Dee arched a bit to give him better access. It seemed as if her breasts anticipated him, already tingling and taut and heavy. Please, she thought in desperation. Take them in your hands. Take them in your mouth and suckle so hard I feel it in my toes.

He must have heard her again. He set his mouth to her and feasted.

‘I’d love to… oh… ah, go to Giverny. What about… oh, yes… Tahiti? If I’m following great painters I should… go…’

Her gown was at her waist, and his mouth was on her breast. She couldn’t keep her eyes open or her hands still. She measured his back, his strong, lean back, and traced those lovely biceps. She fought that ember when it sparked. But then Danny nipped at her breasts with his teeth, and she forgot control.

‘Tahiti,’ he said, taking her breast into his hand, ‘would be lovely. As long as you dress like a native. I want to be able to see these magnificent breasts every day.’

He licked her throat, inciting fierce chills.

‘My breasts are too small.’

‘Shut up. Your breasts are perfect.’

And to prove it, he devoured them all over again. Dee didn’t mind losing that argument. She was melting, the wicked witch in water. Sliding down to lie on the blanket with Danny following her as he traced her arms, her hips, her legs with his wonderfully callused hands. As he slid the dress completely off.

‘Not fair,’ she gasped, arching with the pressure of his palm against her belly. ‘You’re the only one in clothes here.’

‘Easily remedied.’

Immediately remedied. She’d thought he’d looked impressive before. It was nothing to Danny James rampant.

‘Dear Mother of God,’ Dee breathed, unconsciously mimicking his earlier words. ‘Do you think you’re appropriate for a virgin? I mean, shouldn’t I start out on something smaller and work my way up?’

Danny burst out laughing. ‘You do know how to make a man happy.’ He lay down next to her, nestling skin to skin, just as she’d dreamed. ‘Now, relax. It’s a man’s work I have before me this day.’

She groaned. Another John Wayne… oooooohhhhhh…

He kissed her, slowly and sweetly and absolutely sinfully. He fitted himself against her, shoulders to toes, so she couldn’t be confused about how happy he was to be there. He let his hand drift from breast to belly to mons.

‘Open for me, Dee. Let me give you as much pleasure as you give me.’

Dee wasn’t sure her legs worked properly, but she did her best to oblige. And gasped again when she felt his hand on her inner thigh. When he slipped his fingers into her.

‘God,’ he moaned. ‘You’re so beautiful. You’re so wet for me. Feel it?’

Feel it? She was writhing with it, stunned with the sudden shaft of pure, sweet pleasure his fingers unleashed. It consumed her, sweeping away every other thought or action. She couldn’t speak, couldn’t breathe, and he was still tormenting her with the most cunning fingers ever attached to a hand. He slid a finger inside, then two. Pleasure speared through her, igniting unquenchable holocausts, freezing and burning her at once, confusing her body, her power, so she didn’t know how to gauge her danger. So she couldn’t care.

But oh, his hands. His mouth. His sweet, hot breath fanning across breasts dampened by his tongue. His words, raw words of need and want, promising, pleading, propelling her to new agonies.

‘Danny… please…’

She was scrabbling at him, sobbing and cursing, fighting the inevitable explosion. It was coming, and he wouldn’t allow her to rest, to hide from it. She was going to change.

God, her body had to be glowing with the building power. She had to be too close to stop it.

‘Close your eyes…’ she begged. ‘Oh, close your… ooooooh… my… God…!’

Cataclysms, catastrophes, colors that simply didn’t exist in the universe spun within her, gathering, intensifying until she couldn’t stop moving, until she couldn’t stop begging, until, suddenly, she disintegrated into shards of light and color and sound, gasping and weeping and bucking hard against Danny’s touch, convulsing into the night sky like fireworks on the Fourth of July.

She was panting like a long distance runner, and she knew tears ran down her cheeks. ‘Never,’ she admitted, ‘this has never…’

‘Well, it will again,’ he promised, still stroking her. ‘And there’s even better.’

‘There can’t be. I’d never survive it.’ She opened her eyes and almost came right off the blanket. ‘Oh, no! I told you to close your eyes.’

Danny easily held her to him. ‘Why should I, and miss the most beautiful sight ever?’ His smile was so bright, so wicked. ‘You in the throes of orgasm.’

He was acting as if nothing had happened that wasn’t natural.

Dee frowned, still struggling with the aftershocks that shuddered along her limbs. ‘But I’ve shifted.’

‘Shifted? Into what?’

Dee caught her breath. The idea was inconceivable. ‘Who do I look like?’

Danny brushed her hair away from her damp forehead. ‘Persephone.’

Suddenly she was sobbing, and she couldn’t stop. ‘I’m me?’ she demanded. ‘I’m really me?’

He looked so confused, so concerned. He kept stroking her, soothing her sobs. ‘There’s nobody else I’d be making love to.’

‘Oh, Danny.’ She laughed and cried at once. ‘Make love to me.’ She took his face in her hands. ‘Banish the dust bunnies. Please.’

‘With pleasure.’

He kissed her, mouth and breast and the tender, sleek skin he’d just been torturing with his fingers. He stoked those terrible fires all over again until Dee couldn’t breathe well enough to beg. And then he lifted himself over her and nudged her legs open and kissed her hard, plunging his tongue deep in her mouth, stroking her to incandescence, and then he slid into her, tight into her, impossibly large for her, and he gentled her and incited her and brought her right back to a shattering, gasping climax at the very moment he plunged home, past the slight resistance that didn’t matter after all, so deep into her that she thought she’d die, that she thought she had died, and he pumped into her, slowly at first, but gathering speed, murmuring delight to her, murmuring encouragement and gratitude and love as she felt the pleasure spiral yet again to impossible heights, matching him move for move, murmur for murmur until she convulsed, screaming, and he emptied himself into her, emptied the last of him into her, and fell into her arms, spent and struggling for breath.

‘I really look like me?’ she asked a few minutes later as she stroked his hair where he’d rested his head between her breasts.

‘Like no one else.’

She chuckled. ‘Oh, hell. Now I’ll never be able to convince you that I’m a shapeshifter’

And then she slept, with Danny James in her arms, up on the mountain where the witches danced.


At eleven o’clock, Crash climbed the rickety trellis again and found Mare waiting for him on the roof, dressed in her Corpse Bride dress and holding two DQ hot fudge sundaes. Py was stretched out at her feet, eyeing the cups.

‘You look great,’ he said, sitting down beside her, using every ounce of self-control he had not to touch her.

‘Thank you for coming,’ she said, primly. ‘That was very forgiving of you.’

He looked at her, round in the moonlight, smiling at him. ‘Not that much to forgive.’

The moonlight was bright enough that he could see straight through that blue tulle to her spectacular legs, long strong legs, and the urge to run his hand up under that skirt was damn near overpowering. He reached for his sundae instead, but she cocked her head at him, holding it out of his reach. ‘So that’s all it takes? I call up and say, “I’m sorry,” and you come back?’

‘What am I, stupid?’ Crash said, ‘Of course that’s all it takes. ‘This is True Love. You think this happens every day?’

‘Princess Bride,’ she said. ‘I don’t know why anybody ever quotes any other movie.’

‘Well, there are other really good ones.’ Crash closed his eyes to keep from lunging for her since he was sure he was in a good place right now. Mare smiling at him was always a good place. ‘Can I have my sundae now?’

She stuck her chin out. ‘You remember what I tried to tell you last night? That I was magic?’

‘Mare, I have always believed you were magic,’ Crash said.

‘Uh-huh. Here’s your sundae.’

Crash reached out, but the sundae floated over to him of its own accord, bobbing along on the cool night air, ignoring the stiff breeze that was still promising the storm to come.

He froze for a moment, watching it hover in front of him, while Mare took the lid off her sundae and spooned up the first bite as if nothing unusual were happening. His stayed just out of reach, moving up and down, side to side, back and forth, as if sliding on invisible strings. It had to be a trick, he told himself, but when it slid closer to him, he ran his hands around it, trying to find the supports and couldn’t.

‘You’re good,’ he said finally. ‘How do you do that?’

‘Magic.’ Mare spooned up more sundae.

He took his and still couldn’t find the wires that had held it up. ‘You’re really good. Got a spoon?’

The spoon floated over to him, too, spinning in lazy circles until it arrived at his cup and stuck itself into the ice cream.

Okay, that was beyond good. Granted, he never did think clearly when he was with Mare, but this… He looked over at her.

She looked back at him calmly, heat in her eyes.

‘My uncle used to do magic tricks,’ he said, staring at the sundae and the spoon and then at her again. ‘Nothing like this.’

‘I didn’t say “trick,”‘ Mare said carefully. ‘I said “magic.” I’m magic. My family is magic. I’m psychokinetic. Dee’s a shapeshifter. And Lizzie transmutes things. She’s trying to turn straw into gold right now. That’s why the shed roof hums.’

Crash looked at the sundae again, took a deep breath, and dug the spoon into the ice cream. Mare was not crazy. She was odd, she did and said odd things, that was one of the reasons he loved her. But this… ‘Shapeshifter?’

‘Usually some kind of bird. She’s into flying. I think it’s a metaphor for her need to escape, but that’s just me.’ Mare licked her spoon, sounding very matter-of-fact, but his mind latched on to the ‘licking the spoon’ part as something pleasurable and understandable and much preferable to ‘My sister is a shapeshifter,’ and it was with real regret that he dragged his mind back to the part he was going to have to deal with.

‘Straw into gold.’

Mare nodded. ‘That’s Lizzie’s big project. She does smaller things. Like when she gets nervous, she turns things into rabbits. On bad days, we’re up to our asses in bunnies. If she’s turned on, it’s shoes. Usually, whatever she transmutes turns back on its own. Sometimes it doesn’t.’

Py lifted his big head and stared at Crash, his golden eyes solemn in the darkness, and Crash began to believe against his will because those were not house cat eyes.

‘Where did you say Lizzie found Py?’

‘The zoo.’

‘Right.’ He rubbed his forehead with his hand. ‘Let’s try this again.’

‘We come from a long line of witches,’ Mare said, as if they were having a completely normal conversation. ‘No real trouble aside from the odd pond ducking and one burning at the stake.’ Her voice darkened. ‘We ever get time travel, somebody’s gonna pay for that one.’

Crash took a deep breath. ‘Uh-huh.’

Mare scooped up more ice cream. ‘Our aunt Xan convinced Dad and Mom to go on TV and we ended up the Little Miss Fortunes, and you’d have thought somebody would have seen the play on words there, wouldn’t you? But no, and the show was a success, but then something went wrong, and there was a fraud conviction, and Mom and Dad asked Xan to take their powers for some reason, and she took too much and they died.’

Crash straightened at the bleakness in her voice there. That wasn’t magic, that was real, he knew that part, and suddenly her whole preoccupation with Xan began to make sense, magic or not. ‘Dee took us and ran from her, and it’s been thirteen years on the run since then, what with all kinds of people wanting to get hold of us.’

‘Hold of you,’ Crash said, losing all appetite for his ice cream. He put the cup down for Py, having a feeling that anything he could do to make Py like him might pay off big in the future.

‘We were the Miss Fortunes,’ Mare said. ‘Very big deal. Especially for Aunt Xan. All those powers, you know?’

‘I’m starting to. That’s the secret you could never tell me?’ Okay, she thought she was magic. Except there was that spoon spinning around and sticking in the cup. So maybe she was magic.