Money Shot (30 page)

“Tell me.” She grinned and laid her head next to his on the couch cushion. “And your hoopty wasn’t even free. Hell, no. You had demands.”

“Well, yeah. You give away the milk, who’s going to buy the cow?”

“Can I just say how refreshing it is to hear that old piece of crap and have the guy be the cow for a change?”

He rolled his head to the side to meet her eyes, and she saw laughter in them. But there was more, too. A gravity. A beautiful, uncompromising honesty. “I wanted, too, Maria.”

“I know. And not that pretty, polished robot I’d become, either. You wanted
me
. And I was such a fool, such a complete
idiot
, that I honestly debated. Do I scrape up the courage to actually participate in my own life? Or do I keep punishing myself by living somebody else’s?”

He found a single ringlet in the bramble of her hair, tugged the end and watched it bounce. “Do I get a vote?”

“Yours is the only one that counts.”

“I love you, Maria.”

She had to swallow hard to find her voice. “And that’s a miracle,” she said softly. “A gift. I don’t understand it and I certainly don’t deserve it, but I’ll take it.”

“You’d better.” He threaded his fingers through her curls to cup her skull in his big, hard palm and bring her mouth to his. “Don’t argue. Just marry me and be done with it.”

 

The words fell out of him without forethought or consideration. They just jetted straight up out of his heart and leaped into the air between them. No parachute, no net. They hung there, suspended in time and space, while she stared at him with a wild-eyed terror that almost made him long for one of her old fake smiles.

“Okay,” he said, “I hadn’t planned to go quite this far tonight, but I have that terminal honesty thing going for me and, well—” He lifted his shoulders and plunged forward even as he cursed himself for a fool. “Screw it. I have no patience. I love you, Maria. I always will. You don’t have to marry me right this minute, but fair warning? I’ll want that eventually. I’ll push for it, too, so brace yourself. For now, though, I’d be happy if you just stayed. Here. With me.” He cleared his throat. “Or somewhere else. It doesn’t have to be here. On Mishkwa. Because I could go to—” He broke off. “Where do you live?”

“Minneapolis.”

“Minneapolis. I could go there. Or we could—”

“Rush?”

“Yeah?”

“I hate Minneapolis.”

“You do?” He searched her eyes and found the sorrow he knew would always be there to some degree. He found barely checked fear hunkered down next to some serious doubt. But he also saw hope. He saw love. And he saw his future.

“Yes,” she said. “I want to be here. With you.” She smiled at him and it was shaky but genuine. Growing. “I won’t lie to you, though. The whole let’s-get-married thing? It scares the crap out of me. I only just hopped off the Penance Express. I don’t even know what my life
is
, and the idea of promising it to somebody—anybody, Rush, not just you—is really—” She broke off. “I just don’t know if I can.”

“You can. You absolutely can. But for now?” He pressed his mouth to hers with an aching tenderness, and everything inside his chest shifted. Settled. Bloomed. “For now, this is enough.”

Then her mouth opened under his and all that lovely tenderness went hot and needy. An ache filled him. A desire. A fierce imperative to take and hold and claim, but he battled it back. Just for tonight, just this once, he wanted to be gentle. He wanted to give her the moonlight and roses she deserved and he was so bad at. He wanted to give her poetry.

He tore his mouth from hers and buried his face in her hair. His heart tried to stop, then go, then settled for knocking against his sternum like it was trying to get out. He breathed in the green, earthy smell that clung to her hair, which was spectacularly unhelpful in terms of maintaining his self-control, but he bore up under the temptation. He held. Right up until she licked his throat.

“Oh Jesus.” His fingers twisted into her hair, and he dragged her onto his lap.

“Hallelujah,” she mumbled as she straddled him and gave him her sweet mouth. His hands found the neat angle of her hips and he jerked up underneath her, ground his want shamelessly into her heat. And she purred. Actually
purred
.

“Maria,” he said, but then her tongue slid up to his ear.

“Hmm?” She bit his lobe with exquisite tenderness. His blood leaped into a rolling boil.

“I wanted—” He desperately tried to think.

“Yes?” She circled her hips against his in a knowing, lazy swirl that incinerated a good half of his meager vocabulary.

“I wanted—”

She trailed her tongue along the rim of his ear. And there went the other half of his vocabulary. He was starting not to care. He managed, with a great deal of focus, to say, “I wanted to go slow this time. To be gentle. Last time I was so—”

Her hands—those clever, quick, blessed hands—slid under his thermal. Every inch of his skin sang as she jerked it up to smile fondly down at a series of love bites she’d left on his chest a few nights before. “Yeah. You were. Me, too.”

He blinked at her, dazzled and more than a little confused.

“Rush,” she said, leaning in until their foreheads touched. “Listen to me, okay? I’ve spent a lot of years hating the way I wanted. Fearing the strength of my desire. But I’m finally in a place where I can look it in the eye and it doesn’t scare me. Not when I’m with you.” Her eyes went hot and she nipped at his shoulder with a sharpness just this side of pain. A vicious pleasure sliced into him. “What’s in me isn’t gentle. It’s not soft and it’s not sweet. And, Rush?” She soothed the sting with her tongue. “It’s asking for you. All of you. I want you to come into me with everything you’ve got. And if you even think about holding back . . . well. I might have to punish you.”

A wondering joy settled into his stomach alongside the relentless churning want. “Punish me? Really?”

“Oh, Rush.” She sighed but her eyes sparkled with molten mischief. “Do you need me to prove it?”

A smile broke across his face then, slow and considering. “Would you?”

She shoved him down on the ancient couch and did exactly that while moonlight spilled over them like a benediction.

IT HAD been, Maria mused as she sat between Einar and Yarrow in the deserted front room of Mother Lila’s Tea Shop the next morning, a very disorienting twenty-four hours. First there was her headlong tumble into unexpected love. Then there was Rush’s mind-boggling confession of a matching tumble. Then there was a terrifying proposal of marriage she still didn’t have the first clue what to do with, followed by several hours celebrating their matching declarations, the memory of which pinked her cheeks.

She buried her nose in her teacup and forced herself to focus on Yarrow, who was inexplicably lying her ass off. She set down her cup and gave the girl a skeptical look.

“That’s quite a confession, Yarrow.”

“I’m quite a girl.”

“I thought you said you had better things to do than behead chickens by the light of the full moon.”

Yarrow lifted sharp shoulders. “I lied.” Her mouth, painted just this side of black, quirked into something between a sneer and a grimace. “I’m good at it, you know.”

“What, lying?”

Again with the grimace-sneer. “Listen, I was really angry, okay? The backstory’s boring, so I won’t get into it, but let’s just say I was on the wrong side of a bad breakup. I was hurt, I was angry, I got into some bad stuff. Oldest story there is, right?”

“What, boy meets girl, boy dumps girl, girl steals a chicken, snowshoes five miles to an abandoned mine shaft—which is
dangerous
, by the way—and whips up a little love potion number nine for paybacks?” Maria tipped her head, considered. “I don’t think I’m familiar with that one.”

Einar leaned forward to insert himself into the conversation. “To be fair, Goose, it’s not all that far afield. There’s a certain culture up here on Mishkwa that lends itself to that sort of thing. Maybe on the mainland it would be a hard sell, but up here? People cast spells all the time, for everything from healing to protection. Why
wouldn’t
a bright kid take a page from her elders’ book?”

She gave him a tight smile. “True.” She turned back to Yarrow. “You’re claiming responsibility for the counterfeit money, too?”

She picked at her nail polish, refused to meet Maria’s eyes. “That guy I told you about? Back home? Sells pot on the university campus? He asked if I’d meet a guy for him in Thunder Bay, pick up a backpack and bring it back to Mishkwa. No drugs or guns or anything, just money. He sent a guy to pick it up at the end of tourist season before the ferry stopped running.”

“You knew the money was counterfeit?”

She shrugged. “I didn’t care what it was. I only cared about what he was paying me.” She gave Maria a burning glare. “No college fund in my future, you know?”

Maria accepted that in silence. Einar was right, actually. It wasn’t a bad story. It was pretty believable, all things considered. Teenagers were unpredictable, emotional and volatile. They did stupid things.

But Yarrow was no ordinary teenager. She wasn’t impulsive, and she was the farthest thing from stupid Maria had ever seen. Oh, maybe she’d been more normal once, but walking through the fiery hell that her stupid, selfish, impulsive behavior had landed her in had likely burned all that foolishness out of her. That was something Maria could attest to from personal experience. She’d been through her own reckoning with the evil that came standard with her soul. And, worse, with the consequences it held for the innocents around her.

That sort of reckoning knocked
all
the nonsense out of a girl. Exactly the sort of nonsense that prompted kids to off chickens by the light of the full moon for revenge. Or risk juvie for a few bucks and a bad mood.

And that was only the intellectual evidence. Her gut smelled something off, too. The girl was lying to her. Hiding something. So what was it, and why was she hiding it? And more importantly, why was Einar facilitating it?

Yarrow flaked off a big chunk of black polish from her thumbnail and glanced at Maria from under heavily mascaraed lashes. She flicked her gaze to Einar, then back to Maria. “Are we done here?” she asked. “Is confession time over?”

Maria purposely didn’t follow her glance to Einar, just kept her eyes steady and cool on Yarrow’s. “You tell me,” she said softly.

“I don’t have any other crimes to barf up, if that’s what you’re asking.” She picked at her cuticles until Maria was afraid she’d draw blood. “So? You planning to arrest me or what?”

“Not today.” She reached toward the girl’s forearm to deliver a comforting pat, and Yarrow jerked back as if Maria had threatened her with a dirty hypodermic needle. “I’ll discuss this with my superiors, have them fact-check your story with a few key people, and we’ll figure out what to do next. In the meantime, just stick close, hmm?”

Yarrow cast a pointed glance toward the frozen lake out the window. “Where the fuck would I go?”

“Good point,” Maria said evenly. “Well. You know where to find me if you think of anything else. Or if you just want to, you know, talk.”

“Yeah, because this has been
so
much fun.”

Then Yarrow was on her feet and through the swinging kitchen doors without a backward glance. Maria turned to Einar, who sat watching the doorway that had swallowed up all that anger and tightly wrapped pain.

“She just, what, turned up at your door and laid all this at your feet?” she asked.

“Who else could she talk to?”

“What about Lila? I mean, if you’re going to cop to an unauthorized jaunt into black magic, surely the island’s high priestess would be the logical choice for a confessor?”

Einar shook his head. “Lila’s pretty stern when it comes to the darker side of our religion.”

“And you’re not?”

He pursed his lips and made a so-so motion with his hand. “Paganism is an old religion, Maria. One of the oldest. It way predates this idea that a deity has to be purely good.”

“It’s about balance,” Maria said impatiently. “I know. Good and bad, dark and light, male and female. Lila explained.”

“It’s about more than neat little pairs of attributes marching up the plank to Noah’s ark, though,” Einar said. “It’s about embracing all the aspects of the human experience, light
and
dark.”

Maria sat back and studied him. “You think Lila’s a fairweather pagan? Only practicing the parts she likes?”

“That’s not a bad way to put it, actually.” Einar leaned forward, warming to his subject. “It’s not as simple as good and bad, light and dark. There are multiple faces to Our Lady. Faces Lila doesn’t want to acknowledge, or if she does, only in the most cursory way. Lila wants to focus on the gentle, forgiving mother goddess. The wise, all-knowing crone goddess. She glosses right over the angry, sexy maiden goddess that runs roughshod over—and through—so many teenage girls.”

“And that’s the goddess Yarrow was calling on? Sacrificing to? The goddess of hot sex who might help her bring a bad boyfriend to heel?”

“Why not?” Einar gave her a rueful smile and spread his hands. “It’s a very primal female weapon, an old and essential one. Lila doesn’t like to talk about that incarnation of the goddess, though. She’s too messy.” He leaned back, shook his head. “But, damn, she packs a punch.”

“The kind of punch that’s been short-circuiting men’s higher-order thinking since time immemorial,” Maria observed.

“Yep.” He grinned. “Our circuitry holds up better as we get older, though.”

She gave him an if-you-say-so face.

He leaned in, suddenly intense. “That face of the goddess? That petulant, moody sexuality? It’s the least interesting and least powerful aspect of Our Lady.”