by Holley Trent
“I bet she dreams in neon colors,” he said.
“That doesn’t sound too far off-base.”
She expected him to wave goodbye, and that she’d thank him and see him to the door, but instead, Chris stood at the bedside, dark blue eyes locked at her face.
There was nothing shy or hesitant about him. Normally, that would have repulsed her—made her run—but she stared back because she couldn’t not stare. She was captivated, or perhaps magically ensnared.
And afraid.
Always afraid.
“Come on,” he whispered and tilted his head toward the open door. He hooked his thumbs into the belt loop of his jeans and tipped his head toward the door again when she didn’t move. “Let’s go,” he projected. “Let her sleep.”
“I…” She clamped her lips and tried again telepathically. “I should stay with her.”
She wasn’t used to talking to anyone but Mallory like that and she kept forgetting that in Norseton, most people could. Most people were like her, and she’d need time to adjust to the environment.
“It’s eight-thirty, Marty.”
“I should be here if she wakes.”
“I would never presume to tell you how to parent, but she’s six, and I think if she wakes up, she knows well enough to go looking for you. She’s in a safe place.”
Marty passed her tongue across her dry lips and pinned her gaze on the floor. The rug beside the bed was pretty. Navajo design. Probably expensive, not that Marty had any expertise in such things. She wasn’t used to people around her being so well off.
“How about a walk?” Chris asked. “Have you seen Norseton at night?”
She shook her head and raised her eyes.
He was moving around the bed toward her.
Instinctively, she took a step forward rather than away, then she realized what she’d done, and backed up.
“Let her sleep,” he projected. “We won’t go far.”
“I don’t know. I…”
“You’ll feel guilty?” He stopped in the doorway and looked over at the bed.
Shani’s body had relaxed, and her head had lolled to the side. Her mouth hung open to let out her tiny snores.
Marty wasn’t going to lie. She didn’t see the point of lying, so she nodded.
She hadn’t spent much time with any man, socially, since her divorce, and that had been finalized three years prior. She’d always been able to come up with a good excuse for not having to connect with anyone, and never quite the truth.
“Please.” Chris held out his hand. “Do this for me.”
“Do what for you?”
“Walk with me. Let me get to know you.”
“Why?”
She suspected it was an unintelligent question—a copout, really. She was putting herself on the defensive so he’d back down and say “Never mind.”
He held his hand out even farther and raised his chin in a dare.
He wasn’t going to let her wriggle off the hook without a better reason, apparently.
She raised an arm, tentatively, and glanced over her shoulder at Shani.
Still asleep, and snoring more quietly.
Tentatively, she put her hand in Chris’s, and let him lead her into the hall.
He closed the bedroom door softly behind them and marched her past the dining room, where he’d barely paused except to say, “We’ll be back in a bit. Going out for some air.”
They moved too quickly for Marty to see their expressions or field any queries—too quickly for Marty’s defensiveness to ramp up and for her to call a halt to the field trip.
He didn’t say anything even when they were down on the sidewalk and walking at a steady pace toward the park.
She glanced back at the building—up to the second floor and to the window she thought was the guest bedroom at Will and Erin’s—but the light didn’t come on. No sad little face appeared on the other side of the glass. Marty shouldn’t have expected there to be. She had no experience of seeing Shani watch her walk away. Since the divorce, Marty hadn’t gone out.
And I’m not really going out now. This is just a walk.
Chris pressed his hand to the palm of her back as they stepped off the curb and into the street.
Her reflexes had her moving closer to him as if there were some sort of string around them, pulling them taut, and she was stretching its constraints.
She fell into step with him, her side brushing his, his energy prickling over her flesh. Her skin felt as if it were glowing with a low-simmering heat, and her lips…
I’m smiling. Why the hell am I smiling?
“This gazebo has been here forever.” Chris guided her down the path, past Shani’s nemesis playground, and toward the white, octagonal structure with the dark violet roof and the mosaic floor.
Marty had admired that floor as she’d sat in the gazebo, supervising Shani at play. The tiles created a picture and the scene had been ripped out of an epic. A Viking longboat. A storm. A missed port.
“Do you know the story?” Chris asked quietly.
Marty had no idea how long she’d been standing near the step staring at tiles, but minutes must have passed. The configuration of cars parked at the curb in front of the shops across the street was different.
And Chris was sitting.
He sat on the other side of the gazebo with his forearms leaned onto his knees, his smile soft.
Sighing, she crossed the structure and took one of the benches adjacent to him. “How long was I standing there like that?”
He shrugged. “Doesn’t matter.”
“I disagree. Usually when people zone out for minutes at a time, the people who notice try to rouse them.”
“But we’re not normal people.”
“Excuse me?”
“Not normal people, Marty. We’re Afótama.”
“I’m…half that.” Whatever that means. “And you say that as if being Afótama excuses my behavior.”
“You’re Afótama. Half. Whole. Whatever. We don’t really keep count.”
“Bullshit. Everyone counts amounts. Counting and ensuring sameness is a natural human response. People accept what’s familiar and predictable.”
Chris laced his fingers and lowered his gaze to the tiny tiles. “Ótama…she wasn’t, isn’t, a woman who keeps count. Her husband wasn’t like her. He was an outsider. He wasn’t the man her parents would have had her marry. He had no power, no magic, and yet she gave up everything to be with him because he was right for her.”
“That man got her killed. Their love got her killed. So, what’s that tell you?”
Chris didn’t respond. He turned his face slightly, seeming to look at a different spot on the picture on the floor—in the general vicinity of the stylized storm. It was a large section of tiny gray X’s impeding the ship’s passage.
But for the first time since arriving, she noticed hidden symbols. In the middle of that panel of X’s were four gray tiles that had white hearts. As many times as Marty had been in that gazebo in the past week and had stared at that floor, she hadn’t noticed the hearts.
“They say that there’s a purpose to every partnership,” Chris said. “And that there are no mistakes with matches. Not even Ótama’s, in spite of how that voyage ended.”
“She’s an outlier.” Marty’s argument seemed weak, even to her, but she’d had to make that one point. Ótama had been, and was, a powerful witch who’d been granted a second chance at life, and among her descendants, at that. Marty wouldn’t dare compare herself to a woman of Ótama’s legacy.
Chris moved closer, abandoning his bench for hers, and slinging his arm along the bench back behind her. “So are you.”
“In my case, that’s not a good thing.” She sat ramrod straight, gripping her thighs tightly, and looking anywhere but at Chris, but she couldn’t escape his gaze. Not really. She could feel it on her—assessing her.
And she wanted to know what he thought when he looked at her like that. She’d spen
t so much of the past five years maintaining that she didn’t care what any man thought, but he’d flipped the script somehow. She didn’t understand. She just knew it was true.
Magic?
“The school here,” he said, just as quietly as before, “is a good one.”
She still couldn’t look at him. She settled her gaze at the red and white stripes of the ship’s sail—the community’s unofficial pattern, she’d noticed. Many of the shop awnings and porch flags bore those colors.
“Shani would fit in well. She’s outgoing and curious. Her cousins are already there, and I don’t imagine she’d have any problems making friends.”
Shani had never had her mother’s problem with that.
Marty patted down the curly bump in front of her ponytail and risked a glance at Chris.
He was staring at her dead-on, his expression serious and expectant.
She pulled her gaze back to the floor and to her sneakers that were still stained on the sides from the red desert soil she’d tromped through during a recent hike with Shani and the other kids. They’d been so happy. They’d been relaxed and confident. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen her niece and nephews laughing so much. Being in Norseton was obviously good for them. Mallory kept saying the same would be true for Shani, but Marty had never been as optimistic in her risk-taking as her sister. Since their father’s deception, she’d been even less likely to take risks.
“Shani always lands on her feet,” Marty mused, mostly to herself, but also because she needed some control of the conversation that she didn’t know the direction of. Further, she needed something to distract her from Chris. Moving a couple of feet might have been a good first step to clearing her mind, but she didn’t want to move. She wanted to stay in his prickling proximity even if he were making her stomach knot and her mouth dry because that nervous feeling was still a far cry better than anything she’d felt in longer than she cared to remember.
“She’s a brave and resilient little girl,” he said. “And what about you?” His fingertips glided across the skin over her neckband, across her spine to her opposite shoulder.
His touch titillated, made her muscles contract and lungs constrict. It made her heart race and blood pool in her breasts and lower down.
She squeezed her thighs together even tighter and forced a swallow down her constricted throat. “Wh-what about me?”
“Are you brave enough to see if you’ll land on your feet, too?”
“No.” She didn’t even have to think about the answer, and the ease with which she’d spoken her truth frightened her. Only Mallory had been privy to Marty’s fears in the past five years, and not even she knew all of them.
Chris cupped her chin and tipped her face toward him.
Everything about him was warm. His hands, his expression, and his eyes—in spite of the blueness of them.
She leaned into the touch, closing her eyes and letting herself pull in a deep breath, finally.
“My job is to see to it that you do.”
His words were in her head and yet he hadn’t spoken aloud. He could do that—that weird psychic shit she’d always thought made her and Mallory so unique. They weren’t unique. They were just parts of a bigger thing.
Marty needed desperately to understand that thing.
“How is it your job?” she asked him, opening her eyes in time to see him gave his head a brief, eloquent shake.
“You’re acting like I’m supposed to know,” she projected.
“Because I think this is obvious to you, and that you don’t want to try to digest it.”
“Maybe the knowledge isn’t so obvious, then.”
“Maybe not. You weren’t raised here. Maybe you don’t know what’s possible, but you should still be feeling what I do. You’re Afótama. You should recognize me.”
“I’ve never seen you before today.”
“Do you recognize me, Marty? Don’t think about it. Yes or no.”
“I don’t understand why you’d ask that. Of course I recognize you. You were at the hospital earlier.”
“No, I mean on a deeper level than that. Are you drawn to me? Do I make you feel safe?”
“Yes, but—”
“Marty. Please. Don’t try to explain it away. Stop trying to tamp down what your instincts should be telling you.”
“My instincts don’t make sense,” she said aloud. “How could I possibly trust anything when—”
Chris didn’t let her finish. His mouth was on hers. He ate her words. His tongue silenced the objection she would have spoken. His hands, one moving down her back and the other twining around her ponytail, extinguished her body’s tiny resistance.
“You being here now isn’t a random occurrence. You had to come home. You belong here, just like I do. I’ll help you.”
“You’ll…help me?” She gave herself over to him, her lips, her body, her will, and just…let things be for once.
The fact it felt so good scared the hell out of her.
CHAPTER FIVE
“So…beautiful.” He pulled her full bottom lip between his teeth and let it snap back, then brushed his tongue across where they must have stung. “Been in my dreams. Torturing me.”
Chris’s primary goal was to make Marty understand that she was his, and that he was hers. Maybe kissing her hadn’t been the best way to go about that. After all, she’d known him less than a day, but slow and steady could possibly break him. He’d had a ten-month tease of her and needed resolution.
“Me?” she queried.
“I hoped you were real, and then there you were in the emergency room. Kiss me back.”
She tensed against him, but before she could let any doubt settle into her thoughts, he projected, “I’m safe, Marty. You know that. Stop questioning.”
“Real life doesn’t work like that.”
“You’re a witch. Stop trying to apply human standards to what’s possible for the Afótama.”
“A…witch.”
“That’s what you are. What we all are. Varied and unique.” He danced the tip of his tongue across the bow of her lips and grinned at her little sigh.
“I don’t have any magic, Chris. Not like…not like the people here.”
“Bullshit.”
“I think I’d know.”
“You already know I’m yours. That’s magic. That sureness is because of magic. And I know you have more besides that. You know things.”
Marty scoffed and pulled a bit away from him. “You’re mine? You don’t even know me.”
He growled low and reclaimed the space she’d put between them. “Right now, I know everything that’s important.”
“Such as?”
“Such as you wanting very much to belong to someone who’ll stick because you’re used to people drifting away.” He slid his tongue across the sweet spot in the middle of her bottom lip and sucked the enticing thing into his mouth. If he had his way, he’d consume all of her, right there in that public gazebo—he’d sate himself and put out the fire within and not care what any onlookers thought. Restraint was important, though. She was already tentative, already worried about Afótama clanspeople’s opinions of her.
Her breath came out in thready pants. She tipped her chin up, baring her neck for him. He slid his lips down the elegant line and kissed where the slope joined with her shoulder. Nudging her collar aside, he tasted more of her warm skin, and slipped his other hand around to her back to lift her shirt.
She caught his hand as he moved it up against her spine, but she didn’t push him away. She just held her hand against his, her body tense, breathing frozen, thoughts an incoherent muddle.
He understood.
Touching her made understanding her much easier. “You don’t like how fast I’m moving,” he whispered against her ear.
“This isn’t proper.”
“Because you’ve had a child? You think people’s attraction to you turned off just because you had a baby?”
“
I didn’t just have a baby. I’m raising that baby, and on my own. Maybe reputation isn’t important to you, but it means something to me. I’ve got enough strikes against me already. I don’t even know you. For all I know, you’ve fucked every woman in Norseton, and when people look at me with you, they’re thinking I’m your next conquest.”
“Why would you assume I’ve fucked every woman here?”
She scoffed again and finally pulled his hand out of her shirt.
She put some distance between them—moved one bench away, and then another—and sat up straight, entwining her fingers atop her lap. “I know your type.”
“Excuse me?”
“I mean, look at you. You’ve got that All-American boy thing going for you. Women probably trip over sidewalk cracks when they see you smile, and God forbid you pay any attention to them whatsoever. They might just drop their pants then and there.”
“I can assure you that’s never happened.”
She closed one eye and rolled the other.
“It hasn’t.”
“You get my point.”
He shook his head, then relaxed, and draped his arms over the bench back. “I think you know better than that. Am I chaste? Nah. Hard to be Afótama and thirty-five years old and not need to take someone to bed every now and then. We crave touch. I assure you, though, that if you’re with me, you won’t need to worry about there being a queue of women lining up to take a chunk out of you.”
“So, you’ve been trawling for ass outside of Norseton.”
He winced.
“No response, doctor?”
“I don’t know what to tell you, Marty. I suspect that the truth doesn’t align with what you want to hear.”
“I don’t care, anyway.”
“Don’t lie to me, sweetheart. Don’t even try. You’re not going to get away with it.”
“Whatever.” She stood, strode to the edge of the gazebo platform, and then stepped down onto the path before he could draw her back.
So he just followed, keeping behind her a few feet—not so far that she couldn’t sense he was there, but not so close that he was invading her space.
In due time, she’d want him in her space if she didn’t already. That was inevitable for their kind, and he saw the transitions in other fated matches. Queen Tess was practically inseparable from her chieftains. Will rarely left Erin’s side, even for work. In fact, they worked together. In the past month, Chris had almost never seen the queen’s cousin Nadia without one of her lovers or the other, and that had surprised the hell out of him initially. Nadia was one of the most closed-off clanspeople he’d ever encountered. He’d never seen her with anyone else before Jeff or Thom, but she wasn’t shy about showing that she’d made a claim on those two.
