Page 71 of Vengefully Matched

She smiled, and then frowned at the table when she found herself almost touching Agatha’s other elbow. Damn this matchmaking table and its shrinking ways.

“I never knew you were a bagel kind of gal. I, for some reason, thought muffin.”

“I do love muffins too,” said Agatha. “If it’s a carb, it’s for me.”

Prissy smiled. She loved learning more about Agatha like this. Not just her breakfast preferences, but the time she spent organizing and planning and preparing to juggle the Council business smoothly. The more she knew, the less Priscilla felt that she knew, and the more suspicion nagged at her mind that perhaps Agatha did make a good president.

Perhaps she did deserve the position she had won.

Prissy had spent so long telling herself that she’d only lost because of the vitriol she’d faced after leaving Evelyn, because of the assumption some people made, out loud, even, that she had purposefully broken the woman’s heart to drive her back to England and try to snag her job.

That wasn’t why she’d broken things off with Evelyn. And she wasn’t falling for Agatha for the presidency. Prissy simply enjoyed two things: being a powerful woman and fucking one.

She’d misjudged Agatha. Prissy had thought that she was weak because of her kindness and sunshiny demeanor and enthusiasm. But the truth of the matter was, she was beginning to see that Agatha’s kindness was a strength. That Agatha’s ability to remain optimistic was a skill well suited to her office. That perhaps politicians who fantasized about cruelty and doing harm were not what the world needed. That people like Agatha, people who looked at the world and saw the beauty of its bones, were people worth knowing. Worth cherishing.

She wanted to tell Agatha, one day, what a damn fine president she made.

But in the long line of things she needed to admit, that was low priority, because what was really pressing on her mind and on her body was how she felt about Agatha Vanderbilt Voisin, the woman, not the job.

She knocked on the guest room door. When Agatha didn’t answer right away, she thought about leaving, but the thing was, she didn’t want to leave. Not unless Agatha wanted her to.

“Agatha? I can come back later if this isn’t a good time.”

Priscilla wasn’t proud of it, but she pressed her ear against the door, and, in true Hart Manor fashion, she swore it got easier to hear through.

She heard water running. Agatha was in the shower.

As soon as Agatha had walked into the guest room, the house had sprouted a full adjoining bathroom, which was not something she’d ever seen it do, though it had once grown a new bathtub in Azrael’s bathroom for Vickie, but this was a full room, tub, shower, and toilet, with a gorgeous marble-topped double sink framed by vanity lights that could have fit right into old Hollywood.

Hart Manor liked Agatha, liked her in a way that it had only ever loved the Harts and Victoria, and Priscilla had been turning that over in her mind the last two weeks that Agatha had lived here—stayed here, she reminded herself—trying to make sense of what it did to her heart.

Could your house tell you when you’d met your soul’s match, the one person it would be willing to grow around, that you ought to be willing to grow around too?

The thought was a lot, and today wasn’t about her, so she leaned once more, and knocked.

“I need your help with something,” she began, but Hart Manor wasn’t satisfied to simply grow Agatha a new room.

The door shifted, vanishing for a moment, retreating into a pocket in the wall that had not been there a moment earlier, and Priscilla landed on the floor with an ungraceful thump. She was fortunate that the house had also grown Agatha a lush pastel pink carpet to go with a sunrise mural behind her bed.

It was like waking up at dawn in there, she thought, until she heard Agatha scream.

“Are you all right?” Priscilla sat up and Agatha darted out of the bathroom, clad only in a large towel clutched closed but inching toward blowing Priscilla’s entire mind.

“How did you get in here?” Agatha sounded breathless, cheeks flushed. What had she been doing in the shower? Any possible answer made lust burrow sharply in Priscilla’s stomach, creeping lower, throbbing, threatening to undo her.

“The house is fucking with me,” Priscilla muttered. “There was a door, then there wasn’t a door.”

Agatha looked from Priscilla to the now-totally-normal door, eyebrows raised, and the carpet swayed, as though the house was laughing at her.

“If you wanted to come in my room, you could just say so, chérie,” said Agatha. Her voice was low, and her eyes were wide, that shocking blue temporarily short-circuiting Prissy’s ability to think.

“It was the house,” she managed. “It has opinions.”

The other woman smiled, shaking her head, as though she didn’t believe it.

She took a step toward Priscilla, mouth opening to say something, but the bathroom door slammed shut behind her, catching the towel firmly, and for a split second, she stood in all her naked glory, too startled to even attempt to cover herself.

Priscilla knew she should look away, but she wasn’t made of stone, and she couldn’t look away immediately. Good goddess, Agatha was fucking beautiful, a Renaissance painting, like Venus rising from the clamshell, except her breasts could put even Botticelli’s masterpiece to shame. She was all curves of flesh that Priscilla needed to dig her fingers into, from the thick slope of her thigh to the soft expanse of her stomach and her lush, full breasts, areolas big enough that fitting them in her mouth would be laughable, like trying to swallow an orange. Her nipples were tight, and Prissy wanted to roll them between her fingers, to work her mouth around them, to bury her face between Agatha’s tits and her hand between her legs like she was some sort of horny teenager again, searching the internet for soft-core porn.