Which Witch is Which - Kerrigan Byrne Page 0,11

lurch.

Nick felt the blood pounding in his throat, his temples. “I was not gawking. I was wondering what you were doing in my seat.”

“Gawkin’.” She settled back against the headrest with a self-satisfied smirk and let her eyes fall closed like the conversation was over.

“I was not—”

An unexpected sensation brought his words to a screeching halt— the smooth length of her finger pressed against his lips.

“Shh,” she yawned. “I’m fixin’ to nod off.”

Rage rattled through Nick, mixing with the simmering irritation like a volatile cocktail. This insolent witch had shooshed him? Him? The one before whom warlords groveled and kings bowed? The one who measured time not in minutes, but in the shrieks of the defeated? The one who had made rivers from the blood of his enemies and built mountains from the bodies of the conquered dead?

No. She hadn’t recognized him. He doubted if she even recognized herself or had any clue as to the power pulsing just beneath her skin.

She would know him. She would submit. She would surrender, or he’d be damned.

They both would.

4

She’d be damned if this puffed-up, self-important peckerwood was going to ruin her first airplane ride. Even if he did look like the devil’s own lawyer. Hair the color of a dark roux, eyes like sunlight through Jack Daniels, and body like a college linebacker—or at least the college linebackers of her acquaintance—Nicholas Kingswood had predator written all over him.

She’d seen more genuine smiles on a rat snake, and she had no intention of being another notch in his probably-imported belt.

True, she could have just moved, but he was awful fun to look at.

Even now, she stole a glance at the man fuming in her peripheral vision. He was remarkably big. She had seen enough of men that clothes didn’t hide much from her anymore. If her estimations were correct, it was a wonder Mr. Kingswood could bring his knees to touch at all. Poor Bucephelus would be jealous as hell.

Moira allowed herself to imagine what a man that size would look like hard. In the absence of the sleep that fled from her like a thief, it helped keep the tidal wave of borrowed emotions at bay.

So many people, so little space.

Their combined sorrows, joys, and resentments swirled around her, seeking a path into her mind like electricity trying to ground itself.

“No one smirks like that in their sleep.” His voice—deep, dark, and buttery as pork ribs left overnight in a smoker—punctured the thin film of her vivid visualization.

She opened one eye and tilted her head toward him. “You the nap police or somethin’?”

“If you’re not sleeping, the least you can do is finish our conversation.”

“No,” she sighed. “The least I can do is nothin’. Which I’d like to do, if you’d quit pesterin’ me for five minutes.”

The muscles bunched beneath the shadow of stubble on his strong jaw.

Goddamn, but he was fun to annoy.

“Pestering you? You take the seat I paid thousands of dollars for, and I’m pesterin’ you?”

Moira ignored the perfectly mimicked rendition of her own twangy patois. “Yup.”

“Unbelievable.” He reached down to his attaché case, withdrew a sheaf of papers and began leafing through them.

“I don’t see what you’re all bunched up about. You still got a seat. And a pair of tits to stare at besides. You oughta be happier than a pig in slop.”

A grunt from the bag at her feet sent a burst of fear skittering down her spine. Quiet, she willed Cheeto.

Nick’s unnerving amber eyes fixed in the direction of the sound.

“What’s in that bag?”

Moira swung a protective leg in front of it. “None of your business.”

His lips, and the sultry smile they formed, could have been stolen from one of the wicked satyr statues Moira had seen in a book at the St. Bernard library.

“Yes,” he said. “Please put your legs in front of the bag. I’ll split them to get to it and enjoy the effort twice as much.”

The threat lodged further south of the Mason Dixon line than Moira was comfortable with. “You reach one finger toward that bag and I’ll break it quicker than you can shake your dick.”

“You mean the dick you were gawkin’ at while you were pretending to sleep?”

Blood burned into Moira’s cheeks. “I wasn’t either.”

“You were. And judging by the grin on your face, you liked what you saw.”

“Please.” Moira rolled her eyes in feigned disinterest. “I seen enough of them things to choke a humpback whale.”

“So why not see one that can do the job on its

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