If Wishes Were Horses Read online

  Sarah stared after him for several long moments. Her brain had gone as numb as her heart and she wasn’t sure how long she stood there, paralyzed, before the cell phone at her belt rang.

  She pulled it off. “Wylde here,” she snapped.

  “This is Dexter, Sarah.” Her lieutenant’s voice was a rush of relieved words. “They finally got the rest of the dang reports from the medical examiner. Forensics says the vic’s death was self-inflicted. They didn’t find any evidence of another person at the scene. No footprints, hair or skin samples on her clothes or belongings. Not even any semen in her body or evidence of a condom. There were three drugs in her system. She was a freaking pharmacy. The toxicologist played with the combination and came up with a reaction like liquid nitrogen. It’s something he’s never seen before, but when it all comes together, it turns into negative 100 degrees immediately. He says we may have a new street drug, or she may have hit on something by accident with her little cocktail. He said based on that and a totally clean site, Marion’s just got themselves a really freaky OD situation.”

  “Is that his official medical opinion?”

  Dexter hesitated. “Sorry about that, Chief. His official report is going to rule it an OD death. Another thing, even better news. Time of death was pinned at 11:00 pm. We have nine people who verified independently that Justin Herne was leading a Wiccan ritual from eight o’clock to midnight. Forensics says that alibis him even if he shot it into her veins and left her there for it to take effect.”

  Ten people, she thought.

  “Chief?”

  “Good work, Dexter. I’m at Herne’s home now. I’ll inform him and then I’m off for

  the rest of the day. I think I’ve got a touch of the flu.”

  “Yes ma’am, that’s been going around. We’re all glad about the way it turned out, though, but sorry for that lady. She sure was messed up.”

  “Yes, she was. Bye, Dexter.”

  Sarah stood there, listening to the sounds of Herne moving upstairs, drawers opening and closing. She looked at the computer screen again, the fanged creature sneering at her.

  102

  If Wishes Were Horses

  When Justin came down a few minutes later, his sitting room was empty, and Sarah’s car was gone. A scrap of paper was propped up on the computer screen, held there with a piece of Scotch tape. The shadow of the demon was silhouetted behind it.

  Justin pulled off the note and swore viciously.

  You’ve been cleared. We’re through.

  “That’s what you think, sweetheart,” he growled, crushing the note in his hand.

  103

  Joey W. Hill

  Chapter 14

  He let her be for the night. He could be that patient, knowing the weight of what he had laid on her earlier in the day. He did leave a message on her machine, he couldn’thelp that.

  “Sarah, this is Justin. We’re going to have to talk about us. There is an ‘us’, whether you want there to be or not, and I want to see you. Call me tomorrow, or I swear I’ll show up on your doorstep and you’ll have to deal with me. I should have handledthings differently, I know, but don’t use it as an excuse to run from me. Don’t run from us.”

  He lay in bed for awhile staring at the ceiling, and then gave up and snapped on the small reading light. He withdrew the news clippings he had printed from the Chicago Times and went through them again, imagining Sarah all alone in a warehouse full ofblood and violence, her struggle toward that one last man, her refusal to give up.

  From Sarah’s limited comments on her personal life, Justin knew her husband had left her shortly thereafter. He had left her when she needed him desperately, and it sounded like during their marriage he had let her push him away when she thought thejob had become too much to share. Justin wasn’t going to let her do it to him. Sheneeded someone in her life strong enough to push back.

  He turned off the light, lay back in the bed and went back to studying the ceiling until the grandfather clock downstairs struck midnight, and his body raged for her. Hewondered if this was how drugs had been for Lorraine, this all-consuming need to havethat pleasure in her blood. He wanted Sarah in his house, in his arms. He wanted his cock buried in her and her body arching beneath his, that sinuous movement that women made, an erotic dance to offer themselves up to a man’s need, to sate their own in the bonding.

  Fuck it. He was going to get up and go to her house, and he was going to use every method fair or unfair to get her to accept him. He knew it was wrong, but he didn’t givea damn. He hadn’t believed he would ever know what love felt like again, and certainly hadn’t expected it to take the form of an instantaneous attachment to a skinny police chief with a smart mouth, shy smile and irises as big as robin eggs.

  He flipped over and jumped back with a startled oath. Sarah was in the process of getting into his bed, her knee up to slide in next to him. Justin froze, his face just inches from hers. She stared back, her eyes round and sad, and her lips parted to speak. He caught her to him, his hand to the back of her head, and brought her to his lips. He nearly moaned at the joy of that contact, her bare breasts crushed against his chest, for she was naked as he was, her body cool where his was hot, a melding of elements.

  104

  If Wishes Were Horses

  “I’m sorry,” he muttered against her, and she made a noise of acceptance. He was already achingly hard for her, and she straddled him with her thighs, pulling the sheet back and sliding down on him, taking him inside her, fusing them together even with their lips still joined. He wanted to touch her, caress her, watch her grow more and more wild with passion, but she seemed as desperate to simply mate as he did. She left him no choice, for the muscles in her cunt clamped down on him. As she rose and fell on his body, riding that wave of their desire, she was as relentless as a rider mounted on a thoroughbred, coaxing him with the stroke of her silken walls to lengthen his stride, make for the finish line.

  “Sarah, let me—”

  She shook her head, placing her fingers over his lips. He groaned again as her hands lifted, cupped her breasts, their quivering movement contained in the curve of her palms, her nipples stiff and eager. He reared up to possess them with his lips and tongue.

  He dug his fingers into her waist, moving his grip up to either side of her spine,then back down, clutching her hips. Even as he realized something was wrong, his body refused to acknowledge the warning. His frustration and pent up desire for Sarah exploded, the orgasm ripping through him, leaving him torn between horror and pain.

  He had only known Chief Sarah Wylde for two days, but Justin Herne was a manwho noticed details, not just as a shopkeeper, but as a man who revered that which wasprecious. Under his right palm, he knew there was supposed to be the smooth, satin circle of a bullet scar. There was none.

  He snarled his frustration as his cock was milked dry by the being upon him. As his hands clutched in an involuntary clamp on its hips, the Sarah image wavered and he saw the being’s true eyes, the eyes he had seen in Lorraine’s face so many years ago, when what he had thought had been a dream had led to the best miracle and worst nightmare of his life.

  “Don’t,” Justin gasped, “don’t—”

  The Sarah creature shook its head, put its hands over Justin’s at its hips, then the

  touch was gone.

  Justin blinked. He was alone, the incubus gone, only the tangled sheets and trembling post-orgasmic state of his body telling him what had just transpired was real. Even that would not have convinced him, if he had not been father to an angel because of a similar visit over eight years ago.

  He rolled over, grabbed the phone, knocked it off its pedestal. “Son of a —” He scrambled for it, snatched it up. The phone rang and rang, and he swore again when he got Sarah’s machine. “Sarah, this is Justin. Pick up. Please, it’s urgent. It’s about the murder.”

  He waited, snarled when she did not pick up the phone. He broke the connection,

  made the call to
the uniform working dispatch in Lilesville on graveyard shift.

  105

  Joey W. Hill

  “She called about an hour ago,” the rookie said. “Said she was still feeling under the

  weather and wouldn’t likely be in this morning.”

  “Where’d she call from?”

  “She said she was at home.”

  All the alarm bells went off. In Justin’s gut, his head, in every nerve and muscle including the ones that tightened his grip on the phone until his knuckles whitened. “Thanks.”

  He held the buzzing receiver against his forehead for a long moment. He might be overreacting, but his intuition told him he wasn’t. It told him he needed help and Sarah needed protection, fast. Lori had been born almost nine months to the day from when the incubus first visited him. When it took semen, it went immediately to the person whose form it had assumed. That was the only clue to a pattern they had, and thatperson would be Sarah.

  His first reaction was to protect her, to call the rookie back and say whatever heneeded to say to get the entire force screaming over to her house with sirens and lightsblazing. The police would be able to scare off the incubus, but they would not be able toanticipate the next victim.

  Inexplicably, his gaze fell on the article from the Chicago Times that he had left out. He remembered Sarah’s face as she talked to the kids about drugs, not in acondescending way, but in the way someone talked who really cared, who believed thatshe was responsible for every face out in that audience.

  “…we’d have to find him and close in around him before he knew we were there.”

  Sarah was a police officer, sworn to protect and serve. She would want to protect her people, and the people in this town were his as well. He and the coven were the only ones capable of stopping the thing, but the cost might be Sarah’s life.

  “No, damn it.” He erupted from the bed, grabbing for the nearest pair of pants. “It’s not taking her. It’s not.”

  He hit the preset button to dial Linda as he took the stairs to the lower level three at a time. “Oh, God, Sarah,” he murmured as he listened to the ring. “Hang on, baby. I’m coming.”

  * * * * *

  He couldn’t possibly have the nerve to break into her house again.

  Who was she kidding? This was Justin Herne, the man of steel when it came to nerve. Defying a homicide investigation, telling the cop in charge he would pick andchoose what information he cared to divulge, fucking the sheriff in the neighboring county half-blind, making her fall for him.

  She shrugged irritably into her robe. She should take her gun, but he might interpret that as a sentimental gesture.

  106

  If Wishes Were Horses

  How fondly would he think of it if she actually shot him this time? In a place where it might do some good.

  She really needed to start locking that door. Bolting it. Booby trapping it with hot oil and barbed spikes.

  Sarah moved up the hallway and saw firelight. Despite the warming weather, shehad built a fire earlier in the evening. She had been feeling a cold in her bones that cameas much from the drain of her turbulent emotions as her lack of body fat. It had beenembers when she went to bed, but apparently he had stoked it up, thinking that theromantic gesture would warm her. He was in for a surprise. It was going to take thefires of hell to melt the icy frost she felt for him right now.

  She stepped into her sitting room and he turned from where he stood before the fire.

  It was a good thing she hadn’t brought the gun, because it would have droppedfrom nerveless fingers.

  He was naked, long muscles outlined and praised by the fire, from the taut right buttock on which he rested most of his weight to the smooth landscape across his broad back. A wave of desire struck her, so strong it made her knees weak. Attraction vibratedbeneath his skin, called to her body as nothing ever had, so her pussy immediatelypulsed at high alert, as if seconds away from climax.

  It was Justin. It wasn’t Justin. Two parts of her brain processed what her eyes saw and spat out entirely different data. Unfortunately, the part that told her it was Justin was in charge of her body, moving it forward toward the being from which her heart screamed she should retreat.

  The dark eye beckoned her with no more than a flicker of movement, a slight curveof that sensual mouth that she could already imagine moving over her skin, branding, sucking, kissing, biting, marking her, leaving no crevice unexplored. Her pussy tightened, her breasts ached, and when he reached out, his long fingers closing over herwrist, she shuddered, a quivering sigh escaping her.

  “Sarah,” he whispered. “I want you.”

  He’s a stranger. He’s the incubus.

  “I want you. Only you. I can make everything not matter. Don’t fight me. I only want to bring you pleasure like you’ve never known.”

  His hands moved over her shoulders, curled in the neck of her robe, peeled it back over her shoulders. Sarah stood in his armspan, feeling his cool hands on her skin, thefirelight behind him warming her calves. His touch was ten times more potent than his gaze, and the moment his fingers slid over her breasts she came, hard, her fingersgripping his arms in shock as she rocked forward on her toes, her forehead pressed against his chest. He did no more than tweak her nipples gently, prolonging the climax. Her arousal ran down her legs and he caught some of it in his other hand that dippedbetween her legs and found her.

  107

  Joey W. Hill

  She writhed, her body still spasming from the aftershock of one climax even as hestarted stroking her impossibly toward a second.

  “You’re mine, Sarah,” Justin’s face and voice filled her senses. She was headed to the floor, her body held in his arms. She didn’t fight. She couldn’t. “You’re too precious a gift for this world. I think you belong in mine.”

  Her will shrieked at her body to move, to resist. She had read stories of people put under for surgery who didn’t go under but were paralyzed, unable to tell the doctor they were awake and feeling everything. Or pets, tranquilized for airline flight, toolethargic to move but terrified to the bone.

  An icy ball of terror surrounded her will, watching her body offer itself to a being she knew was not Justin, hearing his words and knowing what they meant. She was unable to do more than observe herself willingly and eagerly open herself to him as he lowered himself between her thighs, his cock erect and potent. It brushed her and she cried out, a sound of pleasure that ricocheted off the scream of denial inside her head.

  Being in control was important to a cop, important to Sarah. Perversely, she had gone into situations where she knew control of the outcome wasn’t possible. But she was always able to be in control of herself, of Sarah. The day she had dragged herself to her feet and made it across fifty feet of blood-soaked concrete floor, she had known herlife was likely about to be taken from her. However, she still had the choice. She could cross that floor to do the job or run.

  Justin had known her fear of that loss of self from the beginning. So even when he cuffed her to her bed, there had been that still moment, that tender kiss, that acknowledgement of her, who she was, her soul. His own had reached out to touch it, so that what they were doing had been something they were doing to each other, even though she had been scared to death and more aroused than she’d ever been in her life.

  Until now. But this was different. There was no pause, no touching of souls, not even a chance to catch her breath. He was yanking her body’s reaction from her like adoctor using a hammer on her knee joints, driving her up and over pinnacles at breakneck speed before she was ready for them, a spiraling whirlwind where theorgasms were just leading to even more gripping climaxes, an ocean of heat suddenly invaded by ice as he drove into her. The contrast brought forth another orgasm that wrenched open something inside her that shouldn’t be opened, so her scream was torn between pleasure and pain, leaving her nowhere to hide or run.

  The cold spread through her and she shuddered in the grip between frost
and pleasure.

  His cock drove into her again, with such force their bodies moved backwards on thehearth rug, and her hair, trapped under her shoulders, tugged her head back so he could sink his teeth into her throat. Her traitorous legs rose, clasped around his hips, her breath panting, lips moist from the cold breath coming from between his. His hands moved down her sides, over her ribs, under her to cup her breasts, then between them to stroke her clit at their joining.

  108

  If Wishes Were Horses

  “Come for me again, Sarah. Hard. Bring my come into you, milk me for your pleasure.”

  She now understood how much power she had held. Justin had desired her, wanted her, overwhelmed her with her body’s responses to him. But it had been her response always, not something he manipulated from her as she had accused him of doing. She might have held onto that cowardly belief if she didn’t have this moment to compare it to. She had wanted what he had been offering, fiercely.

  Pleasure. Warmth. Affection. Friendship. All the potentials for love had been in his touch, his eyes and his voice from the very beginning, and time and rationality had had nothing to do with it. Her heart had known from the first moment, and had joined with her body and soul in responding to the same remarkable response from his.

  This being had locked her heart and soul away from her body, and those elements were prisoners inside her head as all the sensual centers of her physical self rose up in response to his seductive powers. They dragged the rest of her screaming toward the icy abyss the cold darkness of his eyes promised.

  Oh, God. Justin, help me.

  109

  Joey W. Hill

  Chapter 15

  The bastard had somehow taken or hidden his car keys.