Body Temperature and Rising - Book One of the Lakeland Heatwave Trilogy (11 page)

‘I have to say, my darling, I must call into question your abilities as a practitioner of sex magic if you cannot make one man of above average virility stiff.’

Serina couldn’t help but notice that Deacon stroked the upward curve of his erection in much the same way he stroked the leather of his bullwhip before he unfurled it. She shuddered at the thought, and yet in spite of it, she slid a hand down in an effort to ease the fire in her pussy, but he slapped her hand away. ‘I don’t think your slut hole has earned relief tonight, loveliness.’ 

She cried out and writhed against the mattress. ‘I’m telling you there was something else going on, some other form of magic, powerful magic. I felt it. I tried to warn him about it, but he wouldn’t listen.’

‘Liar!’ The sudden raise of his voice made her jump and cringe. ‘You tried to sell him your hocus pocus rubbish, didn’t you? Didn’t you?’

She blinked back tears and nodded. ‘I didn’t know what else to do. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.’

His face softened. ‘Of course you are, my darling.’ He pulled her close to him, his strong arms settling her on top of him, but he held her so no amount of wriggling would allow her to impale herself back on his desperately-needed cock. He caressed her cheeks and breasts. Everywhere his hand touched felt like he had ignited lust until every pore of her body trembled with need. ‘Perhaps I demanded too much of you too soon. Perhaps you’re just not as ready as I thought you were, my lovely. Perhaps it was foolish of me to send you, so untried as you are, to do such an important task. But I must confess, I really thought you were ready.’

‘Please, darling,’ she let the tears slide down her cheeks. ‘I am ready. I really am. You must believe me, there were powers at work, other powers. Maybe that horrible American he was with, maybe she was doing something behind my back, maybe she had done something to him before they arrived. I asked him not to bring her, demanded it even, just like you said.’

He held her in a disappointed gaze. ‘My dear Serina, Marie Warren did nothing to Mr Meriwether before his arrival at Raven Crag, I promise you. And as for her time at the site, well she slept through your debacle. Since you could not keep her away, I made sure of that myself. I assure you she had nothing to do with Tim’s unfortunate lack of interest in you. Oh come, come, my dearest. Don’t fret so.’ He pinched her nipples until she winced in pain that somehow still felt like enflamed desire. ‘I suppose it is possible that there was other magic at work, just as you say. After all, you are a powerful witch. You would certainly know these things, wouldn’t you?’ He pinched again and moved so his cock rubbed agonizingly at the edge of her raw pout.

Suddenly she was aware of how hard she was trembling. How many times had he made her come? It had to be magic that had allowed her to drive the car and arrive home safely. He was on her before she cleared the woodland. She couldn’t see him, but dear Goddess, her body felt him like a fast moving fever threatening to burn her up. At least he had waited until she was out of sight of Tim Meriwether and his woman, at least he’d spared her that humiliation. Beyond that, he had left her little pride, and as mindless with lust as she was, it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter if she died in the throes of the ecstasy he could offer. She could only take what he gave her and whimper for more as her desire built rather than dissipated. It was only as he dragged her from the car and pushed her down on the bed in her flat that she fully realised the extent of his rage. He never unfurled the bullwhip. He didn’t need to. He offered a far more exquisite punishment. 

She bit back a sob. ‘It wouldn’t have taken much power to realise there was strong magic on him.’

‘Of course not, my darling, of course not.’ He held her so her aching gape was pressed up tight and begging against the blunt head of his cock. ‘And we shall get to the bottom of that powerful magic together. Now that I have seen more clearly the situation, there is yet a better way that you may serve me, but first, my sweetheart, let me ease the rage of your need.’ 

With that he pushed into her so hard and so deep that it took her breath, and yet she sobbed with relief as he began to jack hammer with bone breaking force. Whatever it took. She could endure little more without some real relief.

Chapter 11

The afternoon shadows were lengthening across her bedroom floor when Marie finally woke up. For a second she wasn’t sure where she was, for a second there was a lingering tingle low in her belly and she thought of Anderson, but then he’d said she would feel that tingle when any spirit was close. She shivered remembering the events of the past 24 hours, then groaned. ‘It just gets more insane all the time,’ she spoke into the silence. 

Then she remembered Tim sleeping on her sofa. She dressed quickly, noticing once again with an icy shiver the bruise marks along her neck where Deacon had held her. She brushed her hair down over them, then shuffled into the lounge. 

Tim was gone, but the ripple of fear that clawed at her insides eased off when she saw the quilt folded neatly at the foot of the sofa with the pillow stacked on top of it. A cup had been used, washed, and placed neatly in the draining rack, and the kettle, which Marie always forgot to refill, was full. He had a farm to run, she reminded herself. He didn’t get the luxury of sleeping till he was rested. She wondered if he’d found something to eat. She wondered if he was OK. 

She felt a surge of guilt at her bad behaviour last night. Whatever had happened with Serina, she should have been there for him, even if it meant having to watch the bitch fuck him. The strangeness of it all suddenly hit full force. There was no way in hell she could have slept if Tim were fucking Woo-woo Woman. The barb of jealousy aside, he was doing it for very serious, very important reasons, and the raunchy little voyeur in her would have relished a good look at Tim’s junk and how he used it. The wank potential was too hot to be ignored, let alone the danger he had actually put himself in. That sharpened the bite of guilt, but also made her wonder what else had been going on. Surely Serina Ravenmoor didn’t have the power to cause her to sleep while she had her way with Tim. And what had she actually done to him to make him so upset? 

Before the thought was completely out of her head, she was halfway down the steps. It wasn’t hard to find Tim. He was unloading hefty bags of grain from the back of a flatbed into the barn. The day had dried and warmed to a steamy Cumbrian greenhouse, a condition that seemed to be the order of the day for the past week and a half. It had been enough to cause Tim to take off his shirt, and the sight of him naked to the waist nearly took her breath away. No. She was absolutely certain she could not have slept through that. 

‘You all right?’ He called, wiping a gloved hand over his sweaty brow.

‘Not so bad. You?’

‘Better now. A little hard work’s always good for what ails you.’ She thought she saw a pained look cross his face, but it passed so quickly that it could have just been the play of light and shadows. 

‘You must be famished,’ she called up to him. ‘I know I am. I’ve got everything for a fry-up if you’re interested.’

‘I wouldn’t say no.’ He offered her that boyish smile that had made her knickers wet the first day she met him, when he handed over the keys. After that, he’d not smiled very much. Now she knew why that was. He looked down at the patina of sweat and dust covering his broad chest. ‘Give me time to clean up.’

She fought back the urge to ask him if he needed help with that. Instead, she glanced down at her watch. ‘You’ve got 30 minutes, then I eat it all myself. Consider yourself warned.’

‘It smells great,’ he said, as he stepped into the kitchen all clean and freshly scrubbed. ‘I didn’t think an American could do a proper fry-up.’

She smiled up from her efforts at the stove. ‘My mother was a Brit, and if there was one thing she taught me it was to do a fry-up.’ 

‘And to make good coffee,’ he said as he took up the cup she offered.

‘My dad taught me that. He was a real coffee snob.’

‘Ah,’ he said, leaning up against the counter next to her, the angular lines of his body making the heat in the kitchen a lot more intense. ‘The best of both worlds.’

‘You?’ She asked, turning her wandering attention back to the eggs before they burned. 

‘Cumbrian born and bred,’ he said. ‘I lived in London a good bit of my life, so sadly I lost the accent.’ She saw the blush crawl up his throat. ‘Now I wish I hadn’t. Maybe with time, I’ll earn the right to claim it back.’

She settled food onto the plates and nodded to the table. ‘Is that what the farming is all about, earning it back?’

‘Sort of, I guess.’ He pulled her chair out, then settled in next to her. ‘Though it’s not a hardship earning it back in this place in this way.’ He smiled at her look of disbelief. ‘I mean it’s hard work, but that’s not the same as a hardship, is it?’

She shook her head, remembering the work she’d left.

They finished the meal in light, getting-to-know-each-other, conversation – the type one might have experienced on a first date, the type that kept what was really on their minds enough at bay for sanity to prevail a little while longer. Afterwards, they did the washing up side by side in companionable silence. They had settled in for another pot of coffee when she approached the subject of the night past. 

‘Tim, I’m sorry for my terrible behaviour, and the falling asleep.’ She found it hard to meet his gaze. ‘That wasn’t me. I would never have been able to sleep under such circumstances.’ She lifted her eyes. ‘I was afraid for you, and to be honest, I was afraid for the Ravenmoor woman too. One minute I was watching with my heart pounding in my chest while she cast the circle and the next you were waking me up.’

She could see the tension along his shoulders that hadn’t been there before, and the hard line of his mouth reminded her of the Cumbrian stone walls always marking the boundaries not to be trespassed upon.

‘I thought of that afterwards,’ he said, seeming to find it equally difficult to meet her gaze. ‘After I’d added my own dose of bad behaviour to the evening.’ He forced a grunt. ‘Mind you, it was just as well you weren’t watching.’

‘Tim?’ She reached over and took his hand. For a second, she thought he would pull away, but instead, he wrapped his fingers around hers. ‘Tim, what happened?’

The blush that rose from the open collar of his shirt up over his cheeks was dark crimson. The muscles of his jaw twitched, and his shoulders got even stiffer. ‘Nothing happened, Marie.’

‘Look Tim I really am sorry that I wasn’t awake to be there for you and that I was so rude to Serina but really …’ Then she got it. ‘Oh. Nothing?’

He shook his head and glared into his coffee cup. ‘I mean she was doing sex magic, for fuck sake, and I’m not shy, but I couldn’t … I tried.’ His hand twitched beneath hers. ‘That’s when she started trying to sell me all her stupid crystals and potions to help my fucking libido. Marie, I swear, nothing like that has ever happened to me before.’

‘Tim, look at me.’ When his eyes met hers, she continued, ‘You’ve felt sex magic before just like I have, and how hard was it to get turned on?’

He huffed out a breath, and raked a hand through his hair. ‘It wasn’t getting turned on that was the problem, it was trying to keep from ripping off my jeans and fucking everything in sight. That was the problem.’ His hand suddenly went low to his belly. Marie couldn’t help noticing that even the thought of what the ghosts made him feel, what the Elementals made him feel caused an instant bulge against his fly. She forced her attention back to his face, but not before she remembered the silky hard feel of his cock in her hand there in the manger, and her pussy was most definitely sympathetic. 

He continued. ‘And that burn, you know what I mean. At first it hurts like hell until you get used to it. Then it twists and turns and rearranges itself until, I swear, Marie, it feels so damn good, and …’ His voice drifted off. ‘I didn’t feel that. I didn’t feel that at all.’ For a second the two sat in silence as Tim contemplated his observation, then he spoke softly, ‘OK, so there was no magic. You did warn me that she was a quack, but still, the woman wasn’t exactly unattractive, was she? If I’d met her at a pub and we’d spent an evening together over a few drinks …’

Marie’s hand mirrored Tim’s resting low on her belly, remembering. ‘There was magic, Tim. I remember now. I remember feeling it just before I fell asleep, the burn, and I remember thinking maybe Anderson had come. But then I knew it wasn’t him.’ This time it was her turn to blush. ‘Then I don’t remember anything else until you woke me up.’ She shuddered at the memory of how desolate she felt when she realised it wasn’t Anderson.’

Holding her breath, she leaned forward and laid her hand on the bulge at his crotch, and he sucked air. ‘Tim, if there is magic that makes us horny, don’t you think maybe there could also be magic that makes us, you know, not able to. Maybe magic that’s there for our own protection?’

He placed his hand on hers, and rocked his hips forwards into her touch, and his eyelids fluttered. ‘I think it’s a theory worth investigating, and we do have unfinished business, don’t we?’

She lowered herself to the floor onto her knees in front of him and the room was awash in heavy breathing as she undid his fly, a bit more awkwardly than she intended. Before the zipper was down, the heavy weight of his erection shoved forward into her hand. She offered a throaty chuckle. ‘Tim Meriwether, a commando boy, who’da thought.’

‘Missed laundry day,’ he breathed. ‘You know with everything going on.’

‘Makes it easier for me,’ she sighed, leaning forward to take him into her mouth.’

‘Oh God,’ he gasped and curled his fingers in her hair. ‘Oh God, Marie.’

For a deliciously endless moment, the only sound other than her wet ministerings to his cock was their heavy breathing and the slight protests of the wooden chair as Tim braced and ground against it. The tightly controlled shifting of Tim’s hips made deep-throating him a pleasure, so much so, in fact, that she fumbled with her own fly and slid her fingers down inside the cut-offs, bucking against her hand with the first shiver of delight as she parted her wet folds.

‘You can’t keep that to yourself,’ Tim managed between laboured breaths. ‘I want to see. I want to taste.’

She ploughed two fingers deep into her slick hole, then eased them free, glistening and creamy with her juices. Shifting only enough that she could see his face well, she lifted her fingers to his mouth.

His cock surged as he pulled them between his lips with a hungry slurp. He made almost the same kind of sound he’d made over the breakfast she’d cooked, only deeper, so deep she could feel the vibration of his moans down his body clear into his cock. And his tongue, my God what the man could do with his tongue, even just on her fingers, made her gasp, made her pussy let down a fresh flood. 

‘You can’t keep such sweetness from me, woman.’ He pulled away from her. ‘Now that I’ve tasted you, I want all of you.’ With the same animal power he had used to heft the bags of grain into the barn, he lifted her until her arse rested firmly on the oak table, then he pushed her back with one hand, kissing his way over her still-clothed breasts and down her belly to where the humid heat of his lips and tongue conspired with his nimble fingers, pushing and pressing and rootling until her shorts and knickers were down over her hips. As she lifted her bottom so he could shimmy them off, his mouth kept on target right down over her mons to linger for a tonguing and a suckling of her clit, which caused her to make sounds not unlike the contented grunts of Tim’s mare. 

Then he went deep, as though he were searching for buried treasure and he knew exactly where to look. Cupping her buttocks to him, he tongued and slurped and suckled her swollen lips, returning to the nib of her clit to stoke the flames that had become a full-fledged inferno. Then the middle finger of one hand sought out her anus, already wet from the delicious mix of her juices and his saliva dripping down over her perineum. He plunged it deep, judging perfectly the results, which with just the right nip on her clit, sent her writhing into orgasm. 

Then he pulled away, face dewed with her heat. With one shove of his hand, his jeans were around his knees, and he pushed into her grudging pussy with a growl so feral that she gushed again and responded with her own growls and grunts. She wrapped her legs around him, locking her ankles until he was bear-hugged between her thighs. She met him thrust for frenzied thrust, until the whole world and every conscious thought that existed in it centred around his cock in her cunt. Nothing else existed, nothing else mattered. 

She screamed her next orgasm until her throat was raw, just as he grunted next to her ear. ‘Jesus, Marie, I have to come. Now!’ And he did. She felt him, felt the core of him as he emptied himself into her over and over again there on the kitchen table.

They managed to make it to the bed for round two, which was long and lingering and playful. At some point, Marie lost track of how many times she’d come, and even the slightest doubt about the working order of Tim’s junk was replaced with heated, naughty admiration. She drifted off to sleep in a spoon position, his cock still happily nestled inside her, his hand cupped possessively around her breast.

No problems had been solved. They would wake up with Deacon still looming over them like a bilious plague, but at least for the moment they could pretend that all was well with the world.

The room was deep in shadow when Tim woke up with Marie wrapped in his arms. The sight of her, the memory of what had led him to be in this enviable position made his cock tense again, but he ignored his desire to wake her for another good fuck. He was used to the craziness. He’d lived with it for three months now, but she was not, so he opted to let her sleep while he took care of his evening chores. 

She moaned softly and shifted on the pillow, as he carefully disentangled himself from her, but she didn’t wake up. He dressed quietly, resisting the urge to linger and watch her sleep. On his way out the front door, he grabbed a piece of cold bacon left over from the fry-up and wolfed it before pulling the door quietly to behind him. Hopefully he’d be back before she woke up, and he smiled at all the wonderful ways he might tease her into the waking world.