Page 79 of The Women of Wild Hill
That’s why she’d put Liam Geddes on the same plane to New York. When that hadn’t worked, she’d wrecked his boat off her beach. He’d told Brigid in bed just now that he thought he might love her. It would have been ridiculous if it hadn’t sounded sincere. In Liam’s company, she felt comfortable in a way she never had before. In his bed, she’d discovered everything she’d been missing. She’d always liked sex, but it had been a mechanical operation. With Liam it felt transcendent.
She’d been looking for a word to describe what she felt for him.Loveseemed to work better than any other. And yet she despisedeverything he stood for. His media company, his politics, and most of all, the league of vile gentlemen that his father had founded.
Maybe it was punishment for leaving Wild Hill behind. Brigid had spent most of her life refusing to use the gift she’d been granted. Aunt Ivy had always told her nieces being a witch wasn’t optional. Those who shirked their responsibilities paid the price. Brigid knew that the Old One could be callous. She’d allowed her most devoted followers to be tormented, tortured, and put to death. But it was inexplicably cruel, Brigid thought, to force a woman to share the same fate as the mother she’d lost.
She finally understood how Flora must have felt in those final days. To find herself madly in love with someone despicable. It must have made her question everything—starting with her faith and her sanity. Still, Brigid envied her mother the few months of bliss she’d had with Calum. Brigid already knew her affair with Liam would end with one of them dead. She was going to be asked to kill him or sacrifice herself. Maybe both.
No, Brigid decided.Fuck that. Her mother had done what was asked of her, but she wouldn’t.
“I HOPE YOU DON’T MINDmy saying so, but that’s quite the swimsuit you’re wearing.”
A man was standing just up the beach, a smirk on his tipsy face and the last sips of a Scotch in his hand. He was in his mid-forties but remained boyishly handsome. She recognized him at once—and it seemed he knew her as well.
“Excuse me?” She would have expected a man of his age to know better than to surprise a mostly naked woman on a deserted beach. Either he was too drunk to see straight or he wanted to scare her—or worse. Or perhaps all the above. Brigid was happy he’d found her and not someone else.
“Didn’t you wear something similar inDeath Rattle? I was obsessed with that movie when it was released. I must have sneaked out to see it at least five times. After my mother found a ticket stub in my jeans pocket, my father wrote a sermon about your films and how they lured kids our age to Satan.”
“And did you find him?” Brigid asked.
“You mean Satan?” The man’s smirk spread. “No, but I would have happily sold my soul for an hour with someone like you.”
He wasn’t drunk, Brigid realized. He’d just had enough liquor to say what he wanted to.
“Someone like me? An entrepreneur? An artist? A three-timeSNLhost?”
“The kind of girl who would have made my father’s head spin.” He bit his lip as if imagining something particularly naughty. “A bad girl.”
“Ah.” Brigid smiled. “See, I’ve always preferred the termwitch.”
“Well, you certainly cast a spell on me.” He pulled in a deep breath as if to fortify himself against temptation. Then he stole a quick look over his shoulder at the house lights in the distance. “You’re Liam’s guest, aren’t you? What are you doing all the way out here on your own?”
Two sentences chock-full of meaning. She was alone and vulnerable out here, away from her protector. Only his loyalty to his host stood in his way. Brigid stifled a laugh. The motherfucker had no idea what he’d gotten himself into.
“I am Liam’s guest, but I don’t belong to anyone,” Brigid informed him. “I was about to go for a swim. And now that you’re here, I’m not alone.”
Encouraged, he stepped forward. “I’m Josh Jacobs.”
“I know,” Brigid said, planning her next move should he take another step toward her. “You’re the junior senator from Arkansas. But aren’t you supposed to have an accent?” The same man whosounded like an investment banker from Greenwich, Connecticut, was Foghorn Leghorn whenever he stepped in front of a camera.
“Back home they want to be represented by people who talk like them,” Jacobs answered with no hint of embarrassment. “That’s why I was elected—to give the people what they want. If they’d rather have a rube than a lawyer with a Yale degree, so be it. I aim to please. That’s how the game works.”
“The game?”
“That’s all it is,” he told her. “I’m in the entertainment business, just like you. Of course I wouldn’t go around saying that. But we’re all friends here, aren’t we?”
The question threw her for a moment before she remembered it wasn’t just a party—it was a meeting of a club that Calum Geddes had spent the last half of his life assembling. That she’d been invited told Jacobs they were on the same side.
“Oh, definitely.” She felt herself beaming. She’d been following Josh Jacobs’s career for a decade. Meeting him on the beach told her the Old One had been listening after all—and she’d sent poor, suffering Brigid a wonderful gift. It wouldn’t make up for Liam, but it was a pretty good start.
SHE’D FIRST HEARD JOSH JACOBS’Sname the day he took the political world by surprise, soundly defeating a popular incumbent in the Arkansas state primaries. Though the senator he eventually replaced had the third most conservative voting record in the Senate and an A+ rating from the NRA, Jacobs had successfully branded the man as a socialist. His crime? Supporting environmental laws designed to clean up the state and benefit lower-income communities at the expense of corporations. Jacobs’s attack ads featured Black, brown, and white trailer park residents thanking his opponent for sticking up for the little people. His dog whistle was heard loud and clear.
Jacobs wasn’t the sort to let moss grow on him. After he won the election by twenty points, he embarked on a crusade to overturn those same laws, roll back regulations, and defund the Environmental Protection Agency.
Not long after, one of his campaign’s corporate contributors quietly released caustic industrial chemicals into a river in the Ozarks. The summer was particularly steamy that year, and kids who lived in a trailer park less than a mile downstream from the factory spent their days in one of the river’s swimming holes. When they began coming home with strange burns, their parents told them to spend less time in the sun. But the rashes they took for sunburns refused to fade. Instead, giant blisters began to appear and ulcers formed. Then the river’s fish started floating up to the surface, their scales and skin peeling off. By the time anyone thought to test the water, two dozen children were left disfigured by the chemical burns. Three died from infections.
The second the media got a whiff of the scandal Josh Jacobs was immediately on the scene, blaming everyone but the guilty parties. He shed crocodile tears while talking to reporters. He sat with the children in the hospital. He cursed the president of the United States for being too high and mighty to visit the afflicted. Soon, the country had grown bored of the story. Jacobs slithered back to Washington unscathed. The laws he’d fought against were not reinstated. The children and their families were left to fend for themselves. The company paid each family a few grand and washed their hands of the controversy. With the regulations still lifted, their profits soared. A rare species of trout went extinct.
“SO I TAKE IT YOUknew Calum Geddes?” Brigid asked Jacobs.
