God bless her, Devyn was a wonderful sister, but Allie needed her to go away—now. “I’m fine,” she called, the desperation clear in her voice. “We’ll be down in a few minutes.”

“A few minutes?” Marc repeated and shook his head. “Not for what I have in mind.”

“Make that an hour,” Allie hollered.

From the other side of the door, Dev grumbled, “Pass the brain bleach,” before her footsteps retreated briskly down the hall.

As if nothing had happened, Marc squeezed Allie’s inner thigh and began kissing a trail along her jawline. “If you missed me so much,” he said, “why didn’t you call?”

Allie was pretty sure she’d prepared an answer for that, but all the blood had left her head and traveled south. After a moment’s hesitation, she told him, “I wanted you to come to me.”

Which was the truth, more or less.

“It worked, didn’t it?” he said. “I couldn’t stay away.” With a challenge in his eyes, he used the dull edge of his thumbnail to draw swirls along the inside seam of her panties. “So now that I’m here, what else do you want me to do?”

Heat crept into her face, but she was too far gone to stay quiet. “Touch me, like before.”

He licked his lips and glanced down at the hand moving beneath her skirt. Again, he tucked his thumb beneath her panties and skimmed her with a whisper graze. “Like this?” he asked. “Or . . .” Gingerly, he pinched her slick bud between two fingers and slid them up and down, sparking to life a thousand nerve endings that lit her up like the Fourth of July. “Like this?”

Allie’s eyes rolled back and her knees gave out. Marc reacted instantly; otherwise she would have collapsed to the floor.

Pride lifted the corners of his mouth. “I guess I have my answer.” He stopped his erotic slide and speared her with a look so hot she nearly climaxed right there. “But I still want to hear you say it.” He used one thumb in a taunting tickle. “How should I touch you, Allie?”

Her voice sounded foreign to her own ears when she told him, “The second way.”

“Did you like that?”

“Yes.”

“Ask me nicely.”

She swallowed her pride and begged. “Please? Please touch me again.”

After a lingering kiss, he resumed his massage, and for the next several minutes, they each watched Marc’s wrist tendons flex as his gifted fingers rubbed sweet, mounting tension low into her belly. Both their breaths were deep and shuddering, Marc’s control clearly slipping as he thrust his erection against her thigh. But every time she skated near the brink, he’d lighten the pressure to bring her back down, promising, “When you come, I’ll be inside to feel it.”

“Now,” she said. “I want you, Marc.”

“Not yet.” He withdrew his hand and trailed a glistening index finger along her collarbone, then licked her skin clean. “I want to taste you first.” Pulling back, he glanced at her wrists, still held high above her head. “But to do that, I’ll have to let you go.”

She bit her lip and nodded, both eager and disappointed to regain control of her hands.

Marc pointed at her wrists. “Keep them where they are. No matter what happens, you don’t move. Understand?”

The dangerous timbre of his command sent a thrill through her. “Yes.”

He released her, and she rotated both wrists to restore circulation while keeping them in place. Marc knelt on the floor and shoved her skirt around her waist, then shucked off her panties and tossed them aside. While guiding her heel atop his shoulder, he glanced up as if to make sure she’d obeyed him, and only then did he lift his mouth to the juncture of her thighs.

The first lick weakened her, arms slipping an inch. Marc used his mouth with just as much skill as his fingers, but that was the problem. With each decadent suckle and lap of his tongue, Allie found it harder to support her body, let alone her hands. Eventually, she couldn’t stay vertical any longer.

“Please,” she said. “I need you.”

When Marc stood from the floor, she noted the change in him—the feral hunger in his gaze and the way he tore at the button of his jeans and jerked down his zipper. He took possession of her wrists with one hand while freeing his erection with the other. Allie widened her stance in anticipation of taking him inside her, smooth and hot and hard. In her impatience, she writhed against him, unable to wait a second longer.

Marc’s desperation must have matched hers, because he didn’t even bother to lower his pants before nudging his rounded tip inside her. At the contact, they shared a long groan, but he withdrew as abruptly as he’d entered.

“No,” she pleaded. “Don’t stop.”

Marc tipped their foreheads together and reached into his back pocket for a condom. “This will just take a second.”

“We don’t need one,” she said. More than anything, she longed to feel his warm, naked skin inside her, no barriers between them. “I’ve been on the Pill for years.”

But a tear of plastic proved he was unwilling to take the risk.

He rolled the latex down the length of his shaft and wasted no time burying himself to the base in one powerful thrust that emptied Allie’s lungs. Her disappointment vanished. All that existed was the rush of pleasure as he pinned her to the wall with his hips and slid in and out of her aching center in strokes so slow she wanted to scream.

Her breaths came in pants, her nerve endings glowing impossibly hotter while he ground a hard rotation against her, then another. Pleasure mounting, she whimpered and looked to him for release.

As always, he knew what she needed. Lazily, he traced her mouth with an index finger and stared at her in wide-eyed wonder. In that infinite moment, something beautiful passed between them. The last bit of Allie’s heart melted in surrender, every piece of her now in Marc’s possession.

He plunged deep, her lower back pounding the wall with each quick stroke. Marc never released her gaze, and as tension broke into ecstasy, her inner muscles shuddered in wild spasms that coaxed a cry from her lips. With another deep thrust, he held inside her, stiffening in his own climax. Connected as they were, both in flesh and soul, Allie didn’t think it was possible to love him any more than she did right that second.

A few breaths later, Marc moved his hands to her face and kissed her, soft and slow—the kind of kiss that told her this was more than sex for him. Finally free, she twined her arms around his neck to extend the intimacy.

“I want to be with you, Allie,” he said, still cradling her between his palms.

“I want that, too.” She pictured their future together—a thousand exquisite moments just like this one—and she wanted it so badly it hurt. Any other outcome was unthinkable.

“But I need your help.”

She listened as Marc recounted the previous days’ events, down to reading his great-great-great-uncle’s letter. She nodded and feigned surprise in all the right places, but her heart sank when he asked for assistance breaking Memère’s hex. No matter how she justified the deception, she was still lying to the man she loved.

“We’ll have to do some research,” she said, unable to meet his gaze. “I’ve never tried anything this powerful.”

He nuzzled the side of her neck. “Whatever it takes.”

Those were the words she’d wanted to hear, but Allie had to force a smile. “Don’t worry, baby. We got this.”

She had to stay strong—she loved Marc too deeply to fail him.

* * *

Twenty minutes later, a very satisfied Marc took Allie by the hand and led her downstairs to the bakery shop, where her sister was leaning over the sales counter, using one of those handheld icing bags to draw cartoon dicks onto oblong sugar cookies.

Never a dull moment around these Mauvais women.

“Secret hobby?” he asked. Knowing Devyn, she’d probably take a rolling pin to all those innocent schlongs when she was finished. “Or wishful baking?”

She rolled her eyes while piping a pair of balls beneath a member that hooked a little too far to the left. “We got a last-minute order for a bachelorette party tonight.” She slid a glare at Allie. “And since the owner was taking an extended break, I got stuck with this glamorous job.”

“Oops,” Allie said with an apologetic grin. “Thanks for being on top of it.”

“While you were under it,” Devyn muttered. “But no problem. It’s my lifelong dream to sit around all day drawing dicks.”

“Let me help.” Allie filled another bag with white icing and began frosting the tip of each cookie.

Marc frowned at the implication. “That’s disturbing.”

“This is nothing,” Allie said. “Once I had to bake a giant red velvet penis cake—with cream filling inside.”

“Classy.” Who knew women had such dirty minds? “Why don’t you give me that voodoo book you were talking about so I can research spells while you two give those cookies their happy ending?”

Allie jerked her head toward the far end of the counter. “Second cabinet from the end. But be careful; it’s older than mummy dust.”

She was right. The volume of yellowed journal pages was hand-stitched together and bound in something that looked like aged burlap stretched over wood. A chill skittered down his spine when he rested it on the counter and opened the front cover.

“What am I looking for?” he asked.

Allie turned to her sister. “What do you think? Lave tet?”

“Nah, that takes three days.” Devyn focused on her cookie art until she’d finished another wang, then turned a thoughtful gaze to the ceiling. “A smudge stick cleansing with extra gifts for Memère might be enough. We can always try the lave tet if that doesn’t work.”