Chapter 20

CHAPTER TWENTY

“He knows,” Holly said. She’d called a family meeting in the library, which was a former sitting room that had become so overtaken with books that at some point over the decades it had transformed into a library. The two aunts were seated together on an old-fashioned settee upholstered in crushed velvet, while Missy, egregiously hungover and still wearing her pajamas and a pair of sunglasses, slumped in a stuffed armchair. Winter leaned against a bookshelf, dirt on the knees of her jeans and work gloves tucked in her pockets. Someone had lit a cranberry candle, and Prickles was curled on Aunt Daisy’s lap, her black gloves stroking his tiny head.

“Who knows what, dear?” Aunt Rose asked.

“Connor thinks she’s a witch,” Winter said in a flat voice.

Holly turned on her. “You knew this would happen!” she accused. “Why would you ever push us to sign the contract?”

Winter glared at her. “Believe it or not, I don’t know everything.”

Holly didn’t back down. “Do you know what this could mean for our family? I knew he wasn’t here for some stupid ghost story. I knew he had to be here for some other reason because there are a hundred haunted houses in Maine. He’s here to expose us .”

“He won’t be able to.” Winter gave an unconcerned shrug. “He doesn’t know what we are, and even if he did, no one would believe him because he doesn’t have any proof.”

“She used power in front of him,” Missy said, and took a swig of Gatorade.

Aunt Daisy and Aunt Rose paled.

“It was an accident!” Holly yelped.

Missy flinched. “Oh my God, keep it down, will you? Some of us are still rum-ified right now.”

Aunt Rose tutted in sympathy. “Dear, you know I can make a potion to fix that. I wish you girls would let me help more.”

“So your hands can cramp up for a full day afterward in karmic retaliation for helping someone? I think not. I pickled myself, and pickled I’ll stay.”

“What happened, Holly?” Aunt Daisy asked. Prickles lifted his head; looked around the room; and, content with his position in life, immediately fell back asleep.

Holly briefly explained the incident at the pond, and when she finished, her family sat in thoughtful silence.

“Well, it’s not ideal,” Aunt Rose finally admitted.

Holly plunked onto a footstool and dropped her head into her hands. “That’s a generous way of telling me I messed up and we’re screwed.” She lifted her head again. “He’s already putting together the pieces. He correlated my migraines with usages of power. He’ll be watching us like a hawk, even more so than before. I wish we could break the contract and get him out of here.”

Aunt Daisy patted her shoulder with her gloved hand. “We’ll just need to be extra careful. I don’t have to remind you what happens to women like us when others discover what we are.”

No, she didn’t. History had made sure that families like theirs stayed hidden.

“Or what will happen if you girls draw too much attention to yourselves,” Aunt Rose added solemnly. “Daisy and I can’t protect you any longer. You must moderate yourself, Holly. You haven’t been in control lately.”

Aunt Daisy was right, and Holly burned with embarrassment. Everything had been so much easier four years ago, when Aunt Rose had been able to dilute the strength of their powers with her potions, but even their experienced aunts could no longer mask what Holly and her sisters had become. Their power had outstripped even the most potent of Aunt Daisy’s concoctions. It was up to Holly and her sisters to master and harness their powers now, which were unnaturally strong even among their kind. The sisters would have gladly traded what nature had given them for normal lives, but there were those among their kind who coveted the level of power they had. Dangerous people.

And all of Holly’s uncontrolled incidents lately might as well have been a beacon flashing for their attention.

“He can’t know,” Missy said confidently. Her hair was a frizzy riot around her head, and Holly was pretty sure she was still wearing makeup from last night underneath the sunglasses. “Like Winter said, almost no one knows about us. Besides, I don’t think he’s a threat. You should see the way he looks at Holly. His gray eyes get all love swoony and alpha wolfy. I think he wants to bang her brains out.”

“No, he doesn’t,” Holly muttered, hoping to hell she wasn’t blushing because that was exactly what Connor had said he wanted to do last night.

“Alpha wolfy?” Winter asked with a smirk.

“Yeah.” Missy swallowed another mouthful of Gatorade. “Like he wants to punch out a bunch of guys and then make Holly scream his name in bed.”

“Missy!” Holly hissed.

Missy grinned at their aunts. “They read romance. They know.” She pointed finger guns at the aunts and shot them off. “Love bullets.”

“Oh my God, meeting dismissed,” Holly said. “I just wanted to warn you all to be careful around him.”

While Missy launched into a detailed recap of a show she was watching, Winter exited the library into the hallway, where Holly quickly caught up with her.

“Hold on, Win. Do you know how this is going to end?”

Winter shook her head. “It’s all foggy until suddenly it’s not. I don’t get to choose what visions I see, and nothing is already decided.”

Holly searched her sister’s eyes. Winter was hardworking and fierce, and she kept her guard up even around her family. “I don’t give a damn about your no-meddling rule. If you see something, you let me know.”

“I’ll think about it.” Winter stomped off to tend to the grounds.

By dinnertime, Connor had done all the prep work necessary for that evening’s filming and found himself wandering the grounds in hopes that he would run into Holly. Pathetic.

He went back to his trailer and tried to read more of the old Germanic text about evil beings, but his thoughts kept returning to Holly. Since they were keeping it professional, he had a contractual obligation to tell her about the filming in the orchard that night and invite her to take part.

Relieved to have an acceptable reason to find her, Connor jogged to the front door of the house and raised his hand to knock. Before he could, Winter opened the door. She’d obviously just come in from the orchards because her nose was sunburned, her jeans were dirty, and she was holding a sweating bottle of water in one hand. “She’s in the barn,” Winter said, and closed the door in his face.

How did she do that?

Connor took the dirt path that cut between the house and the weathered barn. When he reached the barn, he found the side door cracked. It was dim inside when he entered, but light glowed faintly from the stairwell at the back.

Connor wound his way between empty crates, shelves covered with dust cloths, and spinning trays of postcards. When he reached the stairs, he took them slowly, his heartbeat accelerating with each step. What was she doing in the hayloft? Was it something not quite witchy?

At the top of the stairs there was another door, this one also slightly ajar. When he pushed it open, his lips parted in shock at what he saw.

Holly was wearing a pair of paint-splattered leggings and a paint-covered shirt tied in a knot above her belly button. She was kneeling over a canvas that lay on top of a drop cloth, her dark hair falling from her bun and framing her face as she swept a paintbrush in long, sure strokes. The hayloft was brightly lit by the late afternoon sun, and there was a long worktable at the back of the room, covered in jars, brushes, and powdery pigments. There were finished canvases propped against the walls, stacked on the floor, or resting on easels. A few were hanging from nails, but most were tossed aside as if they were garbage.

Connor had been hunting ghosts most of his life, and these paintings still made the hair rise on his arms.

Holly turned as the door bumped into the wall and leaned back on her heels, paintbrush in hand. She swiped at her hair, leaving a blue streak along the side of her face.

“Can I come in?” Connor asked.

“Winter must’ve sent you,” Holly muttered. He couldn’t tell if that pleased her or annoyed her. “God forbid she share her reasons with anyone else. If you think I’m closed off, then Winter is sealed tighter than Fort Knox.”

Connor eased into the room and shut the door behind him. He glanced at the first painting in a stack against the wall. It was four feet by four feet of pure despair: a frothy ocean and ravenous sky devouring a man as his wife helplessly screamed. Her mouth was gaping, as was the void in her chest. Connor shivered and turned to the next painting. A storm, wild and ruthless, devastating a town down to its foundations. “Do you sell these?”

“Do you think anyone would want them?” she asked bleakly.

Everywhere he turned there were violent weather scenes: tornadoes, hurricanes, driving rains and terrifying floods, thunderous clouds, and bodies decaying in the relentless desert sun. He wandered along the wall, pausing when he reached a painting that was nothing but a child’s mitten in the center of the white canvas, and he felt more than saw that it was a fatal avalanche.

“What is all this?”

She tracked him with her eyes, her bottom lip caught between her teeth. “It’s horrible, isn’t it?”

“Why do you paint them?” He traced his finger along sand granules that she’d added to the taupe paint of a desert so dry he needed a glass of water just looking at it.

“They’re my nightmares.”

Connor flinched. Her nightmares? Was she really plagued with these horrors every night?

“Not literally,” she said, as if reading his mind. She dipped the paintbrush in a glass of water and swished it around. The blue paint swirled and then gradually diluted, turning the liquid midnight blue. The brush handle clinked against the glass before she pulled it out and dabbed the bristles on the cloth floor covering. “It’s complicated.”

“Try me.”

“Do they freak you out?”

He imagined they would some people, but Connor had experienced more damaged hearts and broken souls than most. He’d seen terror, loss, longing, and unrelenting love that had endured even after death. What Holly had created was a visual gallery of the emotions he’d witnessed but could never quite put into words. It was as if she’d taken his experiences and given them form.

He felt … relieved that someone else understood.

Connor sat on an overturned crate next to her and clasped his hands over his knee. “No, they don’t freak me out. They’re from the furthest end of the spectrum of emotions. They’re the transcendent emotions—the ones that are so powerful they can exist across planes: hatred, terror, devastating loss.”

Holly nodded and set the brush down. “That’s an interesting way of seeing it. These are the reminders of the devastation great power can cause. Once I’ve painted them, I can let them go. They don’t take up space in my head anymore. They’re like … a picture journal.”

Connor searched her eyes and said softly, “They haunt you, these images?”

She shrugged and stood to stretch, lifting her arms over her head and turning her face to the ceiling. Her shirt shifted higher up her torso, and Connor’s mouth went dry. “They come to me, and they won’t leave until they’re executed, so I create them with paint and canvas.”

He filed away her comments. They didn’t make sense now, but he was certain they would with time.

“Are you scared of me now that you’ve seen my secret chamber of horrors?”

Connor reached for the knot on her shirt and tugged her closer, until she was standing in between his thighs. “I’ve been scared of a lot of things, but never you.”

She glanced away at that and he took note, but for the first time in a long time he wanted something more than the story.

Connor splayed his hands on her hips, feeling the heat of her through the thin fabric of her leggings. He flexed his fingers but didn’t make another move. She’d put the brakes on, and she’d have to be the one to take them off.

Holly’s fingers speared into his hair, and his breath caught. He was supposed to be inviting her to the night filming. He should have been hounding her for answers about what secrets her family was hiding. Instead, all he could think about was touching her, tasting her. He didn’t delve too deeply into the emotions that hovered in the back of his consciousness: the ones that urged him to connect with this person who understood horror as surely as he did. He ignored the faint warning that they were close to crossing a line that couldn’t be uncrossed. He pushed away the guilt about exposing her family.

This was where Holly came to chase oblivion, and he wanted to find that with her.

The air swelled between them, growing heavy with tension. A breeze rifled his hair, and he was almost certain there weren’t any windows open this time, if there ever had been, in the attic.

She tilted his head with one soft hand under his chin, so that he was looking up at her from where he sat on the overturned crate. Her eyes were thoughtful, her plush lower lip tugged between her teeth. “Are you sure about wanting more now that you know I’m different?”

“It has never been a question of whether I want you.”

She pushed on his shoulders until he got the hint and came off the crate to kneel in front of her, his hands on her hips and his breath on her belly. “I know I said I wanted to cool it,” she whispered, “but can we pretend, just this one time, that you’re not leaving and that we don’t have opposite agendas?”

“Yeah,” he rasped, his fingers hooking into her waistband. “If this is what you want, right now, we can be just Holly and Connor.”

She laid her hands over his, encouraging him to tug down the fabric an inch. “This is what I want. Just you and me.”

He kissed the exposed flesh, rubbing his lips and beard scruff lightly over her skin, and then repeated the process, inch by agonizing inch, until the top of her black lace panties appeared. Connor ran his tongue over the edge of them before dipping underneath the elastic to repeat the action. “More?”

“Take my pants off.”

Connor never complied with any instruction faster. Within seconds he’d dragged her leggings down and tossed them aside, leaving her in lace panties that made him heavy with desire. Conner blew hot air across the lace before kissing her through them. “Now what?”

“Now,” she said firmly, “I want you to give the orders. I have a feeling you can be bossy in bed, and I think I would like that with you.”

Connor’s blood raged in his veins. He slid his finger inside the leg hole of her panties and said with deep command, “Spread your legs.”

She immediately widened her stance and he pulled the thin fabric aside, exposing her to the cool attic air.

God, she was beautiful. Connor figured every time a man tugged aside a woman’s panties he thought it was the most beautiful sight in the world, but there was something about Holly that made this moment deeper, sexier, and more dangerous than any he’d had before.

He parted her and leaned forward to slide his tongue over her, one long drag that ended at her clitoris. Holly moaned and flexed her fingers in his hair as he gently sucked her into his mouth. He released her after a moment and then ran his tongue over her again, rubbing and licking and enjoying her until her legs began to tremble.

No longer content with holding her panties to the side, Connor peeled them down her legs and threw them to the side. Finally free of the fabric, he lifted her thigh and hooked it over his shoulder.

With her fully opened and exposed to him, he buried his face in her, tasting her and lapping at her until her hips undulated under his mouth. He inserted a finger inside her, and with a “come hither” gesture began stroking that sweet spot that made her fingers dig into his shoulders.

“Connor,” she moaned. “Connor, Connor, Connor.”

Every chant of his name on her lips bound him tighter to her. His thoughts were primal and completely devoid of rational thought. This was his woman. He was going to make her scream his name and melt like wax in his hands.

He stood, lifting her in his arms and carrying her to the table with the paints on it. He set her bottom on the edge and nudged her back. Glass clinked together and containers fell; a jar of black paint tipped over and spilled, but he didn’t notice until he accidentally put his hand in it.

Uncaring about the paint, Connor gripped her thighs with his hands, opening her to him like a feast. The sight of his black paint handprint on the inside of her thigh was so hot that his inner wolf growled with satisfaction. She’d said before she didn’t know he was into mate marking, and until that minute neither had he.

Not that she was his mate.

But he sure as hell enjoyed marking her.

Connor returned to the center of her pleasure and drove her relentlessly upward until Holly’s thighs squeezed around his head and she came with a cry that had him feral with need, the windowpanes rattling with a burst of wind that came from within the attic rather than out.

She was still trembling from her release when Connor stood and looked down at her, his blood on fire. “Take your shirt and bra off.”

Holly shimmied out of her shirt, and his breath caught at the sight of her matching black lace bra. As her bra fell away, he was unable to tear his gaze from her.

She was entirely naked on the table, a black handprint on her thigh, her dark hair having come loose and curling around her shoulders. The pink nipples of her full breasts were already tightening in the chilly air of the hayloft, and her hazel and green eyes were so smoky with desire that his chest squeezed at the wonder of being able to experience her like this.

Jesus, she was fucking amazing.

Connor smoothed his finger over the raised skin of her collarbone. Holly’s eyes fell to the handprint on her thigh, and a little wrinkle appeared between her brows before she noted the spilled black paint at her side.

“A fortunate accident,” Connor said thickly as he leaned forward and kissed the top of her breast, “because now I’m thinking I want to paint you all over.”

Holly grinned. “Only if I get to paint you after.”