Something About Witches Read Online Free Page B

the temples. Since right now she wore a silk gold robe that clung to her curves, it was easy for a man to imagine that hair tangled in his fingers as she wrapped her arms and legs around him, allowing him to bury himself in that wet dream body. Her fingernails trailed along the rail like a man’s arm, drawing his gaze despite himself.
    He’d tell her to tone it down, but he knew this was just Raina. Daughter of a witch and an incubus, she could no more turn it off than he could turn off how he felt about Ruby.
    “You’re still a bitch, you know that?” he grumbled.
    “Good thing we both love the same person. Else we might be tempted to maim one another beyond repair.”
    Goddamn it.
He was frustrated, hurting, pissed off, and he had nowhere to go with it. He couldn’t change the past three years. In Ruby’s shop, he’d picked up on the well of pain trapped behind that smart mouth and hazel eyes. Something unbearably fragile was behind the brick wall she’d constructed against him. So fragile, it might destroy her if he blasted that wall the way he wanted. He had to convince her to open the door, and that wasn’t usually the way it worked between them.
    She had teased him about his cowboy side, but she liked the way he could rope her down, body, heart and soul, and get her to surrender it all to him. She didn’t realize, when he held such gifts in his hands, how their power overwhelmed and humbled him.
    He’d seen her potential for a long time, what she could become. Thank God that harpy of a mother of hers was dead, may the Powers that Be forgive him. With Mary Night Divine gone, Derek had been sure Ruby would embrace that side of herself at last. He’d even arrogantly assumed the love he could give her would help fill in that foundation, make it solid.
    Well, she’d built herself a foundation, all right. It worried him to the bone what kinds of things were in that concrete.While he didn’t know what the hell had happened, he should have been here to help. Even if he had to let the world fall to darkness.
    For every day he’d ever spent with her, he’d had to spend a hundred times that away from her. He had no right to feel this way. Fuck that— he had every right. He knew a lot of things about time, and one of them was that in things like this, it didn’t mean shit.
    “Where are you staying tonight? You
are
staying.”
    He looked up to see Raina studying him with narrowed, kohl-rimmed eyes. Though her tone warned him against the wrong answer, the set of her mouth wasn’t completely fuck-you-and-the-horse-you-rode-in-on. “I’ll find a dive to catch a few hours; then I’ll hit the road.” Before she could retort to that, he added in a curt tone, “I have some things to set up. I’ve asked Ruby’s help on a job in Florida teaching a coven to contain a fault break. Think she’s going to do it.”
    Raina tapped one of those inch-long nails on the railing. Interestingly, it was painted a delicate frosted pink. “Isn’t that like throwing molasses against glue? Taking a woman playing with Dark forces to fight Dark forces?”
    Derek set his jaw. So she’d decided to take the bull by the horns. Good. Suited him fine. “What
is
she playing with, Raina?” At the woman’s closed expression, he restrained the urge to come up the stairs and throttle her. Instead he simply braced his stance, hooked his thumbs in his jeans pockets and took a gamble on one sure thing. “I know you love her. Else you wouldn’t still be here. You could make ten times more in Manhattan with this little gig of yours.”
    “Yes, but the cost of living is higher. And I couldn’t be within a stone’s throw of a military base. You know how I feel about men in uniform.”
    Derek imagined the bruises his fingers could leave on that fragile throat, then swallowed pride. “She used soul magic on me. That’s how she drove me off. And it took me too fucking long to figure it out.”
    The sardonic look on the witch’s face