Cursed be the Wicked (34 page)

“I need to complain to the staff here, I don’t think I ordered a woman tonight.”

She bites her lip as I remove my shirt, but she’s smiling because she knows I’m full of shit.

Finn takes my hand in hers, urging me to sit down next to her on the bed. I lean forward and hover. Having her body underneath mine makes my blood heat and my heart race.

I let a hand slip beneath her shirt to feel the warm skin waiting for me. I’ve missed it.

She’s soft as silk.

I move slowly as Finn reaches to find the button to my jeans. She quietly tells me to listen closely as she holds my stare.

I try.

“You asked me earlier if I missed you,” she says with a whisper.

I palm her breast and answer as best I can.

“Yeah?”

Finn breathes in deep as her eyes close. She hums while she pushes my zipper down. She slides my jeans as far as she can, taking my boxers with them.

When my fingers brush against her nipple, a much smaller noise escapes her.

I dip down. My lips find her neck, her chin, her lips. “And?” I slide my hand down, between her legs.

“I did,” she breathes, and then I kiss her again.

“Yeah?”

I push her legs apart and feel what’s waiting for me.

I’m overwhelmed with how beautiful she is when her skin flushes and her hips thrust.

She nods, and quietly tells me, “Keep going.”

I kiss her, just below her ear.

“How much?” I mutter. “How much did you miss me, Finn?’

“So much,” she breathes. “I thought about you every day. Worried about you every night.”

She reaches down to find what I’m dying to replace my fingers with and I kiss her hard.

Our tongues meet.

I’m going to explode.

I push my jeans off of me the rest of the way as Finn sits up to pull her shirt over her head. Then she reaches behind her back and releases her bra.

She leans back down and I take her in. All of her. She lays here for me, vulnerable, ready to completely give everything she has to me and yet, I’m the one who is shaking.

“Come here,” Finn says, sliding her hands around my waist.

I linger above her. Her eyes search mine and I let them. They’ve searched my soul already, there’s nothing she doesn’t know.

“I’m never leaving again,” I promise, then I lower my lips to her for another kiss and lose myself inside of her.

I push earnestly, but slow, and Finn’s body curves to meet mine fully. I’m insane with desire for her. I crave every inch there is to touch. My lips can’t kiss her nearly enough.

It’s more than sex and want and lust I’m dealing with here. I’ve known it for quite some time now but this . . . it’s aching to be closer and yearning to know everything about her.

A pure devotion I’ve never experienced before.

A simple need. To be with her.

Always.

I slip a hand underneath her body and pull Finn closer. I hold her there, letting each thrust tell her how much I missed her too. How glad I am that she came into my life. How I plan to make her a part of mine for as long as she’ll have me.

She grabs my shoulders and rolls her hips and when I feel her getting close, it pushes my limits and rattles me deep inside. Everywhere.

Finn’s breathing becomes ragged. When she looks me in the eyes and holds tightly onto me, I know she’s there, so I kiss her deep and long and when she moans with satisfaction, it throws me over the edge.

I’m dizzy and blissed out, with her like this. I can’t breathe but I try and as we come down off of our high, I kiss her soft along her shoulder, then back up to where I find her lips.

My body leans down into the bed next to her. We relax into each other as our bodies calm themselves, Finn curls up into my side, right where she belongs.

I lay there, letting my fingers graze over her arm and I just smile.

I watch the moonlight play against the wall of the room.

I breathe in and out.

I think to myself, how insane this might have seemed to me before, finding exactly what I’ve needed all along, here, in a city I never thought I wanted to see again. But now, it just seems like the sanest thing I’ve ever done.

“There’s something I wanted to tell you,” I rasp. It should be more difficult than this, seeing how I’ve never uttered the words before. But it couldn’t be easier than it is right now.

Finn rolls over and rests her chin against my chest. She grins an evil grin.

“You love me.”

I laugh and push some hair out of her face.

“Do you really have to ruin everything for me?” I tease and she seems slightly embarrassed. The blush I love to see has returned to her cheeks but I don’t want her to feel that way.

I honestly don’t know if I believe she
knew
before I said it. Or if that’s just what some might call woman’s intuition. But it’s a part of her, and therefore, it’s a part of what I love about her.

Finn’s eyes dip slightly. I pull her chin up a little with my fingers, and she stares up at me.

“You can say it if you want, I’ll pretend I didn’t know,” she says.

I roll over, pushing her onto her back once again and kiss her softly.

“I love you,” I whisper. She smiles huge with that blush I adore so much.

“Say it again?”

“I love you.” I kiss her lips. “I love you.” I move to her neck. “I love you.”

I place my lips next to her ear, “Shall I continue?”

She nods and hums, “Forever.”

We spend the rest of the night alternating between talking and laughing, loving and teasing.

For the first time since leaving Salem all those years ago, I don’t feel like I have to run anymore. I find it surreal on some level. Because who’d have ever thought I’d be able to move forward with my life by going back to the place where it all started?

Talk about irony.

I guess it doesn’t matter where I am, or what got me here. What matters is that I know where I belong now. Who I belong
with
. And I plan on staying here for a very long time. Because I can finally say, without a doubt in my mind, in
this moment
, I’m home.

Chapter 21

Fortune Telling

“
Holy
.”

Summer is not the best time of year to decide to paint a house. I need the distraction though. It’s been a long eight months since I came back to Salem for good and a lot has happened.

It took some time, but I was able to get Liz’s house into decent selling condition and get it off my hands for a good price. After I decided I wanted to keep the property Mom had left me, I used the insurance money left over from paying Geneva’s mortgage to start a rebuild on the land.

The most prominent thing though, is that I just finished my first full length novel last week. I sent it off to a boatload of agents, hoping to hear something back other than “you suck the big one.”

On top of all that, Geneva thinks it’s time she moved into something smaller, and closer to the B&B, since I was able to convince Finn to move into Mom’s old house with me. It isn’t quite finished yet, but it’s in the livable stage.

It didn’t take a whole lot of coaxing either. Something about a dream might have been mentioned.

These days, I don’t confirm or deny, out loud, whether or not I buy in to the whole psychic ability thing with her. I try not to think too hard about what happened that night at Mom’s when Liz caught on fire.

That may be partially due to the fact that the whole thing gave me the heebie geebies. It might also be due to the fact that I’m still a stubborn ass and won’t give Finn the satisfaction of knowing she has convinced me there is the slightest possibility that anything beyond the norm exists. I can’t ignore the fact that the woman has some sort of a gift, though.

I peek down and see her hustling around with Geneva on the front porch. If I thought Finn’s winter ensembles were skimpy, her summer wardrobes are even more so.

I make a concentrated effort to remain focused because I’m sweaty and thirsty and hoping to get this last side done before the end of the day so I can take her for a weekend getaway somewhere nice.

Some place where
she’s
the one getting pampered for once. Where we won’t hear the word ghost or witch for an entire forty-eight hours.

Not that I’m complaining. Much.

“Coop!” Geneva calls up from the front yard. “Come on down for some tea.”

I paint the last corner of a section that’ll put me at a good stopping point and climb down the ladder to join my two favorite women for that drink.

Finn doesn’t flinch when I lean down to kiss her as we pass one another. She does blush a little though. I don’t know how long that’ll last but I enjoy the sight of her rosy cheeks every time.

I smirk and she slaps my arm, then I fall down into Geneva’s porch swing and let the ceiling fans and shade cool me off as much as they can.

“You’re famous,” Finn teases when she drops the July edition of Monthly Traveler into my lap.

We don’t subscribe, which means Bill must have sent a copy for me to see the piece I did on Salem.

I sit up and pick the magazine up to check it out. The cover is a nighttime shot of Mom’s house back in its heyday. They must have found it on the internet somewhere. It looks ominous and perfectly eerie with the fog spreading out around it. There’s a blurb about the Festival of the Dead that’s coming up in October. What catches my eye, though, is the small print underneath it that says “A witch’s love story. Find out the real scoop on what happened to Maggie Shaw’s husband.”

“Son of a bitch.”

He ran it. The novella I wrote about Mom and Jack and Dad and Liz.

Finn hides a grin and pours some glasses of tea while I sit up and open the mag to my story. It’s marked with an envelope addressed to me. Inside is a check and a note, from Bill.

Coop,

The secrets you keep are doozies, my friend.

Read the article again after you quit the magazine. Loved it. Decided you were right. If you ever decide to go freelance, call me.

Bill

I toss the envelope down onto the table beside us and read every word of the story with a ridiculous smile plastered across my face the entire time.

Memories of last fall take over. I don’t look back on any of it with bitterness or resentment, but rather a before and after moment.

Before and after I met Finnley Pierce.

Some of it was bad, yes, but some was good. All of it changed me for the better, I’ve come to think. It gave me Finn, and Jack and Geneva, so I’ll always be grateful to Mom for her journals.

I don’t feel the need to deny who I am anymore, either. When kids ride by the house on their bikes and yell out, asking if I’m crazy Maggie Shaw’s son, I tell them, “Damn straight.”

I was hoping Mom’s reputation would have been cleared after everything, but with Liz being the one person who could have confirmed my story, that just didn’t work out.

Some people still think my mother killed Ben, some think I did. Most think Ben was innocent in everything and that Liz was the sister of the witch who murdered her husband, generous for taking in their abandoned son.

I know the truth, though. And when people come around searching for that truth, I tell them. The one thing that does bother me these days is that just about everyone still sees Jack as the town drunk who’s nothing but a nuisance.

He’s not.

Jack makes efforts every day to get his life back together. He says it’s for me but I hope it’s for him too. He deserves some normalcy. He deserves the chance he didn’t get when he was younger.

Finn and I finish our tea and clean up the yard. I tell Geneva I’ll be by to finish painting tomorrow and she kisses me on the cheek.

“You’re a good man, Cooper Shaw.”

I don’t answer her and I don’t nag her about whether she’s taken her supplements the local healer prescribed to help with her memory either. She knows better than to skip them. I just wave goodbye and take Finn with me back to the house where we spend a nice quiet, uneventful evening watching T.V.

When it’s time for bed, I tell Finn I’ll meet her upstairs and I make my nightly rounds throughout the house, turning off lights and locking doors.

A lot of things have changed with the new house.

There’s no secret room upstairs anymore but I do keep Mom’s things tucked into special places, here and there.

The wind chime that used to hang out front now hangs just over the kitchen sink. I smile every time I hear it ring.

The rowan tree still grows out back. The construction workers offered to pull it down when they started the rebuild. They said it was almost dead anyway but something told me I should to keep it.

It’s in full bloom again now. Like it’s found new hope. I’m having a guest room built right next to it for Jack.

Finn and I don’t hear glass breaking from anywhere in the house anymore, either. I don’t know what to think of that, honestly, but I try not to. I’m too busy counting my blessings these days to worry about whether or not our finding Ben’s body had anything to do with the ghostly encounters Finn and I had here.

I remember more and more about Mom every day it seems, but there are still so many things to learn about her, too. There are questions that still need to be answered, and even though I’ve come a long way since the guy who thought everything had a logical explanation, I’m not a hundred percent sure if I believe in all things supernatural.

I think about the woman waiting for me upstairs right now, how I plan to make her my wife someday soon, and I know one thing without a shadow of a doubt.

I believe in Finn.

I believe in
us
.