by Elsa Jade
She never ran away. Heck, considering her crutches, she couldn’t. She’d learned in grade school that she had to stand her ground and believe in herself when no one else would.
And anyway, hadn’t she read somewhere not to run away from wild animals?
Not that Thor was a wild animal, not at the moment anyway.
So…why did her heart keep pounding?
Regathering the shreds of her focus, she poured the purified water from the rose vial over his pricked finger and into the flask. “Now let the rose float.”
Gently, he lowered the bud. “This will work?”
She had to hope the cool flow of water would take the edge off her absurd fever. “Every element here—everything in the universe—has its own unique energy. This spell is bound on one end to you and your energy, and it’ll be a beacon to light the way home for your bear. But there’s one more element.” Setting the flask on the mirror, she swiveled away from him to rummage in the bag.
Maybe she’d find her composure in the bottom…
“A wild animal is a creature of its senses,” she lectured, trying to make the topic as dry as the desert around them. “So we need to represent taste along with the other sensations.” She handed him a thin ampule. “Break it into the flask.”
He cracked the glass, sprinkling the golden powder over the rose bud. After a whiff, he guessed, “Cinnamon and bee pollen.”
“It’s not a trap, but…a touch of bait can’t hurt.”
“Now what?” He stared down into flask.
She gestured toward the horizon. “We empowered the spell under the last of the sunlight, and we need moonlight to activate it. So now we wait.”
He sat back with a disgruntled snort. “Not one of my strengths.”
“I’m sure you have others,” she said magnanimously.
His lips quirked in that wry smile she was starting to learn to anticipate. “A few. I mentioned lifting rocks?”
“A useful skill,” she said, matching his solemn tone. “And I should know since I can barely carry even little things with my hands always full.” She nudged one of her crutches, pushing it farther from her.
He grimaced. “Sorry. I shouldn’t joke about it when you…” He gestured toward the crutch.
She scowled back at him. “Don’t,” she demanded. “I’ve found alternate ways of getting around, but the one thing I can’t get around is other people thinking they know what I can’t get past.”
He nodded slowly. “If I think more before I speak, it’s not because I think less of you. When your aunt moved to Angels Rest, leaders in the shifter community discussed what it meant to have a witches’ circle at the center of our territory. They had a lot of questions, but one thing they never questioned was her power. And if you’re destined to inherit that place, you’re obviously due the same consideration.”
“I’ll earn it on my own,” she said with a spark of indignant heat.
“I don’t question that either,” he soothed.
She settled back with a little sniff, not sure if she was more annoyed with his patronizing tone or her own indignant response. “I just had too many people tell me what they thought was good for me.” She hesitated, then added, “Even my sisters and Aunt Tilda. I know they have good intentions, probably like your father. But we already discussed how those go awry.”
“Please let me know if I ever get in your way.”
“Oh, you’ll hear me coming.”
“I’ll be listening,” he murmured.
Chapter 6
The subtle reverberation in his words rattled Thor’s vocal cords to silence. And rattled his composure too. He hadn’t meant that to sound so suggestive.
It was just the strange circumstances. Here on the mesa, the summer sun fading and the secret breath of the night wind, sitting with a witchy woman, he was tempted—just for a moment—to forget his troubles.
Which wasn’t truly an option.
He gathered himself again, not that all his pieces were available. “Is there anything I should do to give this a better chance of working?” He peered at her through the gathering gloom. “Chant or sing or something?”
She tipped her head. “You know any campfire songs?”
“No campfires this time of year,” he cautioned. “Too much danger of fire going everywhere.”
“But you sing?” she prodded.
“We’re not like the wolves and coyotes, always singing.” He traced one finger along the edge of the black velvet spread on the picnic blanket. “Or like the cats, always yowling. Bears only sing when the spirit moves them.”
“Well, we’re waiting for your spirit, so I suppose we’ll wait on the singing too.” She gazed at him, her hands kneading idly at her thighs. “Can I tell you what I really think?”
“Uh…” Had she been holding back her feelings before this? Maybe he’d missed some subtlety of emotion when she’d been aiming a rifle at him?
Not that she seemed interested in waiting for his response. “I don’t think the success of this spell hinges on whether you can sing or even whether I’m a witch,” she said. “I think it matters most whether you actually want your bear back.”
He froze as if last month’s freak snowstorm had suddenly swept through his bones. “I gave my blood to this spell,” he pointed out with some asperity.
“Not much,” she snarked. “It’s heart’s blood—true desire—that powers a love spell.”
He found himself watching her mouth again. That lush upper lip, the inner curve shining from the touch of her tongue when she said the letter L in love and spell. The same little flicker of tongue and pucker of lips when she said his name. “I need it,” he said, still staring at her mouth. “I need the beast back.”
Again, she didn’t quite respond to this statement. “Did you always want to be king?”
That finally brought his gaze up to hers as he frowned at her. “Want to be king? Who wouldn’t?”
She shrugged one shoulder. “Your bear, apparently.”
“I…never really thought about it.” He confessed at last. “I was born to the rex ursi, and I was destined to be rex ursi myself. There was never any question. Not in anyone else’s mind, not in my own.” He glanced down at her hands, still rubbing her legs. She had the kind of hands he liked, maybe not the long, slender fingers he would’ve imagined for magical gestures or whatever, but strong and square. The kind of hands that would hold tight even while the rest of the world was falling apart. “You must’ve felt the same since you always knew you’d inherit your aunt’s place in the circle eventually.”
The restless squeeze of her hands stilled as she looked down at them. “Actually, it wasn’t always a sure thing that I would lead the circle.” She leaned back, propping her hands behind her, but the casual stance seemed forced to him. “Our circles are matrilineal, obviously, but just because I was the eldest didn’t guarantee me a place.”
“I imagine being one of three complicated your inheritance. But why do I think you showed the aptitude and the drive right away?”
She exhaled a hard breath, almost a snort. “But I also had these.” She slapped one hand over her knee.
He kept his gaze steady as he studied her extended legs, the lush curves he’d noted on the Victorian’s stairs hidden by the folds of denim. “It doesn’t seem to slow you down.”
“It did when I was younger. And it will again, probably, when I’m older.” She clamped her fingers around her kneecap. “The circle doesn’t discriminate any more than the rest of society. But that’s exactly the problem. They weren’t sure I’d be strong enough to take a leading role.” She grimaced. “Sometimes I wondered if they were right.”
“There’s no conventional or magical fix?”
She raised her glare from her knees to him. “I’m not broken.”
He opened his mouth and shut it again as he ducked his head. “I keep getting this wrong, don’t I?”
She huffed out another breath, definitely a snort this time.
“At first they thought it might be orthopedic, or maybe neurological, maybe even psychosomatic—a curse while I was still in the womb, maybe.” She shrugged, letting her hands fall to her sides. “I spent way too many hours in too many spellatoriums trying to find an answer. Then I moved on. There was just too much that I wanted to do to focus only on this.” She swept a dismissive gesture across her lower body.
“You have a nice butt,” he mused. When she scowled at him, he flashed her a grin. “Did I say that aloud?”
“Don’t pretend you’re some bumbling bear,” she said tartly, “with more brute instinct than the manners to control his tongue.”
“I have fine control of my tongue,” he said with great dignity. “Even in this shape, I can strip raspberries off the cane without using my hands and never get thorned.” He might not have his bear, but some devil inside him prompted him to ask, “Wanna see?”
Under the dark blue of the evening sky, her green eyes were more mysterious than some long-lost ocean. “Did you bring berries in that picnic basket that you didn’t share?”
“I’d share with you,” he said. “If I had any. But I don’t, so we’ll have to improvise.”
“How are you going to—?” Those mysterious eyes lit with understanding and the silvery light of the rising moon as he leaned toward her.
He moved slow, slower than he would have even with a thorny bramble. And he kept his hands at his sides, just as he’d told her he could. If she ran, he wouldn’t chase her. She’d already pointed out he didn’t have his bear to excuse any bumbling behavior. And she was a witch.
But she didn’t run. Instead, she mirrored his sloooow inward fall.
Giving him time to change his mind?
But he couldn’t change anything. Not without his beast. Not when her eyes flashed emerald as the moon rose higher, not when her little gasp of breath stole the air between them, not when the scent of the night and her skin seemed to wind around him in invisible, irresistible twists sharper and sweeter than any berry bramble.
And still he hesitated one last moment with his lips hovering above hers, as if he was waiting for a sign.
She wasn’t waiting. With the merest lift of her chin, she brought her mouth to his.
So delicate, like the first snowflake of winter. It sent a shiver of urgency through his blood, a primal warning that he’d starve if he didn’t feast now.
The brush of her full upper lip over his was softer than the velvet he crushed in his fist, forcing himself not to reach for her. She exhaled that breath she’d taken, and at the feathery caress across the seam of his mouth, his lips parted instinctively, needing a deeper taste of her.
She followed him, and the hotter rush of her next breath almost broke his control. His fist in the velvet tightened, jostling the flask.
A flash of silver between them startled him. And Rita too, apparently. She pulled back, her upper lip parting from his with a tiny lightning bolt of sensation.
“The spell,” she murmured, a husky note in her low voice. “It’s activated.”
That wasn’t the only thing turned on.
Unable to stop himself this time, he reached for her. Her skin looked silkier than the captive moonlight in the flask, and he had to touch…
But she scooted back on the blanket, spry enough even without her crutches. “That wasn’t right.”
His hand dropped to the velvet again. “The spell?”
“The kiss.”
“I told you I use my tongue. How do you do it?”
“I mean…” She cleared her throat. “We shouldn’t have kissed at all. I’m supposed to be helping you find your bear, not your…whatever that was.”
“Tongue,” he reminded helpfully.
She wrinkled her nose at him. “Stop that,” she scolded. “Now that we have some space between us, I’m sure you feel it fading.”
It wasn’t fading. If anything, the glow inside him intensified. Or was that just the glow in the flask? He gave his head a brisk shake. “I don’t… I’ve never…”
“Kissed?”
He scowled. “Never grabbed an unwilling woman.”
“You didn’t grab me. The spell grabbed you.”
He glanced uneasily at the flask. The silvery light had dimmed, or maybe it was just the moon, getting higher, seemed brighter in comparison. “I thought it wasn’t a trap.”
“Not a steel one. But it is based on a love spell which are supposed to be…tempting.” She glanced away from him. “Anyway, I wasn’t unwilling.”
He stilled. Love? Willing? Her? “Rita, I can’t—”
“Oh, I won’t either,” she assured him with a flick of her fingers. “Virgin witch here, remember?”
Virgin? By the great bear, she wasn’t exactly helping him cast off the spell. “I thought the spell is supposed to attract and bind the bear to me.”
“That’s the intent. We just got caught for a moment in a bit of backlash. It didn’t mean anything, so don’t get all nervous.”
“I’m not—” Didn’t mean anything? Why were his lips still tingling after one virginal kiss?
“How long will it last?” His lips weren’t the only part of him that was tingling…
“The spell? The reunification with your bear is meant to be permanent—”
“No, I mean the side effects.” He gestured, maybe a little frantically, between them.
“Oh, that. Well, the spell needs to be strong since the beast is strong.” Her tone was casually dismissive, but she bit her lip, where the flesh was just slightly swollen, not from any savage male assault on his part, just the primal response of blood and friction and animal attraction.
A natural response to her, as pure and classic as the ingredients for the spell she’d made for him.
And very strong. He averted his gaze from her pretty, pink mouth. “Then I guess my beast will be here any minute.”
“Oh, maybe not quite that quick. You said your bear has been gone for a while, so it might need some time before the spell reaches it. But everything I need to do is done.” She reached for her crutches, and he thought he saw her hands shake, just slightly.
“Here. Let me.” He reached for her crutches with one hand and her elbow with the other, coming smoothly to his feet and lifting her at the same time.
“I don’t need—” she started brusquely. But since she was already standing and he was sliding the cuffs around her forearms, she didn’t have much left to object to. She brushed her hands down her hips and thighs, settling the denim the same way a disgruntled bear shook out its fur. But the vigorous gesture jostled her a little, and she took one wobbling step without her crutches.
He grabbed her elbow again. “Easy,” he said. “You just called down moonlight into a rose. Take a breath or two before you charge off to your next spell.”
Instead of pushing away as he half thought she’d do, she held onto his forearm for a moment, getting her crutches back under her. “It doesn’t usually affect me like this,” she muttered. “It was just a love spell.”
“Just?” He smiled down at her. “If it can catch a king bear, it’s more than just.”
“Haven’t caught him yet.” She leaned down to grab the flask and other pieces, but he beat her to it.
“You hold this so it doesn’t spill,” he said, handing her the open flask. “I got the rest.”
“You should keep the flask close to you at all times,” she told him. “When your bear returns, you want to be ready for it. Wouldn’t want someone else to become rex ursi.”
Of course he wouldn’t. “Well, you’re right here right now, so just hold it.” He folded the black velvet and the picnic blanket with equal care. “If you see a bear coming, don’t run.”
“Har. Once the rose absorbs the spell, you can wear that on you when you’re out and about. Just soak it again each night until your bear returns.”
After packing everything into the picnic basket and the bag she’d brought, he turned to eyeball her. She was clutching the flas
k, her crutches dangling. No way could she walk like that over the rough ground. Actually, he wasn’t sure she could walk at all. Just standing there, she wobbled on her feet, like a little cub. No, a bear cub would be stronger. Not that he was dumb enough to say that aloud.
He should’ve left his Harley with his cousins and brought one of the work trucks instead. If she had to hold onto the flask and to him on the twisting way down the mountain, something would break.
Probably him.
The shock of the kiss still reverberated through him, like distant thunder echoed through the canyonlands.
A warning that somewhere a storm was rushing toward him.
Bears were good swimmers, but he didn’t have his bear. The fact that a kiss had nearly unraveled him should’ve been ridiculous, but he knew better than to pretend that kisses—even virginal ones with just a bit of tongue—weren’t dangerous. Kisses gave females ideas and took males’ common sense. As rex ursi, he couldn’t indulge such a distraction.
Except…he wasn’t rex ursi right now.
Chapter 7
The gentle silver pulse of the illuminated rose was like a second heartbeat as Rita held the flask close to her chest. Somewhere out there in the wild darkness, the beast would hear it, feel it, and come home.
At least that was what was supposed to happen.
Instead, the light seemed timed to her own pulse.
Had she made a mistake? While Thor packed the remnants of the spell, she quickly reviewed in her head. The materials were appropriate, her technique solid, and the intention was clear and righteous. Love spells were some of the earliest works a witch practiced since the energy was both common and simple and also precious and infinitely unique. Reuniting two halves of a matched soul should’ve been child’s play.
That kiss had not been child’s play. That was something elemental, dangerous.
