He grinned. “Yeah, I thought you’d like that.”
Ellis returned and stretched out next to them. He leaned in and kissed her, his hands playing with her nipples and adding even more of a delicious ache to her clit.
“Don’t worry, baby,” Brad said. “I’m going to keep doing this until you give in and give me just one more.”
She dug her fingers into his shoulders, unable to believe her body was still capable of responding to them, much less that she suspected they were going to get another orgasm out of her.
More proof I was meant to be here.
And that was her last conscious thought before Brad picked up the pace a little and managed to trigger one more avalanche inside her. She let out a cry, muffled by Ellis’ mouth.
“That’s our girl,” Brad said. He began fucking her hard and fast, each stroke only keeping her own orgasm going until she thought she couldn’t take it anymore. With one final thrust his body went rigid, his cock buried deep inside her as he groaned.
Ellis lifted his mouth from hers.
“And that, folks,” Brad joked as he leaned down and kissed her, “is a wonderful way to end an evening.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Mandaline actually managed to get out of bed Wednesday morning without being molested by her men only because she woke up before them. She was already out of the shower and dressed and downstairs working on putting the order away by the time they got out of bed.
Brad wandered downstairs looking like a pouty boy. “No fair.” He pulled her in for a kiss.
“Yes fair,” she said, smiling. “I have readings this morning. I need to clear my mind, not have my brains bonked out. I’ll make it up to you tonight.”
He surveyed the stock they still had to put away. “Looks like it bred and multiplied over night.”
“You never know. We are a magick shop. It might have.” She released him after giving him another kiss.
When she went upstairs to refill her coffee, she met Ellis coming out of the shower and gave him a kiss, too. “Morning.”
His blue eyes sparkled as his cock hardened. “No fair.”
She burst out laughing. “You guys reading from the same script? That’s what he said downstairs.”
“No.” He pointed at his cock. “I just rubbed one out in the shower and you got me all excited again.”
“Aww, poor guy. Like I told him, I’ll make it up to both of you tonight.”
He gave her another kiss before letting her go. “Fair enough. I have an early appointment anyway.”
Wednesday night, the men piled into the Element with Sachi and Mandaline to go do the investigation. “So what exactly are we supposed to be doing tonight to help?” Ellis asked from the backseat, where he sat with Brad.
“You mean other than being great eye candy?”
“Sachi!” Mandaline scolded.
She shrugged. “What? I’m just being honest. I thought saying ‘pack animal’ or ‘equipment bitch’ would sound a little rude.”
Ellis and Brad laughed from the backseat. Mandaline felt some relief over that. Secretly, she was worried Ellis might have another freak-out during the investigation. Or at the very least that seeing what she did up close and personal might totally turn him off of a relationship with her.
But the only way to find out was to see what happened.
I have to believe.
“You know,” Sachi continued, “you should be thanking me, boss. The fact that I haven’t scared them off yet says a lot about their character.”
Mandaline gripped the steering wheel a little harder and tried to ignore her friend. “To answer your question,” she said to Ellis, “you two can help us get the equipment set up. It’s not that hard. You saw most of what we’re doing tonight when we were at your house. We’ll do an initial walk-through with the homeowner, find out what they’re experiencing and where, and go from there.”
“Do you think there’s anything supernatural going on?” he asked.
She hesitated before answering, weighing his tone first for any hint of sarcasm. She found none. “I don’t know. Percentage-wise, probably not. We can almost always find something completely benign as the reason. Or we might find something we can’t explain, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s supernatural in origin.”
“When was the last time you found something really supernatural?”
She glanced in the rearview mirror. “I’d consider Julie coming to both me and Brad after her death supernatural. And obviously Julie experienced something not of this world over in Croom before she was murdered.”
“Ouch,” Sachi grumbled from the passenger seat. “That was harsh even by my standards. Go a little easier on him, boss.”
Mandaline took a deep breath. “Sorry.”
“No, it’s okay,” Ellis said. “I deserved it. If you’d heard me the other night, you wouldn’t be defending me right now.”
“He’s right,” Brad agreed. “He was an asshole.” Mandaline glanced in the mirror and spotted his playful grin. “But he got better,” he said in a fake British accent.
“Just to let you know, in case you like, lose your brain or something, I’m calling permanent dibs on both of them,” Sachi joked. “They’re cute and they like quoting Monty Python. You tell me they like skeet, too, and I’m stealing them.”
They easily found Marjorie Caswell’s home. Tucked at the end of a cul-de-sac, it wasn’t much different from the other well-kept homes in her deed-restricted community. Steam wafted from the pavement, which had been thoroughly soaked earlier by afternoon thunderstorms.
“Let’s go do a walk-through before we unload any equipment,” Mandaline said as she shut the engine off. “I want to make sure she’s not just suffering dementia or something.”
Marjorie met them at the door with a smile. “Thank you all for coming.” She led them inside to a neatly kept living room. “I really hope you can convince Gerald to move on.”
“Could you show us around?” Mandaline asked. “We’d like to get a feel for the house, and where you’re experiencing the phenomenon.”
Marjorie looked a little confused. “I’m not sure where it happens. Just that I’m hearing it.”
“Maybe you’d better start at the beginning,” Mandaline suggested.
“Well, we bought this house fifteen years ago and moved in. Gerald was very much a creature of habit. If we weren’t going out with friends or something, he always wanted to eat dinner at seven, so that he could…” She hesitated, a smile finally breaking through. “Well, not to get too graphic, but he wanted to have time to have a constitutional, if you know what I mean, before his TV shows came on at eight.”
She looked a little sad as she clasped her hands together. “Well, Gerald had been in the Army for a lot of years. He was in artillery, and did two tours of Vietnam before he was able to retire. He was deaf as a doornail, as they say. Every night after he’d go to the bathroom, I’d hear this noise, like someone knocking on the pipes, at the same time.”
Mandaline exchanged a glance with Ellis, who looked confused. Brad, however, looked like a lightbulb had gone off inside his brain.
Marjorie continued. “I still hear that noise. It started the night he died.” She smiled. “I told him, ‘Now, Gerald, I appreciate you don’t want to go, but I’ll be all right.’ Heaven knows I spent a lot of time alone as an Army wife. I love him and miss him, but he didn’t need to hang around on my account.
“I thought maybe after a few days, he’d get tired of it and go on. But it’s still continuing!” She leaned in conspiratorially. “Now, don’t get me wrong, I love my children. But if I told them this, do you know what they’d do? They’d want to ship me off to some assisted-living facility. Or worse, make me move in with one of them! I might look frail, but I do okay. I haven’t broken any bones, I get a driving test every year to make sure I’m still safe behind the wheel, and I’m perfectly capable of adding my own bank balances.”