Chapter 18 #2
After the last customer leaves, I whip around in a daze, wiping down the tables and sweeping the floor. When it’s done, I perform the enchantments on the mead barrels so they refill for the next day.
Rafe flips the sign, locks the door, and comes to stand beside me. He places his hand over mine on the counter.
“What do you want to do to celebrate?” Rafe asks.
“Want to go fishing in the church fountain? Or sit on the roof and howl at ghosts? Oh, perhaps you have another enemy I could exact revenge on for you. I have a juicy morsel in the corner of the backroom I caught trying to get into Celeste’s flour stash.
I’ve been saving him for a special occasion—”
“As tempting as it is to share a mouse with you, I think I want to sit beside my fire and drink a glass of mead.” I smile. “With you.”
As soon as the words fly out of my mouth, I shrink away from him. I’m so boring.
“I mean, you don’t have to. I know you have exciting cat things to do.”
“More exciting than sitting by a warm fire with a treat?” Rafe’s eyes widen with delight. “That’s the perfect cat evening. I’ll have a glass of your favourite brew, mead wench.”
I grab two cups from the tray. My hand hovers over the Hex Appeal tap – the love drink, the one that releases inhibitions, but I shake my head to myself and pour us a mug from the Spell the Tea tap and bring them to him by the fire.
Rafe lounges on the low sofa, and there’s a chair opposite him, but he pats the space beside him, and I settle into it. When he takes his cup from me, his fingers brush mine, and the bees are back buzzing beneath my skin.
He drapes his arm around my shoulders, pulling me into him, his chest to my back, his warm breath brushing my ear. He clinks his cup to mine.
“To Bee-Witching Brews,” he says, his low voice like a purr in my belly. “And the most remarkable witch I know.”
I stare into the flames and drink my mead.
There’s something so easy in our silence. I realise that I haven’t been worried about what he’s thinking, that he expects me to do something even though he won’t tell me what that something is. Just being with Rafe is easy. I didn’t know it could be like that.
I’m sliding down on the slippery leather couch. I adjust myself, pressing against him.
“Maybe don’t do that,” he growls against my earlobe, his deep voice humming through my veins.
And all the easiness dissipates as I realise just how tightly we’re pressed together, and that it’s not his thigh bone jabbing into my arse.
I should move. I should. That’s the right thing to do. But even if I wanted to, I’m pinned in place by the bone-deep wanting.
So instead, I do the most un-Autumn Abernathy thing in the world, and instead of running from the danger and hiding in my safe little cottage, I turn towards it.
I turn so that I’m gazing into the blue depths of his eyes, which reflect the flames of the fire immolating the last vestiges of my self-control. His tufts of reddish-orange hair stick out, wild, dangerous, a fey feline that won’t be tamed.
“Maybe I’m like you,” I whisper. “Maybe I’m more cat than I realise. Maybe I do exactly what I want because it feels good.”
I wiggle my hips.
My cheeks burn with heat. Who is this succubus that’s taken over my body?
Rafe makes a purring sound that is so catlike and yet not like a cat at all. There’s nothing about him right now that’s fuzzy or cute or chaotic. He’s looking at me like he can’t understand me, like he doesn’t know if I’m for eating, or for…something else.
And then his lips are on mine.
Unlike last time, there’s nothing soft about this kiss, no questions being asked, no hesitant testing of the waters. It crashes into me like a summer storm, warm and fierce and desperate, scouring away doubt and leaving me raw and thirsty and blooming.
His hand finds the back of my neck, holding me as though I’m the only solid thing in a world that’s tipped sideways. I taste sweet mead on his tongue and something else, something darker and so perfectly him, something that makes a feral moan escape my lips.
Every sensible thought dissolves beneath the warmth of him, beneath the rough catch of his breath and the quiet, involuntary purr rumbling against my lips.
And I can’t deny it. I can’t pretend. He wants me, and I want him, and for one impossible, reckless heartbeat, the rest of the world simply…falls away. There are no curses or missing husbands or impossible futures. Just him. Just this.
I kiss him back with everything I’ve been swallowing for years, and he answers with a tiny, broken sound that unravels me.
Then he jerks away.
The absence of his lips is a bereavement, so sudden that my body still leans towards where he used to be. Cold air rushes into the space he’d filled only moments before.
I lean forward, thinking he’s only trying to get comfortable, but it slowly dawns on me that he’s sliding out from beneath me. He’s peeling off new shirt and tossing it into the corner.
He’s leaving.
He’s rejecting me.
Again.
“Oh,” I whisper. My cheeks flare with heat. My ears ring with the buzzing of humiliation. “Oh. I’m sorry—”
“Don’t you be sorry,” he growls. “Don’t you dare be sorry. I’m the scoundrel here, not you.”
I blink and blink, trying to force tears back into my eyes. Annoyingly, that’s not how tears work. “I read it all wrong, I thought you wanted—”
Rafe turns to me, his eyes raking over my body from toes to nose with an intensity that makes me tremble.
“You think I don’t want you? You, the most remarkable woman I’ve ever met, you, the person who makes me believe that I can be more than a criminal?
You’re right, honey witch, I don’t want you.
Want is not enough for the way I crave you, for the way your scent follows me into my dreams. But it doesn’t matter what I want,” he growls.
“For all my natural charm, devastating good looks, and feline skulduggery, I’m cursed to live in a cat’s body, and you are someone else’s wife. ”
“Warrick’s not coming back.”
“You don’t know that, and I may be a scoundrel who can now lick his own ballsack, but I’m not going to be the reason you cheat on him—”
“He never offered me the same courtesy,” I say with a trembling shrug.
“Exactly. You have no idea what it does to me to know that he’s had you for so long, that he’s made you wait in that cottage for him like he’s the goddess’s gift to woman, when all this time he’s never made you come—”
“You…you heard that.”
I know I blush easily. I know the sensation of my whole body turning warm with embarrassment. But I have never felt a humiliation so bone-deep as the wave that sweeps over me, knowing Rafe had heard me say that.
“I’ve been thinking of nothing else ever since,” he growls.
His tail brushes along my arm. “He’s the real criminal, and you should know what you’ve been missing out on.
I have such plans for you, but not when you’re his.
But when you stand there with your lip trembling and your skin flushed, I think that maybe you were never his, that maybe you’re a fairy queen sent to be my doom. ”
He’s on me again, pushing me back into the couch, his hands on my thighs, pressing them open while his tail slides up my leg, tugging at the hem of my skirts, pushing them up up up over my thighs. The tip brushes over my knickers, and a whimper escapes my lips.
“I can’t stop myself when you make that noise.” Rafe’s lips find mine again, hard and urgent. I’ve never felt like this before, my body alight, my belly heavy, filled with this aching need for something I can’t explain but is definitely, absolutely coming from him.
Rafe stares down at me, his eyes doing war.
“Please,” I whisper.
“Damnit, woman, I’m trying to do the right thing here.” His chest heaves. He unclamps his fingers from my thighs and stands up.
No, come back.
“I think I’d better go,” he says.
“Rafe—”
“When you’re a free woman, Autumn, when we know what’s happened to Warrick and he’s either in the ground or the ink is wet on your divorce papers, then I will hold you down and make you come so many times that you forget his name. But until then, you’re too good for me to corrupt you like this.”
I’m really not.
“Rafe, I have to tell you—”
“You’re the best thing to ever happen to me, my Patroness of Lost Causes, so we’re going to do everything right from the beginning.
I won’t give you a reason to walk away from me.
How’s this for a selfless act?” He grins, but his smile’s all wobbly.
“If this doesn’t break the curse, then I guess I’m doomed. ”
With that, he whirls around, his clothes falling from his body as he shrinks down into them. A moment later, a flame-point Siamese bolts for the window, headbutts the sash open, and disappears into the night.