by Elsa Jade
She growled at her sister when Brandy reached for the glass.
Brandy snatched back her hand, lips pursed. “Ooh. Somebody’s been learning naughty tricks from the bad boy bear.”
Gin snickered. “I approve of this relationship too.” She ducked when Rita aimed at swat at her hair, only a shade less lurid than the wine. “Seriously, sis. It’s high summer in the high desert. If you’re gonna feel the burn, it might as well be the Thorburn.” She ducked the other way away from Brandy’s swipe.
“Don’t encourage her to get mixed up with someone like that,” Brandy scolded.
“Said the only triplet who managed to get herself knocked up by a bear shifter,” Gin snarked back, ducking away from another swipe. “Hey, watch the wine.”
“Mac is just Mac,” Brandy said—not incorrectly, Rita thought. “But Thorburn Montero is…scary, dangerous, too…big.”
Taking another sip of her wine, Rita murmured, “Rex ursi.” With the exhaled “ur-sigh”, the wine burned on her tongue like dragon fire. “King bear.”
Or he would be again, once he reclaimed his beast.
“Mac explained to me that the rex ursi doesn’t take a mate,” Brandy said, her brown eyes glistening. Probably from the wine, but also from her soft heart. As if she hadn’t gone into fierce mama bear mode the first time Aster had changed in front of them. She’d been ferociously determined to cast out the bear and save her baby boy. Until she found Mac. Now she thought everyone needed to find their forever true mate.
And then Gin the gloomy goth girl got herself a polar bear and now whistled cheerfully on her way to work. It was like a cult around here. A cult of bear.
Rita took another drink. “I’m not looking for a mate.”
“Famous last words,” Gin muttered. “If you don’t want a shifter, then what is that bite on the back of your neck?” She didn’t bother ducking this time.
Rita glared at her. “Does a bear fuck in the woods?”
Still holding onto her glass, Gin put one arm over her head to block both her ears. “La la la, I’m too young to hear this.”
“Oh, Ree,” Brandy gasped, angling her hand under the sleek bob Rita had round-brushed back into submission after her bath. “That’s a mating bite. His beast wanted to seduce you.”
With a hard slant to one side—almost tumbling herself right off the step; apparently this wine was also fortified—Rita glared at her other sister. “It’s not a mating bite. He wasn’t trying to change me. If anything, he liked me just the way I am.” For a heartbeat, realizing that silenced her. Had anyone ever thought she was enough, not slow and boring and desperate? When was the last time she wasn’t pushing for something more from herself? As if another set of pushups and crunches, another grimoire of spells would make up for all the ways she wasn’t enough. She shook off the faltering thoughts. Damn wine. “It’s just a…a regular old love bite.”
“Oh, that’s exactly how it starts,” Brandy warned with an echoing “mm-hmm” from Gin. “Just a little nibble. Just a little taste. And before you know it, he’s eating your… Uh…” Her cheeks were brighter than the wine when they stared at her. “Well anyway, you’re the eldest of us and you should know better.”
Rita smirked into her wine. “You two just set a terrible example, I guess.”
“I just don’t think this is a good idea,” Gin said, wrinkling her nose.
“Me neither.” Brandy tsked under her breath. “You guys are copying me, just like when you always borrowed my clothes.”
“I never borrowed your clothes,” Gin protested. “Too many bright colors and flowers.”
“You dyed my favorite skirt black and turned the flowers into skulls,” Brandy pouted.
Gin tapped her upper lip. “That does sound like something I’d do,” she admitted.
“Anyway, I think it’s a bad idea because it’s just not like you, Ree. It would be different if Thor was like Ben and Mac.”
Brandy nodded. “Kind and gentle,” she clarified.
“Or funny and sweet,” Gin said with a nod.
Rita sputtered. “Thor’s not…” She hesitated, the wine seeming to burn on the back of her eyelids and on the back of her tongue, evaporating her defense of him. “Not gentle, not sweet,” she said finally.
Brandy nodded with the wisdom of a full glass of wine. “Mean and scary, just like I said.”
“No,” Rita said. “I meant not not gentle and not not sweet.”
Gin squinted at her with the confusion of two glasses of wine. “So you’re saying…”
Rita blew out a hard breath. “It means… I don’t know what it means. It was just one night, and now it’s over.”
“Nights always come back,” Brandy said in a slightly ominous tone.
Gin blinked at her. “Hey, that’s a good line. Maybe I could make a shadow witch out of you yet.”
“No way.” Brandy waved her away. “I’m happy with my life just as it is.”
“That’s what I want,” Rita grumbled.
Her sisters stared at her in a horror not unlike the time she had borrowed one of Brandy’s floral miniskirts and paired it with Gin’s favorite knee-high combat boots. “What? You guys are allowed to be happy but that’s crazy for me?”
“You just never seen like you needed that,” Brandy said with a shrug.
Rita stared at her. “Who doesn’t want to be happy?”
“What she meant was”—Gin glanced at her middle sister for confirmation—“is that you never seemed like you didn’t already have it, that you weren’t already happy.”
Brandy nodded. “You always seemed happy doing what Aunt Tilda told you.”
“And telling us what to do,” Gin finished with a snicker.
Rita glared at her sisters. “I didn’t,” she sputtered.
“You did,” they said simultaneously.
“But if you weren’t happy—if you aren’t happy,” Brandy continued, “then I’m sorry we didn’t notice.”
“And of course you should be,” Gin said. “And we will be here for you.”
And that was the problem with always being the strong one, the responsible one, the sensible one. She was so used to being that way, and other people seeing her as such, that she didn’t even know how to ask for help when she needed it. “I’ve always had so much in my life,” she murmured. “You two, Aunt Tilda, a place in the circle. It seems greedy to want more.”
Brandy tilted her head. “Did you say to want Thor?”
Rita jerked back with a slightly too high-pitched laugh. “More. I said more, not Thor.”
Gin shook her head. “No, I think you said Thor.”
Rita stared down at the wine glass in her hand. It was empty. She set it aside. “I had Thor,” she said smugly. “And he was definitely more.”
Brandy hooted, a little too loud, and she clamped her hand over her mouth. But in the darkness her eyes glinted with amusement and touch of preternatural intensity. “So why aren’t you happy then?”
Gin snickered. “Asked the girl who’s hitchhiking pickup started this whole thing.”
“Actually,” Rita said, “it was Aunt Tilda who brought us all here.”
Gin lifted her wine glass that still had a swallow left in the bottom. “To Aunt Tilda.”
Since the other two didn’t have any more wine, they just fist bumped her glass
“So what do you want?” Gin handed her the wine glass with a little left.
Rita stared down into the ruby-bright depths. She knew how the fermentation and distillation processes worked, had done plenty of her own cordials and tinctures as part of her circle duties. If she understood the depths of her own restlessness as well, certainly she could craft the steps to find her own happiness. Couldn’t she? She’d always known her own mind, her own path.
But apparently she didn’t know her own heart.
She scowled down into wine glass. “I want to finish the expansion of the shop and get us clearly in the black again. I want you”—she pointed at Gin—“to comp
lete your ordination in the shadow circle. And I want you”—she redirected her point at Brandy—“to pick bridesmaids dresses that don’t suck and live happily ever after.”
Brandy beamed and sniffed emotionally, dabbing at her over bright eyes. “Thank you,” she murmured. “I will be happily ever after. And my bridesmaids dresses will totally suck.”
Gin patted Rita’s knee, just hard enough to send a reverberation through her thigh bone. “That’s nice. But that’s all for someone else, not for you. What do you want?”
Rita tightened her grasp on the wine glass. The stem was thinner than her crutches, but somehow seemed to offer the same support. The kind of support that could be knocked out from underneath her at any moment, she knew, but still. “I want more Thor,” she confessed. She tossed back the last mouthful of the wine while her sisters cheered softly.
The wine burned a little harder, in the back of her eyes this time. “So tell me how are things at the shop?”
Gin filled her in on the last few days, and then Brandy shared her ongoing plans for the wedding.
“Your dresses won’t really suck,” she assured them. “I want everyone to be as happy as I am.” She leaned against Rita with an only somewhat drunken sigh of contentment.
Rita didn’t even bother asking if her sister were sure after a mere three months together. It was so painfully obvious that she and Mac were meant to be together, and not just because of Aster. The energy that flowed between them was so pure and good, if they could bottle it, they could sell it as a true love potion all by itself. Actually, she had bottled some of it, distilling the essences of a wild flower bouquet that Mac had brought to Brandy one day for no reason at all. After a few more distillations and incantations, she’d probably use it in place of her usual formula for coming home. Because it was so obvious her sister had found the place where her heart belonged.
Also, she had traded some of her cleansing and calming potions to one of her circle contacts who specialized in astrology and telling the future. Not that Rita believed in either of those—the stars were to fixed in their courses and the future was too changeable to be a good gauge of human happiness—but the woman had drawn natal charts and futures for both Brandy and Mac and declared them a perfect match.
Also also, she and Gin had sworn they would bring the full fury of the circle and its shadow down upon Mac’s furry head if he ever hurt their sister.
Sometimes being the strong one was pretty damn sweet.
Brandy yawned and called it a night when she started tearing up over being the first bride ever to have a bouquet of Mesa Diablo roses and a cake frosted with magically blessed huckleberries.
Gin observed her gentle tears. “Good thing you’re happy.”
“It’s the wine,” Brandy said. “And not having my boys with me tonight. Thank you for being my sisters.” She threw a big sloppy hug around them both, until Gin lifted her to her feet.
“Okay, okay. Time for bed.” She glanced back at Rita. “You okay? I got another arm.”
Rita smiled at her minutes-youngest sister. Gin might play goth and grumpy, but underneath the black beat a heart of silver. No wonder the clever polar bear had snapped her up when he had the chance. “I didn’t have that much to drink,” she said. “And anyway, I brought my own support staff.” She nudged her crutches with her toe.
“Well, don’t stay out here all night, or I’ll make you a shadow witch too.” Gin flashed a white-toothed grin at her. “Unless there’s some other reason you’re waiting out here…”
A breath of heat washed across Rita’s cheeks. “Just not sleepy yet.”
“Well, there’s one thing that always tires me out,” Gin said with a knowing smirk.
“I do not want to hear—”
“Making circle potpourri.” Gin looked at her. “Why? What did you think I was going to say?”
“Sexy times,” Brandy piped up. “I thought you’re going to say sexy times.”
Rita groaned. “This is why I’m the oldest.
“And you got so many minutes to make up for,” Gin pointed out. She steered Brandy through the kitchen door. “Sweet dreams.”
They went inside, and for a minute their voices echoed down the hallway along with the low thuds of their footsteps on the stairs going up. Then the old house fell silent, and the whispers of the night surrounded her: the breath of the desert breeze, the chirp of crickets and the rustling of small creatures out in the sage and rabbitbrush beyond the back fence, the faraway rush of a car on the freeway, going somewhere.
Where was she going? Unlike Brandy, she hadn’t wanted to reject her heritage, and unlike Gin, she wasn’t looking for a new path with the circle. She’d always intended to be right there. Well, not necessarily here-here but doing what she was doing.
Damn the manhandling that had shifted her desires.
She touched the leftover sprig of honeysuckle she’d pinned to her shirt after she’d finished decanting a finding spell. Like so many good, sweet things, the flower wouldn’t last the night. She detached the wilting blossom from the pin, twirling the long, silky petal between her fingers. Ugh, why was she being so maudlin? She probably had a sleeping drought somewhere in the spellatorium. She pierced the end of the flower tube with her teeth and sucked the single drop of nectar held within the blossom. As she flicked the empty little flower into the darkness, the simple sweetness eclipsed the bite of the wine for a heartbeat.
“Rita.”
The deep voice coming out of the shadows startled her. On some level, she realized, she’d been waiting for him.
“Thor.” She was on her crutches and at the back gate before the exhalation of his name was fully past her lips.
Beyond the white pickets, the high desert was outlined in argent starlight. Thor was a black mass against the silver. Now her pulse skittered a beat, as if it finally remembered it should be shocked, shocked at this midnight assignation between the good girl and the dangerous beast. Maybe it was the wine, or the honeysuckle, or the desert heat, but she pushed open the gate as fast as she wanted to spread her legs if he but asked. Maybe the thought should have shamed her; instead, her heartbeat picked up the missed beat and magnified it a thousand times.
He slipped inside the gate and pushed it shut behind him. This close, the scent of pine and cold water and a deeper musk teased her.
“I didn’t hear the Harley,” she said, as if that mattered.
One corner of his mouth twitched, as if he didn’t think it mattered either. “I walked. I like the desert at night.”
“I’ve not really been out there,” she said. “Except last night on the mesa.”
“It’s beautiful,” he said. “Peaceful yet electrifying, if that makes sense.” Abruptly he frowned. “Always take someone with you if you go.”
“Because of these?” She thumped one crutch on the ground in warning.
“The pack keeps most other predators away. But the ones that wouldn’t heed that warning would be the worst.”
“You mean like you,” she said tartly.
To her surprise, both sides of his mouth curved in a smile. “Yeah. Like me.”
She looked him up and down. For science, or so she told herself, although the quick survey of his body only mostly served to remind her of their night together. “No bear yet.”
“You can tell?”
“Why else would you be back?” She frowned. “Although the rose shouldn’t have faded so quickly. We’ll have to see—”
“That wouldn’t be the only reason I came to see you.”
She paused. “Oh.” A slow warmth, like sunrise, spread through her body, and it wasn’t just because he was standing so close. Although he was, and his big body radiated a midday heat as if little niceties like the clock meant nothing to a king bear.
Maybe it was just the after echoes of their encounter, still reverberating through their auras, the way the magic in a spell took all the ingredients of their everyday world and made something new and powerful. But a
s she told him, there’d been no illicit magic in their lovemaking.
Just the magic of his touch, her hungry response, and the transcendent bliss of bringing the two together.
But she couldn’t assume once meant always, no matter how much her yearning body tilted her toward him. “So… Why are you here?”
“To see you.”
She almost said “oh” again, although that would be about as helpful as his short answers. “My sisters are both here,” she said, shuffling her feet and her crutches. “It would be awkward.”
“To see you,” he repeated. “Not just for sexy times.”
She winced. Of course he’d overheard their semi-drunken chatter. “Brandy didn’t mean that,” she assured him.
“Since you have so many virginal years to make up for.”
“Oh, Gin didn’t mean that either.”
“More Thor?”
“I didn’t…” The almost lie stuck in her throat, dryer than the sand beyond the fence. “Okay, yeah, I meant that.”
He laughed, a velvety sound in the darkness. “Not awkward at all. But also not why I’m here.”
She tilted her head, glad the night would hide at least a little of the fire in her face. “If not for sex or the magic, then what?”
The broad spread of his shoulders hunched a little. “I thought, maybe… Would you like to go out with me?”
She ducked her chin. What was this, high school? No, obviously not, because she’d never gone out with anyone in high school. The “weird Wick” appellation had done the trick even if her crutches hadn’t. “Go out,” she repeated dumbly.
He gestured behind him toward the gate. “Walk out on the plain. If you’re going to make Angels Rest of your home, it would be good to know the geology, the plants and animals, the weather, the beauty and dangers so you can watch out for yourself.”
Would the danger or the beauty be more of a threat? She gazed at him. He probably didn’t even notice that he was the biggest risk to her.
But she appreciated that he wanted to show her, that he didn’t think she shouldn’t go just because she was a woman or “crippled” or some other bad excuse. “I’d love to see it.”
“Not just see,” he said. “Smell and taste and touch.”
