WILLEM (The Witches of Wimberley Book 1) (24 page)

Falling over her, I put my arm under her body, around her waist, and pulled her up so that we both had full use of the mattress from head to toe. When I nuzzled her neck, she gasped. I couldn’t help the smile that broke out on learning that she was as easily stimulated. She moaned long and low as I rolled and tweaked the nipple of one perfectly round breast before taking it into my mouth.

Her hands were running over my back. When she began to massage my butt cheeks my pelvis involuntarily rocked forward and I groaned.

I moved my hand down to her pussy. “I’m glad you’re not bare.”

“Bare?” She seemed to be confused. “Oh. There. No. There’s a reason why nature gave us that and one of the reasons is that the hair follicles create extra sen…”

She cried out when my hand slipped gently over her core. I slid a finger deep into the wetness.

“That’s good,” she said. “But I don’t want your finger. I want you, Will.”

“You mean my cock?”

“Yes.”

“No can do, sweetheart. I’m so worked up I’m going to go off like a firecracker the minute I get inside you. Let me take care of you first.”

“Don’t worry about that.” She pushed against my hand. “Just do it. It’s what I want.”

Well, the point of delayed gratification wasn’t to stand on principle. It was to please my prize. She’d asked for a two-thrust come even if it meant that she was more a spectator than a participant. I figured I could make it up to her later.

So I positioned myself at her center as she encircled my waist with shapely legs and pushed in. She was so wet there was no resistance even though the size of my dick was enough to give some women pause. And there it was. Heaven to the hilt. But the strangest thing happened; I didn’t explode on contact, as predicted.

I pulled out slow and raised my head so I could see her face. The emerald green of her eyes glittered with reflected candlelight. Mesmerizing.

“Look at me,” she whispered.

“I am.”

I pushed back in and realized that what I was feeling was the opposite of being out of control. My body was taking direction from my mind, movements controlled and gauged to maximize the experience for both of us.

“Rave,” I said in a voice too deep and gravelly to be my own, “we fit perfectly.”

She grinned. “Told you we were made for each other.”

I made love to her slowly and deliberately for longer than I would have believed possible. When the moment felt right to move faster, she responded with a few encouraging moves of her own and, in the end, we actually experienced that elusive, practically fictitious event, the simultaneous orgasm.

Christ. Good doesn’t begin to describe it. Sex with Ravish wasn’t just sex. It was a transcendent experience.

It was so good that, over the next twelve hours, we experimented with six different positions in six different places: the bath, the kitchen, my study, her closet, the cabana, and the swimming pool. We sat at the kitchen island in white robes feeding fruit and cheese to each other in between sips of Zinfandel wine from their own vineyard in Fredericksburg.

Her eyes flicked to the LED clock on the microwave. “Staff will be arriving in twenty minutes.”

“Nooooooo.” I shook my head in denial. I wanted to stretch the moment into infinity, live there, and never leave.

“You know what they say, all things must pass.”

“Let’s be in denial together.”

She laughed softly. “I’ll go anywhere with you, Will. Even denial.”

She was so perfectly mussed, disheveled hair falling around her face and shoulder in random waves, lips swollen from my kisses, and wearing such a glow I would have sworn I could see auras. At least hers.

“No. We don’t need an alternate reality. The real world is looking pretty good to me right now.”

Sliding off her stool, she put her arms around me for a quick hug and a big smooch on the cheek. “Quick. What do you want to do today?”

“Let’s get a canoe up river, just the two of us, and float down to the taco stand for lunch.”

She laughed. “Will! That’s a perfect day!”

“No, it’s not. A perfect day would be that followed by lots of fucking in our very fabulous bed.”

With a snigger and what might have been a blush, she said, “You’re the best day planner ever.”

We enjoyed a honeymoon in the sense that, for a week or so, we did nothing but plan activities around sex. We were into each other and nothing else really mattered.

When Rave was called to her parents’ house to put a no-shift spell on the beagle, it seemed she had several other magical specialties, I went with her and got to know them better. They were unquestionably accepting of me, which laid the groundwork for a really comfortable relationship.

They apologized for the way our ceremony ended and punctuated that with a glare aimed in Destiny’s direction.

I chuckled and said, “I wouldn’t change it for the world. Not everybody gets their candle put out by a cat and their bell rung by a bear. It was marvelous!”

The entire family looked at me like I should be presented with the keys to the kingdom.

Rave and I went to San Antonio for a long weekend and stayed in the Presidential Suite at the Omni La Mansion Del Rio, which was right on the Riverwalk. She gave me a tour of her favorite historical sights, restaurants, and shopping.

A couple of weeks later we did the same thing in Austin, again staying in the Presidential Suite just a block away from 6
^th
Street. She showed me the capitol, walked me all over the University of Texas campus, and introduced me to the delights of 6
^th
Street music.

It was a whirlwind of new experiences. Believe it or not, adjusting to a super-rich lifestyle is not as easy as you might think. Not that I’m complaining. I’m just saying that it’s strange to know you can have anything you want when you want it.

What I found I wanted more than any
thing
was Rave.

One morning over coffee on the terrace, she got around to asking what I wanted to do… other than her.

I said, “You mentioned going back to school? An ad hoc degree plan concentrating on paranormal studies?”

“Yes.”

“Well, now that I know my way around campus, more or less, I think that if I could get in starting in January, that would be awesome. I don’t even mind that I’ll be an old man by undergraduate standards.”

She scoffed. “I’m going to have to put an ugly spell on you to keep the girls off.”

I laughed. “An ugly spell, huh? Don’t do it. It could affect my grades.”

“What?”

“Everybody is influenced by looks, Rave. At least give me a fighting chance and put an average-looks spell on me. But you don’t have to worry about me being interested in what anybody else has to offer. Right?”

“Yes. I know. I just thought I’d spare UT a few hundred broken hearts.”

“You’re very good for my ego. You know that?”

“You have every right to a nice plump ego, Will.”

So beginning in January, I commuted to school in Austin four days a week. It was a joy because I did it in the Porsche and, if there was any question about whether or not I was flying on the wings of magic, I scored a miraculously impossible faculty parking spot right on campus.

Rave. Gotta love her.

She had offered to get me any kind of car I wanted, but there simply wasn’t any car that felt more ‘me’ than the Boxster. I’m not saying it didn’t get looks when I pulled up to my parking spot, but I was so much older than your typical undergraduate, nobody questioned it.

At the house, my study was updated with the latest tech marvels and life was paradise. I had the time to study what I loved when I wasn’t in bed with Rave, which was a lot of the time. Time spent with her never got old or boring.

When I refused to shop for clothes, my closet began filling up with or without my participation. It probably won’t surprise you to learn that Rave’s taste in men’s clothes was pretty damn good. I don’t think there was a thing I didn’t like, but my uniform consisted of faded jeans, faded tee shirts and handmade to-die-for cowboy boots that probably cost as much as the car. After learning how much I liked them, she filled my closet shelves with ten pairs in every shade and skin imaginable. She called it a birthday present, but the real present was her popping out of a cake as I’d requested.

I found that university, part deux, was a thing altogether different. I was focused. I was glad to be there. And the high grades that had eluded me before seemed almost effortless the second time around. When summer came, I was enjoying school too much to stay away. So I signed up for summer compression classes. Different, but also fun.

Little by little I learned the names of the people in the witch colony. And gradually I noticed that other people began calling my prize Rave instead of Ravish, which pleased me in indescribable ways.

It took months, but Raider eventually talked me into learning to ride a motorcycle. It was terrifying, but I did it. I accused my prize of putting a you-will-not-crash spell on me, but was secretly okay with it if she did.

Kellan introduced me to an old guy named Cravitt who was a metaphysical scholar. It turned out that there were a lot of intersections between the paranormal and the metaphysical. So I enjoyed spending time with him and soaking in his experience.

Rave was fun, intelligent and witty. She knew when to talk and when to let silence speak for itself. She liked the same music and TV shows. It was as good as life gets and I was so fully in the moment, I never felt the end of year creeping closer every day.

Of course everybody in the witch colony who had been there for a while was accustomed to extraordinary events. They were so commonplace that they ceased to be remarkable, but for me, I never lost a sense of wonder about it all.

For instance, one day I told Rave that the sun was blinding in my shower, coming through the east window in the mornings and asked if I could get some glass tinting or something of the sort. When I returned from school a few hours later, I found that there were no longer any east-facing windows in my bathroom, but much larger north-facing windows instead. I found her in the kitchen making a baloney sandwich.

“We could have just gotten shades for the windows in the bathroom.”

“Why do things half way?” She smiled, as she offered half her sandwich to me.

I ate it out of her hand then started nibbling on her fingers while she giggled like a tween.

“One of these days will you explain how you do these things?”

“Will, when you get hungry, you look for food, eat it, and your body processes it into energy. Can you explain that?”

“Sort of.”

“Liar. You cannot.”

“I don’t think magically replacing windows and eating food are comparable.”

“That’s only because you weren’t born with the ability to replace windows. If you had been, you might find explaining it difficult.”

“I’m gonna let that ride for now.” And I did. What difference did the ‘how’ really make?

Another time, when I was hiking with her in the hills, she stopped me and indicated that I should be still. She quietly pulled out field glasses, handed them to me and pointed to a location slightly above and to the northwest of us.

Bringing the glasses to my eyes, I adjusted the focus and began panning to see what was of interest. When I came to the huge mountain lion sunning itself on a flat rock, I know I jumped. The thing was beautiful, magnificent even. It was also terrifying.

Rave whispered, “Time to go,” then the cat disappeared. One second it was there. Then it wasn’t. That also made me jump.

“What the hell?” I lowered the glasses and looked at Rave accusingly.

“He doesn’t belong here. Too many people. I sent him to Big Bend where he’ll be more at home.”

“You sent him? You mean you teleported that huge beast nearly five hundred miles?”