to side, denying him. Or denying herself.

He parted her swollen lips, baring her engorged clit to
quick, fluttery strokes, his tongue fast and gentle as the beat of butterfly
wings. Whatever she intended to say was lost in a string of whimpers and moans.

His tongue burrowed into her heat and her muscles clenched
around it, making his cock jerk and throb. Wrenching moans from him as well.
She shook his hands off and dug her fingers into his hair, locking his head in
place, freeing his hands to squeeze that firm bottom.

He didn’t need more urging, alternating thrusts and licks
with a speed and precision that would drive her right to edge of mindlessness.

Water lapped over his lower legs and the hot spray of the
shower pummeled his back, but the woman squirming under his tongue had all his
attention. She was close, so close.

His teeth caged the erect nub of her clit, while his tongue
flogged the tip. “I can’t. I can’t. Can’t,” she groaned.

I can’t
was a long way from
I won’t
or
I
don’t want to
.
I can’t
meant she would if he insisted. Though he was
likely to lose a few patches of hair when she did.

He had tasted a lot of women but none like this woman. The
tang of honeysuckle had him burrowing his tongue deep in her clenching tunnel.
The squeeze of her muscles around him gave lie to her
can’t
. She could.
She was close to proving so.

She managed to get one hand between him and the treasure he
meant to devour. Her nails scraped his scalp as she forced his head back.
Panting, she kept his mouth covered until she could speak.

“Fuck, f-f-fuck m-me,” she panted. “I n-need…”

He didn’t need any more encouragement than that. Rising from
his knees, he hauled her up and her legs went readily around his hips. Her head
dropped back to rest on the rippled glass and her eyes squeezed shut as he
nudged his cock into her exquisite heat. He thought she was sobbing now, with
pleasure certainly, but his grasp of the situation was failing. He had one
thought, and one thought only—she wanted fucking. She would have it.

“Hold tight, sweetheart.”

Her legs tightened around his back. The first hard thrust
ripped a cry from her. He took his time, savoring the sweet, slick heat he’d
been aching to sink into since his tongue went diving.

Ah, she was a treasure. He pressed deep and she quivered
around him. Their eyes locked. The barrier between Ronin the enchanted and
Maille the enchantress dissolved. He was part of her, her mind entwined with
his.

Stunned, he could only stare, frozen in time, his mouth
hanging open. It was as if a key turned in the lock guarding his ugliest
secrets and she saw without shrinking away.

The ghostly call of a wild loon turned her rigid in his
arms, and an equally haunting answer snapped the psychic connection.

“Did you hear that?” she whispered.

“It’s okay, sweetheart. An eerie sound, to be sure, but it’s
just loons calling. An avian love song, no doubt. Probably have their minds set
on the same thing we do.”

“They don’t,” she said with conviction and a shiver. He bent
his head to stop her next words with a kiss, bring her back to pleasure.

It didn’t take long to make her forget the interruption.
With each thrust her panting rose, quickening with his. But the psychic link
remained beyond his grasp. She arched her back and moaned when he drove in, but
she held a small part of herself back, her emotions impenetrable.

He picked up the pace, the slap of bodies, her arching back,
nails raking his skin, drove him senseless, so he was barely aware and
willingly obedient when she said, “Now, Ronin. Come with me, now.”

She murmured in his ear. Words that seemed familiar but made
no sense. And did that matter just now? His wild mind was taking over,
submerging reason, as if he were sinking into a dream, leaving him fathomless.

His cock drove deep into the impossible silky heat of her.
Her muscles tightening around his cock had him babbling something back.

He tried to regain some sense but she was so soft and silky
and responsive. If he could fuck a woman in the depths of the ocean, bodies
connected in the liquid weightlessness of fluid power, it might feel like this.
Mindless, weightless passion, unfettered by the harshness of air and earth.

He meant to slow down, make it last, but couldn’t stop. It
was as if she had turned the tables, drugged him with her DNA.

She had taken charge, turned him inside out.

He hovered on the brink of orgasm. Sweet torture. Drawn out
by her control. Still, he couldn’t let go without the melody of a woman’s voice
rising in release.

As if she read his mind her whimpers filled his ears. His
cock jerked, filling her and leaving him empty to the soul.

Maille bolted almost as soon as he pulled out. Ronin turned
off the taps and slid down the wall to sit in the draining water. It took a
moment for reality to sink in. He’d been duped. He’d almost forgotten such a thing
were possible, could never recall it happening. Not even when he was still
human.

Sure, her reaction had been genuine at first. Right up until
the loon call. Or maybe that psychic dip into his soul’s shadows had put her
off. But something had changed at that point. Something had given Maille Shane
power to do the impossible. She’d faked an orgasm with a selkie lover.

Had there been an undercurrent of untapped power running
through her from the beginning? He would have sworn not. No evidence of such,
save flashes of clarity, one moment under his spell, a moment later in control.
Raw and unfocused power, perhaps. Yet, she’d wielded it well enough in the last
moments. Well enough to wither magick wrought by a Goddess.

Beginners luck? Or was Mere bored and using the girl to
torment Ronin in new ways?

He scrubbed his face with both hands and pushed to his feet.
It dawned on him that somehow she knew what he was. She wouldn’t be the first
intended who thought she might free him from his fate. If a woman could resist
an orgasm with a selkie for an entire night, until the first flash of dawn
broke over the lip of the sea, her selkie lover could go free.

That part of the selkie legend was a lie. Were it true, how
was it no selkie had ever been freed?

Selkies were enchanted and irresistible. That wickedly
erotic circle would not be broken. Maille would be under him, screaming her way
through an orgasm at some point before this night was out. It was their fate.
His sentence. He deserved every minute. Every second of every century he’d
served. That and more.

The cackle of the loon’s song echoed down the beach again.
It had an uncanny similarity to Mere’s laughter.

The knee injury throbbed and Maille was grateful. Pain
tamped down the intensity of Ronin’s erotic persuasion. Between the rush of
adrenaline and raging hormones, the misery had receded to the background until
now.

Yes, her skin still burned, feverish with desire. Another
dunk in the ocean would feel like heaven, but then he would know she wasn’t
satisfied, that right at the brink she’d pulled back.

Something was wrong. The warning had pricked in the back of
her brain right at the edge of orgasm. Gave her stomach a
monster-lurking-in-the-shadows queasiness. She’d known something was off even
before the loons sang out a warning. It was silly to pay attention to these
flashes of intuition. That she could interpret animal language was a fantasy
spun by her grandmother, along with a whole host of other metaphysical nonsense
about opening her senses to the power and second sight.

Senses weren’t reliable relays for facts. Emotions, like the
bleak doom settling in the pit of her belly, were the least reliable relays of
all. Facts, measurable data, were the only thing she could count on as truth.

That her body craved Ronin was fact backed up by—

a) a weeping pussy

b) bone-throbbing desire

c) hands that shook so badly she couldn’t manage to
interlace her fingers and fold them in her lap.

Undeniable biofeedback. Any inner resistance to the idea of
giving in to the hottest man she had ever laid eyes on—or hands or tongue
on—had to be psychological.

Yet the thought of ignoring the warning and going back to
Ronin made her feel so ill and dizzy she had to stop and sit on the sauna
bench. Every nerve hummed, her skin so sensitized that if she stepped through
the door, the wind’s kiss against her skin would bring her to her knees.

The door banged open. Ronin was not easily abandoned.

“You okay, Maille love?” he asked, his tone gruffer than the
words.

She swallowed, kept her eyes closed. If she didn’t look, she
couldn’t spontaneously combust.

Quaking hands were bound to telegraph just how un-okay she
was. She pinned them under her thighs
.

“Maille?” Deep inside, her body responded to his lilting
brogue with clenches and quivers.

“Fine,” was all she dared say. More than one word, one
syllable, and her voice would have a quaver.

“You’re shivering.” His tone softened. “Did I hurt you?”

He was reaching for her. She knew it even with her eyes
closed. Like an electrostatic generator, the friction of his presence charged
the air between them. Energy snapped and tingled over her skin.

She shrank away, pressing her back into the redwood wall.
“Don’t.” She meant it to sound confident, assertive. It came out a whimper. The
hand she held up to fend him off shook. She tucked it behind her back.

“Why? What’s this now?”

He was moving in. She’d be trapped. No way would he miss the
longing still telegraphing through her limbs.

She grabbed towels and robes, rose on wobbling legs to
thrust them into his arms. The presence of a barrier, however flimsy, gave her
strength. She snagged a robe from a hook and pulled it on like armor—silken
armor gliding over sensitized skin. She ground her teeth and fumbled with the
belt tie while trying to keep an eye on Ronin without seeming to.

Ronin stepped back, angled his head as if a new perspective
would clarify her behavior. She regretted the frown crinkling his forehead. And
at the same time she knew getting distance between them was the only way to get
a grip on this carnal mania that had taken hold of her. She’d had no practice
at reining in lust.

“I’m fine,” she said again. This time her voice sounded
believably steady.

Ronin, of course, was having none of it. He shoved the
armload of terry cloth back at her, caught her by the shoulders and turned her
so her face was illuminated by the sauna’s solar lamp.

“No, something’s wrong…” No question in his tone, just a
simple statement of fact that trailed off as his frown deepened. As if guided
by an invisible GPS, he dropped to his knees, hands skimming from waist down
thighs, sending erotic sparks through her robe, dancing over her skin and
zinging up her spine. “You’re hiding something from me.” He said it as if the
very concept was a complex mathematical equation to be balanced and solved.
Then he went still.

No way to escape the truth. She grappled for some
explanation that might soothe his ego. How to soften the blow that she’d faked
orgasm?

His hands cupped either side of her knee. Relief, or
something more potent, turned her legs to water. She had to lean against the
doorjamb to stay upright. Her banged knee a perfect distraction or perfect
excuse. Either way she was saved.

He blew gently on the wound—a sweet, soothing sensation that
only fed the urge to redirect him to higher ground. She wrenched away instead.

“I said I’m fine.” She limped ahead of him, the knee feeling
suddenly stiff and stubbornly unresponsive when she tried to get away. She
hugged the towels as if they were a life raft that could keep her afloat in the
sea of lust threatening to pull her under.

“Nonsense,” he said, coming after her and scooping her up,
his tone sharp and crisp as a winter morning. “When did this happen? How?”

“Put me down, Ronin. I mean it.”

He didn’t.

* * * * *

Even in the soft light of an oil lamp, there was no denying
her knee was more than scraped. She did anyway.

“It’s not a big deal.”

He stopped dabbing the abrasion, which itself wasn’t a very
big deal, and just stared at her.

Maille squirmed, uncomfortable sitting on the exam table
where her grandmother had treated injured animals. Doubly agitated by the force
of being at eye-level with Ronin. She dropped her gaze. A deep, black bruise,
the kind that formed quickly around the site of bleeding bone, surrounded the
cut.

He dipped the towel back into the enamel basin of water and
antiseptic solution and wrung it out. “How?”

She shrugged. Her thoughts traveled backward. Memories were
lost in fog, as if her subconscious were trying to shield her from that
knowledge. Okay then, what was the last thing she could remember before the
fog?

Sunshine. Bright, beautiful sky, so perfectly blue it hurt
her eyes. Spring morning with birds singing. And the sound of the surf. Hadn’t
that been just this morning?

Bare feet padding across the kitchen floor yanked her
attention back to the present. The mirror on the right wall gave a clear view
of Ronin rummaging in the freezer compartment. He’d tied a towel around his
waist.

He wore it well. Very well.

The power was out. Unlike the newer, solar-powered bath
house, the cottage was a relic from another time. The oil lamps had been filled
and at the ready in the kitchen and great room. The old propane stove and
fridge were still in place.

The still room hadn’t changed either. Cabinets of healing
supplies. Shelves of ceramic jars. Brown glass bottles stoppered with corks.
Handwritten labels detailing the contents. The wobbling exam table where Ronin
deposited her.

Odder than the fact the room’s contents hadn’t been disturbed
was that it hadn’t disturbed Ronin at all to discover a still room between the
back porch and kitchen.

It shouldn’t be the same. The house had been rented in the
years since Gram’s death. It wasn’t possible that all their personal belongings
were still in place. It was as if the past was superimposed on the present. Or
entangled with it. She didn’t know how to put it right.

Ronan wrapped ice cubes in a towel, returned to press it
against her knee. “I’m waiting for an answer. Out with it or I’ll have to devise
a way to make you talk.”

His eyebrows did a good impression of a devious wiggle. She
ducked her head to hide a smile. Which time did Ronin belong to? Did she want
to know?

“Maille?” His voice had taken a stern, schoolmaster tone. It
made her wet. Wetter. She still ached from the unfinished session in the
shower.

“I don’t remember,” she said.

He slipped a finger under her chin, tipping her head back,
searching her eyes. “Don’t remember? Have you hit your head?”

His free hand slid into her hair. His towel brushed her
inner thigh when he leaned in. She swallowed hard, keenly aware of the growing
bump under the terry cloth.

It was suddenly, stiflingly hot. She grabbed his wrists,
dragging his hands from her hair, forcing him backward to gain some space. “I didn’t
hit my head.”

He reached for her again.

“No. Wait,” she said. “Let me think a minute.”

He backed off, sitting against the scarred desk directly
across from the exam table. The towel inched up his thighs.

Thinking was humanly impossible with him half naked across
from her. The scent of herbs and press of spirits in the still room crowded
around like weeds, choking off the memories she was reaching for, exchanging
them for the ones she didn’t dare unleash.

She lifted the makeshift icepack away and slid from the
table. “Sorry, I just can’t think here.” She limped into the kitchen and a
mason jar on the counter checked her, compelled her to come closer. Blue glass
gleamed in the soft light. Picking it up, she turned, eyes searching and
finding the battered stepping stool, wood darkened to black with age. The first
time she’d filled this jar she’d been almost too short to reach the faucet even
with a stool. Her fingers tightened on the cool glass, the raised logo pressed
against her palm. Her fingers itched to fill it with water and fresh wild
flowers.

It always had fresh flowers in it. Picked on morning hikes.

Hikes like the one she’d taken that morning, starting not at
the cottage, but from a room at a B&B in Wolf Harbor.

Why? She couldn’t let the whys get in the way of memories
unwinding. Couldn’t allow Ronin to distract her when his hands settled on her
shoulders.

“What is it, Maille? Tell me.”

“The weather here can turn in the time it takes a fluffy
cloud to glide across the face of the sun. It turned on me. This morning.”

She swiveled to face him but didn’t look at him, or resist
when he boosted her up to sit on the counter. “You shouldn’t put weight on that
knee. Why didn’t you tell me you were hurt? No wonder—”

“Do you want to hear this?” She rolled the jar between her
palms. It gleamed. Gleamed like new.

“Sorry. Go on,” Ronin said.

“I was hiking. The weather was spectacular. The sunny, warm,
blue-sky kind of day that makes you think winter won’t put in an appearance
this year. I’d made it to the top of the cliffs to a spot with a view. I swear
on a clear day you can see Europe right there where the sky meets sea.”

Ronin pulled out a chair. The legs screeched, wood across
tile. He sat and folded his arms, his gaze focused just over her shoulder.
Intent, as if he were watching her memories rerun like a movie on the wall
behind her.

“I ate lunch there. It was so warm. I was so tired. Good
tired. Good and lazy. And…”

“And what?” he asked when she paused.

Fog filled her mind.

“And, I’m not sure. I think I fell asleep. When I opened my
eyes there was fog. A gentle spring breeze had turned moody. Grown teeth.”

Cold wind had whipped her body, pulled her hair. With
visibility reduced to no more than arm’s length, with only a cotton hoodie
she’d tied around her waist…

More than one tourist had gotten lost and died of
hypothermia up there on the cliffs. Locals knew you were always supposed to
carry clothes to protect you from the cold and wet. No matter how pleasant a
day might appear. No matter what the season. The only thing more deadly than
fickle weather—falls. Maille had known those facts once upon a time. Lived by
them.

Ronin took her hands between his. “Hey, what happened on the
cliff? How did you get back?”

Indeed. A better question might be had she gotten back.
Logically, she couldn’t have in those conditions, save an act of divine
intervention.

Fact—nothing miraculous happened on that cliff. She clamped
her mind tight against any but a scientific explanation for unfolding events.

“Sorry, Ronin, I just need the bathroom.”

She slid from the counter and hobbled through the main
bedroom where she locked herself in the tiny bathroom.

“Not real,” she told herself as she leaned against the wall.
Her eyes burned and her bottom lip quivered as her grandmother’s presence
pressed in around her. Fourteen years after the funeral and Gram’s brush was
still on the counter by the sink. Her bathroom still smelled of lavender and
talcum.

“Not real. Not real,” Maille repeated. As if the mantra
could rescue her from the truth she was barreling toward.

When she was calmer, she closed the lid of the toilet and
sat down. If this wasn’t real—and it absolutely wasn’t—she had to face what
was.

What was one thing Maille could be certain of?

She picked up the silver-backed brush. It gleamed as though
it had been polished just that morning. Silver hair, curled between some
bristles. Maille plucked it free.

If there had ever been any truth to her grandmother’s powers
and forces, and all that talk of inherited callings, Gram would surely have done
something when she was sick. If Maille’s “gifts” were more than coincidence and
placebo effect induced by powers of suggestion, Maille would have known her
grandmother was sick. Could have saved her.

None of that had happened. Case closed.

The hair slipped from her fingers and fell across her
exposed knee. Before Maille could brush it away, heat spread from the strand in
a glowing circle.

No.

Her heart hammered, beat so loud she was sure Ronin must be
able to hear it in the kitchen. Fear stopped her breath.