Witchin' Impossible, page 9
“Cinnamon buns right now.” Unwitch-like, I sniffed him. “It’s making me really hungry.” I hadn’t eaten all day, but I wasn’t just starved for food. I rose up on my tiptoes and kissed his neck.
Before we took this any further, there was something I had to know. “So you never had sex with Tanya Gellar.”
“Nope.”
“I don’t need to know anything more,” I said. I stroked his short beard, caressing the dark hair with my fingertips. I pressed my mouth against his, gentle and easy. I tugged his lower lip between my teeth and bit down—not hard enough to break the skin but hard enough to make him moan.
“Woman,” he said, very caveman-like. His fingers wound up my neck and twined into my hair. My lips parted for him as he lifted me, and I wrapped my legs around his hips. I took his breath inside me as our mouths melded into a kiss that shot pleasure daggers to my groin.
I didn’t even notice he’d carried me to his bedroom until he threw me down on the bed. “This is all a little sudden,” I said, stripping my tank top over my head.
“I don’t know,” Ford said. “I think a couple of decades doesn’t make for sudden.”
He pulled his shirt off, his broad chest peppered with dark hair, and his cut-from-steel abs had grooves deep enough to scale.
“It should be illegal for you to wear a shirt.” I stared at his pecs as they danced when he crawled up the bed to me. I let out an unsteady breath. “Like go-to-jail, do-not-pass-go kind of illegal.”
“You have too many clothes on.” He unbuttoned my pants and slid them down my thighs. “That’s better.”
He spread my legs, his thumbs tracing inner thigh. Weirdly, my witch magic crackled like electricity along my skin. That was new.
He drew his finger back as a spark licked the tip. “Is this going to be a problem?” he asked.
“Uhm…” Maybe. “Nope. I’ve got it under control.” I willed my magic to stop cock-blocking me. Ford’s hair raised on his arms and chest as more energy crackled. “I don’t want to electrocute you. We should probably stop.”
“Uh-uh.” He unbuttoned his jeans. “I’ll take my chances.”
“Thank the Goddess.” I did not want him to stop.
Ford’s body stilled. “Don’t, Haze.”
“Why?”
“How bad do you want to have sex right now?”
My whole body vibrated with lust and desire. “Pretty freaking bad.”
“Me too.”
“Then what’s the problem?” I rubbed myself against him. “I want you. You want me.”
“Because of the mating drive.”
I leaned back to gauge his expression. “What?”
He shook his head. “You really don’t know much about shifters.”
“I think we’ve established that already.”
“The mating drive happens as a byproduct of the mating scent. If we take this further, I’m not sure I’ll have the willpower not to take it all the way.”
“All the way…”
“To the mating bite, which will seal our fate forever.”
“You mean…” I got the gist, but I wanted him to spell it out.
“It means I’ll never let you go, Hazel. If you push me, and we mate as mates, you’ll have to give up your life outside our world. Or I’ll have to leave my life to follow you.”
“Would that be so bad?”
“Yes.” He got up and put on his clothes. It made me want to shoot him. Unhappily, I followed his lead.
When we were back in the kitchen, I wrapped my arms as far around his waist as I could, and I held him tight. “I have never stopped thinking about you, Ford. I’ve never dated anyone because they weren’t you. I threw myself into my work, believing that the job would be enough for me. I don’t remember our kiss, and I’m sorry it changed you into something you didn’t want to be, but for me, I hadn’t needed some biological imperative to tell me that you were the boy I wanted to love. I had feelings for you long before you started smelling like cinnamon toast.”
He tried to pull away, but I buried my face in his chest.
“We don’t have to hash this out right now,” I said quickly, “but I need you to stop being angry at me. Especially since I didn’t know that you had this…reaction to me.”
He stroked my hair, melting me. “You make mating sound like an allergy.”
I chuckled. “I couldn’t stand watching you with Greta. Don’t you see?” I tilted my head back again to look at him. “I can’t tell you how many times I wanted to cast a spell to make all her hair fall out.” I didn’t mention that the only reason I didn’t cast the spell on Greta was because I sucked. The first and only time I’d practiced the spell, I’d aimed at my pee-my-pants dolly, but the magic went sideways, and poor Tizzy ended up bald for a month. Bald is not a good look for flying squirrels. “I never meant to hurt you, Ford.”
Which meant, I really didn’t know much about his or Lily’s kind at all.
Ford kissed my forehead. “I’m not mad at you, Haze.”
His blue eyes blinked down at me.
I smirked. “Vanilla and rum, huh?”
“You’ve really never even dated anyone?”
“You’re the only person I’ve ever wanted to date.”
“What about sex?”
I shook my head. “Not with someone else,” I smirked. I might have been a thirty-eight-year-old virgin, but I wasn’t asexual. “Masturbation can take the edge off.”
He laughed. “You’re not kidding.”
“You?”
“Not with someone else,” he said. “Not since that night.”
“Wow, that’s some serious blue-ball syndrome there.”
He chuckled. “Masturbation can take the edge off.”
Even though he was being cute by throwing my words back at me, a vision of him naked and holding himself flashed into my brain. My stomach was pressed against his groin, and I felt the log in his jeans grow exponentially. Heat rushed through me.
“Now you smell like vanilla, rum, and sex.” He disengaged from me, and my throbby lady-morsels screamed, Nooooooo! “Which means, holding you is not a good plan. Let’s focus on the case. When it’s over, we can revisit this conversation. And talk about what we want to do next.”
“You’re right. I can’t let Lily down. Finding her brother’s killer has to be my number one priority.” I turned myself toward the center island because my nipples were as hard as his Johnson, and looking at him only made it worse. “The case. What do you have?”
He opened a manila folder with newspaper clippings dating twenty years. “Over the past two decades, there have been some strange things going on in Paradise.”
When I raised my brow, he added, “Stranger than usual. These articles are mostly about natural disasters. Tornadoes, severe lightning storms, hail…”
“The size of softballs.” The unusual weather patterns captured my attention. “That is unusual.” I spread the clippings out, organizing the stories by year. The disasters seemed to happen in a pattern. Initially, the storms were not so bad, but it appeared as if they had been getting progressively more devastating over the past ten years. “It looks like there is a break between September and December, then there are freak weather patterns every three months. January. March. June.” I remembered how rough the town looked when I drove in. “Was there a recent storm?”
“A high-wind situation blew through town. It knocked a bunch of shingles off roofs, ruined a lot of store signs, and turned over a few trailers.”
In one of the clippings, there was a picture of a collapsed house. The headline read, “Local Family Killed by Storm.” I used my phone to magnify the image for a better look and noticed someone had scratched an H on the door. “There,” I said, pointing to the letter.
“I see it.” Ford smoothed his beard.
I groaned.
He smiled.
“Stop that.” I was glad we were getting along, and I was definitely interested in exploring the possibilities, but work first. “I saw that same letter at Boyd’s house scratched into his dresser, and again, I saw it scratched into the dash on Danny’s car.”
“What do you think it means?”
“At first, I thought it might be an initial or the start of a word that Danny and Boyd had managed to leave as a clue to their killer, but now I’m not sure. It seems less likely the victims drew the letter and more possible it was left by the murderer. Do you think it’s a calling card?”
Ford tilted his head sideways and looked at the photo again. “Like a serial killer?”
“In almost every single one of these weather events, someone was injured or died. What if it wasn’t an act of the Goddess and more an act of a maniac?”
“Who has figured out how to control the weather?” His expression was incredulous.
“More likely, the killer or killers are crafting something powerful enough to disrupt the weather.”
“I don’t know, Haze. Doesn’t the leader of the witches frown on that kind of sorcery? I can’t believe your grandmother wouldn’t intervene. I know how swiftly she came down on your dad.”
“The Grand Inquisitor,” I corrected. “She’s the witch in charge of all witches and warlocks, not a sweet old lady from The Golden Girls.”
He smiled. “I love that show.”
“Figures.” I smiled back. “You’re right, though. Clementine Battles wouldn’t let this kind of bad magic go without intervening. All the evidence clears the use of black magic, but I have a gut feeling I can’t shake.” And my intuition rarely failed me.
“Maybe they are shielding it somehow.”
“A shielding spell is still a spell. It would leave traces of magic. At Boyd’s there was nothing. But honestly, I’m not completely sure of my powers. I didn’t do well in witchcraft studies in school, and I haven’t really practiced any new magic since I left town.”
“How can this be magic but not magic?” Ford asked.
“That’s the million-dollar question.” I rifled through a few statements. “Mark Simmons said he overheard an argument between Danny and Robert Townsend. Why would Danny have cause to talk to him? Did anyone interview small animal pappy-whatever about the fight?”
Ford shook his head. “Today is the first time I’m seeing these. It doesn’t look like it, though. You don’t think Townsend could do something like what happened to Danny, do you? Besides, what would the alpha of the small prey therians be doing with Lily’s brother?”
“Carla Wells told me she and Danny were mates. She said when she’d told her mom, her mom told her it was nonsense and not to speak of it again.” I chewed the inside of my lip for a moment. “Maybe Danny wanted to get Townsend’s blessing to be with Carla. She is a raccoon shifter like Townsend.”
“You think he got angry enough to kill Danny?”
I shook my head. “It doesn’t track. Besides, Boyd was a wereraccoon. And whoever or whatever killed him, killed Danny as well. I’d stake my reputation on it.”
“How about first thing tomorrow morning I pick you up and we go talk to a certain alpha?” Ford asked.
I nodded. “You plan the best dates.”
CHAPTER 13
I slept terribly that night, tossing and turning as blobs of misshapen dead chased me around. When my alarm finally went off at six in the morning, I was both annoyed and relieved. I put on a pair of sweats and my tennis shoes, tied my hair back, and went for a run to clear my head.
I managed to get as far as next door. Joy Decker sat on her front porch weeping.
“Mrs. Decker,” I said. “Can I help you?”
She wrung her hands. “No. No one can help me. I’ve lost my boy. I don’t know how to go on.”
“Again, I’m so sorry for your loss,” I said. The sentiment was too inadequate to the situation, but most platitudes were. I hadn’t planned on asking the Deckers more questions, at least not yet, but I pressed on because I wanted justice for Danny and Boyd, and I felt strongly the deaths were connected. “Did Boyd ever mention something about the Arete?”
She looked up at me, her eyes dark with grief. “Like a mountain ridge?”
“I don’t think so.” Did Arete mean that? If they were talking about a mountain, then it wasn’t something close to Paradise Falls. The closest thing we had to a mountain was Harmony Hill, and that barely qualified as a hill. “Was he having any problems with anyone?”
“I don’t think so.” She shook her head emphatically.
“What about Clayton Driver?”
Her eyes grew wary as anger turned her cheeks red. “Boyd did some work for him last year.”
“What kind of work?’
“He didn’t say, but I think it had something to do with pulling parts and such. Do you think Driver had anything to do with Boyd’s death?” Her voice broke on the word. “Boyd hadn’t been in contact with the man since he’d quit working out at the junkyard. Do you think he killed my son?”
“He is a person of interest is all, ma’am. I don’t have any real suspects, yet. I’m just trying to gather all the facts. What about Robert Townsend?”
“What about him?” Joy asked suspiciously.
“Did Boyd interact with him much?”
“Of course,” she said. “Bob is our leader. He holds a meeting every month for us.”
“And he and Boyd were friendly.”
“Yes,” she said. “I don’t like what you’re implying, Hazel. Bob is a good man and a great leader. Our lives in this community were those of second-class citizens until Bob took over as alpha. He has made us equal with the witches and the larger animal shifters.”
“I’m not implying anything, Mrs. Decker. Honest, I have no concrete leads. Mr. Townsend seems like a standup guy. Is there anything else you can tell me about Boyd? Anything weird leading up to his death? Any illness or symptoms of an illness?”
She paused for a moment then nodded. “He’d been getting some headaches and stomach pains of late. I figured it was the drugs. They can do weird things to a body, even with shifters.”
I’d seen ibuprofen and anti-nausea pills in Danny’s car. “Has anyone else you know been getting sick?”
“No,” she said. “Just Boyd. It came on about two weeks ago.”
“Had he been anywhere or done anything out of the ordinary leading up to his symptoms?”
“Nothing that I can think of,” she said.
I nodded. “Thank you, Mrs. Decker. Again, I’m so sorry for your loss.”
Lily stuck her head out of the door about the time I was getting ready to take off on a jog. She held up my phone. “Ford called you,” she said. “He’s going to be here in ten minutes.”
Crap. The only running I got done after that was a quick sprint to the bathroom to fix my hair and throw on some fresh clothes.
Ford was right on time. I finished lacing my shoes and went outside to meet him at the curb. “Hey,” I said when I got in the passenger side of his truck. Ford wore dark blue jeans, a chocolate-brown t-shirt, and he’d trimmed his beard, really showing off his chiseled jawline. Hubba-hubba. My whole body went taut with pleasure. Goddess be, that man could melt my panties.
He gave me a crooked grin. “Hey.”
“Why so early?” I asked. “I thought we were going to see Townsend at eight.” Not that I minded the early morning eye-candy.
“I thought we could get breakfast together.”
“Sure, that sounds yummy.”
“With my parents.”
I gulped. “What?”
“I hope it’s okay.”
“Uhm, sure, they can join us.”
“I’m really glad since Mom is cooking.”
I resisted the urge to clutch my throat. We were going to the Baylor house for breakfast. “Is this a meet-the-parents kind of thing, because I’m not sure I’m ready for that yet. I mean, I just found out about the mating thing two days ago.”
Ford laughed, and it warmed me to my toes. “It’s not. My dad wanted to talk to you alone. Breakfast was his idea.”
A big part of me sighed in relief, but a smaller part of me was disappointed. Even though I wasn’t ready to shout anything from the rooftops, it had pleased me to think Ford was.
He slid his hand onto my thigh, sending zips and tingles to all the most inappropriate places on my body. “I’m ready, Hazel,” he said as if reading my mind. “But I’m willing to wait for you to catch up.”
The Baylor house was a large two-story home with a three-car garage and a manicured lawn in a fancy cul-de-sac on Azure Circle. Being the alpha bear had its perks, apparently.
The inside was just as nice as the outside. Mrs. Baylor’s home looked photograph-ready for a spread in Better Homes and Gardens. The walls were painted in warm blues and sandy tones; midnight-blue floor-length curtains hung over the ten-foot window in the living room. The sofa and loveseat were covered in rich tapestry-type material that both invited and dared you to sit. I would check my butt for dirt before that happened.
Anita Baylor, Ford’s mom, greeted me warmly. “Do come in, Hazel. I’m just about done with the last of the bacon.” The scent of smoky meat competed for my attention with Ford’s cinnamon and spice.
“Sounds great.” Ford and I followed her into the dining room. Bryant Baylor sat at the head of an eight-foot table with ten chairs, four on each side and one each on the ends. It was already set with five plates, silverware, napkins, and such. A bowl of fried potatoes, some cheesy grits, a double stack of flapjacks, each a foot tall, a bottle of honey, and a bottle of blackberry syrup made my mouth water and my tummy rumble.
Bryant Baylor read a print newspaper while sipping coffee. Totally kicking it old school.
Ford offered me the chair next to his father, then he sat down on the other side of me. “This is quite a spread,” I said. “We never had these kinds of meals at my house.”
“Mom makes breakfast like this every day.”
Anita walked in with a large plate of at least eight pounds of bacon. “Wow,” I said. “That’s like the Mecca of my religion.” I resisted the urge to bow down to the plate of crispy, meaty goodness.
Ford chuckled. “Are you sure you’re not a shifter masquerading as a witch?”
