If Wishes Were Horses Read online

  That was what had been so moving, so mesmerizing. He had revered and possessedher at once.

  Sarah let out a soft whisper of breath, almost a moan as her legs quivered and

  opened wider, inviting one of her hands under the band of her panties.

  Yes. Her body sighed in relief. Girl, we've needed this. Where have you been?

  She knew the answer, but before she could frantically stave it off, it was in her head. Her ex-husband's cruel comment that she had become a dead fish in bed, not just in herenthusiasm, but in the rasping dryness of her pussy to his advances.

  Asshole. Asshole. Asshole. She pressed her fingers harder against herself, the way she might press them against her eyes to hold back tears, but the moment was lost. Herdesire had fled.

  A floorboard squeaked.

  Sarah rolled, pulled her nine millimeter and its holster from the nightstand. She had the gun in her hand and slid her butt on the floor, her back against the mattress, beforeher mind had disengaged from the previous thought. As a result, she wasn't sure if her mental reaction - Shit - applied to her aborted attempt to rouse herself or the fact she

  had an intruder. Both possibilities seriously irritated her.

  Silence settled over the house, but whether it was that sense her partner had referenced or something else, she knew the intruder was still there. Lilesville had very little violent crime, so it was likely she had a burglar who didn't realize she was at

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  home. She tended to jog from home to the station, the five-mile morning and evening run keeping her in condition, and she kept her squad car at the station.

  She leaned over, peering around the corner of the mattress. Whoever it was, he wasn’t in her bedroom yet. Taking herself to a crouch then straightening, she padded to the door on silent feet, the gun held pointed upward in a two-hand grip, her finger on the trigger guard.

  She could have called out to scare off whoever it was, but if he was light-fingering her house, he was hitting others as well, and she wanted to catch the bastard rather than giving him the chance to run.

  She moved into the hallway, glanced into the one-room guest bath, and eased up to the corner that led into the living room, listening for a telltale rustle or breathing that would indicate someone was waiting on the other side. Nothing.

  She stepped squarely into the doorway, the gun steady and pointed straight at a

  man.

  He sat in her wingback chair, his profile slightly toward her, the opposite side of hisface bathed in moonlight from the window so his features were outlined in silver, but the part facing her was in shadow. He had his legs crossed, one hand on the chair arm, the other resting with casual elegance on his leg, both hands where she could see them.

  He was as still as a woodland creature. His eyes, deep set, dark and large, shonethrough the darkness of her living room.

  “If you get out of that chair, I’ll shoot you. I’m a police officer.”

  “I know that. It's why you can see my hands, Chief Wylde.”

  Deep, cultured and smooth, all the right syllables soft and rich like the first bite of chocolate cake. Sarah did not lower the gun. “This is breaking and entering, asshole.”

  “I broke nothing,” he said. “You left your back porch door unlocked. You've gotten too used to country living. It's safe here. “ His head cocked and she saw a dark eyeglitter, almost black. “But not that safe.”

  “Trespassing is still an option,” she snapped.

  “Wouldn't that be the pot calling the kettle black?” His teeth showed in what she supposed he called a smile. “That was my land you were on tonight, and you invaded the privacy of a sacred religious ceremony. Hardly the law abiding thing to do, wouldn't you say?”

  Sarah stepped forward, returning the gun to a point-up position, though not relaxing her guard. The change in position put her where she could see his countenance fully. Moonlight glinted off his skin as it would off marble. Her cat purred on a cushion behind him in the window seat, unconcerned that she could have been massacred in her bed.

  Justin Herne had an elegant body that suggested a runner's health regimen rather than a weight lifter's. He had strength, she felt it, but his face bordered on gaunt, givingit a pale sharpness and hunger. The hunger unsettled Sarah, and made her think of

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  what she had been doing right before he came into her house. At least, she hoped it was before he came into her house and had been able to hear her rustlings and soft moans. Otherwise, she would shoot him.

  She couldn’t get a good sense of his eyes, so she snapped on the light switch, which turned on the dim buffet lamp by the nearby couch.

  He did have dark eyes, the rich tone of mahogany. When he smiled that feral smile as he did now, it made them more focused, like a faceted gem placed under light, made more hypnotic and overwhelming by its brilliance.

  Many handsome men embellished their countenance by choosing a hair style that framed their face. Few men had the sculptured features that Justin Herne had so that they could pull the hair back into a queue, showing shining wings of chestnut brown hair molded against a finely shaped skull. His eyebrows were perfect curves, from his high brow to the bridge of his straight nose.

  Men with rugged faces had always appealed to her. She preferred a Harrison Ford to a Brad Pitt. Justin Herne was neither pretty nor rugged. Like the statue of a Roman god, his smooth alabaster muscles and features were perfectly defined, all extraneous material chiseled away. The hint of gauntness gave his artistic perfection a haunting, human touch.

  He stood up, and her gun came back down. He was taller than she was, morephysically powerful. In her profession, she was used to that, and knew that her training evened the odds. But there was a power working here that had nothing to do withwhether or not he could beat her in an arm wrestling match. Nothing she had learned inpolice training had prepared her for it.

  She had no comfort zone with men who were sexually confident. As a cop, she knew how to fence words with criminals whose filthy attempts to get a rise out of her

  fell short. The riding and suggestive comments of other cops were also part of the rough world she had to face. Perversely, the stares of a group of shirtless construction workers or a good-looking cable guy’s smile made her fumble.

  Justin Herne emanated the sexual confidence of a god, so strong it seemed to come at her from all directions, even though all he'd done was rise from the chair.

  Her nose betrayed her, stealing her judgment. Beneath the clean chambray shirt that lay in soft folds against the planes of his body and the well-tailored black slacks, she smelled the earth, the residue of perspiration dried on his skin after coitus, the faint aroma of an animal's hair. Her cop senses confirmed what her woman's senses told her. The man facing her was the antlered man.

  “I guess it makes sense, the guy owning the property being the star of his own show,” she said caustically. “So can you tell me what you were doing tonight? Or do I need to know the secret handshake?”

  She wanted to turn on a brighter set of lights to dispel this mood, the sense of

  intimate isolation with him, but she couldn't risk the distraction.

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  “You can search on the Internet for the mechanics of Wiccan ritual, including the Great Rite, officer.” He moved forward, and though he did it slowly, Sarah still felt the threat of him. Not of physical peril, but of something more fragile, as if the ground beneath her were becoming unstable as he pulled matter to him, giving her nowhere to run. He was annihilating her boundaries with his intent eyes and physical presence.

  “There was nothing mechanical about what I saw,” she said, her voice harsh. “You need to stop right there. Now.” Was that panic in her voice?

  “No, there wasn't.” He stopped, and she realized with professional horror that he was standing with his chest against the barrel of her gun. “The
Great Rite is an expression of one of the deepest mysteries. There are no words to adequately describe it. It brings opposites together to create balance.”

  She was sliding down a cliff and there was no one to offer her a rope. “Is that your best pick-up line?” she scoffed. She was all too aware her arms were trembling.

  “No, this is.” He snagged the wrist of her gun hand and yanked her arm and the weapon to the outside of her hip. At the same moment he closed his grip on her other hand and jerked it down to his erection. She found herself cupping his balls in her shaking fingers, his hard length against her palm through the fabric of his slacks. The pulse of his large organ throbbed under the sensitive skin of her wrist.

  She could fight him. She could twist away, inflict pain on him to effect a retreat for both of them, but she didn't. Sarah stood rigid, staring up at him, wishing for something she couldn't name. He destroyed her intention to resist by staying still, holding her close to him, the lift and fall of his chest no more than a deep breath’s distance away from the rapid trembling of hers.

  He studied her face for a long moment. He released her gun hand to reach up and trace the line of her cheek, shielding her eye from the moon's light coming in through the window. His finger moved forward, under the soft skin of her eye, down the side of her nose, etching the curve of one nostril, then rested on her parted lips. He dipped his touch within, just the slight movement needed to find the moisture between teeth and gum and spread it on the fullness of her bottom lip.

  He kept his other hand firmly on hers against his cock, not allowing movement, just making her experience the pulse of that rigid organ against her damp palm.

  “Is the safety on?” he asked, his voice a breath of sound against her face.

  Somehow a brain cell survived to send a message to her fingers so that she shifted her grip, clicked it back on. Damn. She should have thought to check the safety beforehe had. But he had thought to protect them. Protect her. It did nothing to ease the growing fire in places in her body a total stranger should not be igniting.

  She nodded, and he twisted her hand, a strong but not painful force. The weapondropped several inches to the sofa. His arm went around her waist, his hand against herback, and the last space was closed, her breasts against his chest, her thighs against his. Her hand was free, for now his other was on her neck, tangling in her hair, pulling herhead back. Her fingers curled into a claw against his hip.

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  “No,” she said. “You've been…with another woman.”

  “You don't give a damn about that,” he said, his eyes glowing in the dim light like a wolf's. “She is part of you, part of the same Goddess that claimed the Great Lord as her Consort through me, renewing the land and our spirits with our joining.”

  It was true in a deep, primitive way she did not understand, and it scared the hell out of her. She didn’t want to be swept away like this.

  He brought his mouth down on hers before she could say anything else, and God, she didn’t know what she’d have said.

  Something about this night and seeing the ritual had opened the wounds of her divorce, as well as that familiar and overwhelming yearning in her. He was here like an answer to that aching emptiness. Just…fuck it.

  Fuck me, please. Make me forget. Make me believe again. Make it everything, so nothing else will matter.

  “I will,” he muttered, and she realized she had spoken aloud, though she did not know which part of the words had made it to her lips. Sarah held onto his hard biceps as he devoured her mouth, scraping his teeth against her soft lips, bearing her tongue down beneath his, stroking it even as he dominated it inside the wetness of her mouth. He made it lie pliant beneath his will and quiver there.

  He was an intruder in her house. A stranger. She had just seen him participate in a ritual that would horrify the notion of moral conduct in civilized society. But every gasp for breath brought that animal smell to her, the sweat of the ritual beneath his clean shirt, the hunger in his body. Her body shoved away her inhibitions in a way it never had, mowed them over like an eager child overriding its mother's feeble protests in the face of an offer of candy. This wasn't just candy. This wasn't even a whole candy store. This was a child's paradise of endless treasure to discover, summer days that never ended, bare feet in the mud and all the mysteries of the universe expressed in ways so simple they did not have to be spoken.

  She whimpered in the back of her throat when he shifted, pressing his cock against the dampening crotch of her plain cotton panties. He hoisted her, wrapping her legs around his waist, and her hair fell along his jawline as he lifted her above him. His hands cupped her ass cheeks and opened her to the tips of his fingers. It made her squirm in erotic shivers, which rubbed her against the heat of his cock, pressed hard against her clit with pinpoint accuracy.

  She was dizzy. The walls were moving. No, she was moving. He was taking her down the hall to the bedroom. She felt like she was falling down a tunnel, like a slide where there was no stopping the momentum without getting her palms blistered. She held onto his shoulders and he bit her throat, using his tongue to soothe even as he bit down again, harder. His fingers were under her underwear, the tip of his middle finger probing her tight rear entry. Her legs spasmed, kicking the wall, reacting to the strange whirl of sensation the unfamiliar touch speared through her.

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  There was a scrape as they passed her dresser, and then something cold and metal touched her. Before Sarah registered the different sensory input, he had her down on her back on her bed and her arms above her head. Panic shot through her at the snap ofthe steel bracelets of her own handcuffs, their rattle against the wrought iron bars of the headboard. The sudden blast of fear shoved away the tide of lust.

  “What the — Herne, you son of a—”

  “Ssshhh.”

  The world had not stopped spinning from her trip down the hallway, and her panicenhanced the disorientation, keeping her from getting her bearings back in time. Hispalms clamped under her knees and he pushed her legs up into the air and back, so her body folded over and her kneecaps were shoved to meet her shoulders. He threaded her thrashing feet between the railings of the headboard, four slats apart so her legswere spread. He hooked them there so she was held by them and the strength of hishands against the back of her thighs. She stared helplessly up at him through the vee of her legs.

  “You can't—”

  He was on his knees before her vulnerable pussy and ass, and she had a glimpse of those dark eyes before his head bent and his hot, moist breath touched her cunt through the cotton. He sucked the fabric and her clit into his mouth, rubbing his tongue againstthem. The alternating friction of the three caused her body to shake erratically, the onlything she could do in this position. There was no straining possible, no arching, just the fixed point of her pussy and that convulsive little bounce that made his mouth a tiny staccato of pressure against her full to bursting tissues.

  He growled, there was no other word for it, and hooked his finger in the panties. He tore them off her body, the seams scraping her skin with the roughness of themotion. His tongue stabbed into her pussy and she cried out, a prolonged soundbetween a wail and a moan that begged for whatever it was he could offer her. She was going to come, he was stroking her clit, making wet sucking noises of enjoyment that were driving her crazy, yes, now he was stroking harder, alternating light with rough, he was – nooo. He moved back into her pussy, taking away the driving force of the sensation, and when she bounced, the bump of his nose was all the relief she was given. No relief at all.

  She gave a shocked cry as his middle finger, wet with her arousal, invaded her anus and fingered her there, setting off electric sparks of reaction she never knew existed. Her knees rubbed the sides of her breasts, and her nipples were begging for attention against the stretched thin fabric of her tank as she lay helplessly raised like a baby with her ass in the air.


  “Tell me you want more, Sarah,” he demanded, his mouth and fingers working her.

  Don't. Don't.

  “You bastard—”

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  He bit, just the barest pressure of his teeth closing on her clit. She rocked against hisstill finger in her ass and his tight canine hold on her pussy, whimpering. Waves rolled through her, but it was not enough. The surf roared in her ears, beckoning.

  “I can do this all night, Sarah,” he murmured, his lips playing on her pussy. “So ask for it, or I'll torture you, with pleasure.”

  “More,” she whispered.

  Still he did not move. She looked down between her splayed legs and he looked at

  her, holding her clit in his mouth, his tongue doing idle flicks, his eyes hot and steady

  on hers.

  “More,” she snarled. “More!”

  He straightened, held her with one hand on her thighs and freed his belt. Sarah'seyes widened as he leaned over her, his body pressed between her legs. Before she could work her feet free of the railings to thwart his intent, he had reached through theopening of the slats and looped the belt around one ankle. He threaded the tonguethrough the rails and looped the other end around the other ankle and cinched it with aclever knot. Now her ankles were firmly tied and held to the railings, her knees posed over her head without him having to exert his weight against her.