Broken Heart 06 Come Hell or High Water (2 page)

Mm-mmm. Connor sure knew how to get a girl riled. A secretive look, a quiet compliment, an unexpected touch... Yeah, he'd employed them all over the last month.

I liked him. More than I should, really.

"Sunrise is only a couple hours away," I said, patting the hood of my beat-up 1965 Mustang. She needed a paint job and some interior work, but her innards were top-notch. I'd taken my baby to our local mechanic, Simone Sweet, and she'd made the car purr like a baby tiger. "Think I'll take Sally for one last run before bedtime."

Connor 's lips quirked. "Mustang Sally?"

"Well, she was brand-new in 1965," I said, grinning.

He laughed. Oh, Lord. He was sexy. I turned toward him, inched closer.

"Well, then," he said, his gaze on my mouth, "I suppose I should kiss the pretty girl good night."

I rolled my eyes and punched his shoulder. "Lame."

He put his hand over his heart as if I'd wounded him there.

"You have that fancy brogue," I teased, "and you can't give me a better line than that one?"

He cupped my face and kissed me.

His lips were firm and warm. He tasted like cinnamon and coffee. His fingers threaded through my hair, and my hands flattened against his muscled chest. His tongue slipped past the seam of my lips, beckoning me, daring me.

I met his passion with my own.

Heat poured through me, every nerve ending pinging with need, every molecule within me
wanting
. We parted briefly, he gulped in a breath, and then he recaptured my mouth, deepening the kiss, his tongue dueling with mine, his heart thundering under my palms.

Anything I'd ever had before was nothing compared to this maelstrom. I wanted to breathe in Connor, absorb him, take him into me and become whole.

"Lass." He pulled free, leaning his forehead against mine. He inhaled greedily, shuddering. Inhaling wasn't really an option for me, but quivering? That I could do.

My mouth felt swollen and tingly.

I looked down. My white Nikes and his black boots touched, our knees rubbing against each other, and I thought:
We could be naked
.

"Come home with me, Connor."

He drew me in close and tipped my chin so that I was staring into his eyes. An old word floated to the surface of my mind:
aurum
. Latin for "gold." His eyes were tarnished with the kind of sorrow I'd seen only in my mother 's troubled gaze, usually when she was thinking of my father, who'd died when I was fourteen. I wondered about the tragedy that had dulled the shine of Connor's gaze.

"When you look at me like that," he said, running his fingers down my throat, "it's like you can see into my soul."

"No." I stilled his roving hand and took it to kiss his fingertips. "I just see you."

He sucked in a breath, and I was surprised my words had affected him so. Was this the game people played when they felt as if their hearts had met before the world began?

No, Pheebs. Animal attraction is not love.

"You wish to spend the night with me?" he asked. "And you make this choice of your own free will?"

His formal language threw me, but I went with it.
Impulsiveness, thy name is Phoebe Allen.
"Yes," I murmured. "I choose you, Connor."

He kissed me until my knees felt wobbly, and I knew, right then, that I was in for one hell of a night.

Connor slid into the passenger seat as if he belonged there, Clyde to my Bonnie. I glanced at him and saw him staring out the window, his eyes lifted to the full moon. For a moment, he seemed as though he might be praying.

Then he looked at me, and his eyes were not those of a penitent man.

The house was dark, quiet. We both got out of the car, the muggy heat an insult after the cold of air-conditioning.

I hesitated, my gaze traveling the cracked sidewalk, studying the dandelions that poked through. Devil's Shoestring grew in thick brown clumps all around the house. After Daddy passed, Momma's schizophrenia had gotten worse, and so, too, had her strange habits. She insisted we plant the Devil's Shoestring. "Purpose bound," she had said when we were finished. "Promise made."

Guilt flickered like a dying candle's temperamental flame.
Oh, Momma.

My mother had committed suicide.

I was eighteen. I just wanted to take Sally and travel around, get out into the bright, beautiful world. I'd saved nearly all my waitressing money. Aunt Alice had agreed to take Momma in for a while, and had driven from Louisiana to get her. On an overnight stop, Momma went into the hotel bathroom and took razor blades to her wrists. She didn't mess around, either. The lines went from wrist to elbow, and were so deep that the para-medics medics glimpsed bone.

I'd failed her.

I'd wanted a life all my own. It was almost as if her illness had been killing me. I'd just wanted to breathe again.

And now? I didn't breathe at all.

Momma hadn't left a note, so there was an autopsy and a police investigation. While we waited for bureaucracy to crawl toward the obvious conclusion, Aunt Alice and I cleaned out the house. It was hell going through Momma's bedroom, organizing her clothes, inventorying the items she'd considered precious, tossing the stuff she wouldn't need anymore. You ever clutch a half-used tube of toothpaste and just lose your shit?

I did.

I had held on to that stupid tube of Colgate, sat on the toilet, and wept. It didn't do a damned bit of good. Momma was gone. I didn't feel relieved, either. I just felt like my chest had been clawed open. That kind of emptiness was never filled.

You just got used to living with it.

Digging through the boxes in her closet, I found the journals. And that was how I'd discovered Momma practiced hoodoo. Weird things we'd done - mostly to keep Momma's mind settled, like weekly floor washings and planting the Devil's Shoestring - were hoodoo rituals.

Momma had been trying to keep out the bad spirits, the ones only she could see (when she wasn't medicated). Believe me, ever since I got undead and found out demons were real, I'd wondered whether Momma had been able to look into the beyond. I'd been so intent on hanging on to reality, I couldn't consider the possibility that she'd been right.

Y'see, I didn't want to be crazy. I made sure my world stayed in order, that it made complete sense all the time, no matter what I had to do. In a way, that was its own kind of crazy.

The week of Momma's death was when I crawled into Jackson Tate's embrace and we made a baby together. All that yearning to leave Broken Heart and all that money I'd saved went toward fixing up the house and preparing for Daniel Allen Tate.

"Phoebe?"

I realized I'd been staring at the Devil's Shoestring for a little too long. I didn't want to get lost in those memories. I didn't want to feel that same sense of vulnerability and fear that had me scrambling for a human connection.

Well, I guess I didn't need to worry about the human part, now, did I?

Connor's hand pressed lightly on the small of my back and I looked up, realizing how tall and broad he was, how much of a man he seemed when I still felt like a girl.

"Changin' your mind?" he asked softly.

"Nope." I strode down the walkway, digging my house keys out of my purse. I had the door unlocked and opened when I realized Connor hadn't followed me onto the small porch.

"Invite me, lass," he said, his gaze filled with wicked promises.

"Come in," I said, smiling.

I felt the air move, an odd breeze disturbing the damp night, and then he smiled, too.

He sauntered up to the house and followed me inside.

I lit candles and arranged them on the hardwood floor of my bedroom. Connor's eyes were on me, hungry. As if I were a buffet, and he a starving man.

I was nervous.

My experience was limited: small-town boys who fumbled and shook and found their own pleasure too quickly. Jackson had been a good lover, but even with him, I'd never felt this kind of anticipation. My body vibrated with expectation, as if what would unfold tonight would ruin me for all other experiences.

Connor wrapped his arms around me and kissed me, and the world tilted.

The heat of him snaked from his flesh to mine. His fingers skimmed and his tongue flicked, and then I was naked, but for the locket.

He touched the gold heart that hid within it a picture of Momma and one of Danny, and I told him the story: how the locket was a family heirloom, how the first daughter received it on her eighteenth birthday. I told him how important it was, how I loved that it was mine.

"Leave it on," he said, his eyes like fine Scotch. "That, and nothing else."

Oh, Lord. What was I doing? I wanted Connor so badly. It made no sense. I'd known him a month, a stranger who came to town. He never talked about himself, never had visitors. Still, I couldn't help the foolish thought that my soul recognized his. That it had been whispering, "He's the one," ever since I laid eyes on him.

It was stupid.

It was impulsive.

It was true.

I wanted Connor. Not like I had wanted others. Those boys had elicited only slivers of desire; their crude fumbling mocked real yearning. My feelings for Connor were complex, confusing. I wanted to protect him, and have wild sex with him, and make breakfast with him, and fall asleep to the sound of his heartbeat.

"Let me undress you," I murmured. I could give him tenderness, show him affection. Whatever lies we might later tell ourselves, I wanted what was unfolding now to be the truth. Our truth.

He lay down on the bed and I tugged off his boots and socks. My fingers wandered around his feet; I tickled his ankles.

"Lass," he said, choked with laughter.

I grinned.

He released the buttons on his jeans. I leaned over and helped him pull off the denims.

"Boxers?" I said. I studied the material. "Red devils? Really?"

"It was these or Scooby Doo," he said, straight-faced, and it was my turn to laugh.

I was hesitant to draw down his underwear. I wanted to see what those little red devils hid, but all the same, I suddenly felt shy and unsure.

Connor took off his shirt. Then he sat up, drew me onto his lap, and kissed me.

He kissed me until I felt as though my muscles were gonna slide off my bones. That oh-my-God-what-am-I-doing panic melted under the hot assault of his mouth.

"Sweet," murmured Connor as he dragged his lips down my throat. "You taste so sweet."

I attacked his mouth, desperate to lose myself in physical need. Because I would not listen to the ghost beat of my heart, the tiny voice whispering,
This is shiny like new love
, and then,
No, no, no
.
Not now. Not him. Not this.

"Connor," I said. "I can't... you know. Not all the way."

"That silly binding curse? Ach. That has no effect on the Ghillie Dhu."

I stared at him, shocked. "What? The Consortium told us - "

"You believe everything they say?" he asked. "You think the Consortium doesn't have its secrets?"

His words were tinged with bitterness. Doubt started to chill my ardor. What did I really know about Connor? Why had he come to Broken Heart? And why did he so obviously despise the Consortium?