Page 39 of His Whispered Witch

“I’m not running.”

He pulled a travesty of a smile out of somewhere. “It looks very much like you’re running.”

“I’m coming back,” she said. She had promised.

She could not bear a world where she would never see him again, but nor could she bear to be in this cabin a second longer with a man she may have an unbreakable magical tie to.

10

Penn took a deep breath as she navigated the curvy roads back to Silver Spring. Another downside of living deep in the mountains is that you could never flee from somebody at top speed while holding dramatic conversations in your head. She had to focus if she didn’t want to end up at the bottom of a cliff, which meant that by the time she got back to town, she was a little calmer but also crawling out of her skin.

She’d almost avoided being trapped in one marriage, tried to help a guy, and found him declaring that she should be trapped in another.

She sat waiting at the edge of Main Street for the world’s most useless stoplight to change, because in six months of living here, she’d only encountered one other car at this intersection.

Was he right?

The thing she couldn’t get over was the connection that had snapped between them. For a second, she had access to an avalanche of magic the likes of which she had only experienced once when all her cousins had attempted to join together. It boggled her mind. It had taken sixteen witches to almost reachthe level of magic he handed her casually with a touch of his fingers.

Now that she thought about it, he hadn’t made a unilateral declaration. To him, it was just a statement of fact. He wasdescribingthe world, not trying to order it.

Fate had already ordered it.

The light turned green, and she shook her head and hit the gas pedal. She didn’t believe in fate. Who believed in fate? It was one of those ancient Greek concepts you learned in Western literature classes in college. Who said things like that?

Did she want him to be right?

From the first moment she saw him, she couldn’t take her eyes off him. From hair the color of ash that matched his name, to the intensity of his eyes, to his long, lean form, she wanted him. And now she knew vividly what that form felt like against her.

They’d been making out like teenagers, and it was already more intense than any sex she’d ever had in her life. His attention was addictive. From the very beginning, he looked at her like she was the most important human being in the room, and that impression didn’t fade. Every time they met, it was like everything else disappeared for him. She could get used to that…

She could not be with a man who believed in a foreordained mate built just for him.

But he hadn’t said that. He said there was a choice. They could choose to exploit the magic or not. She just wished there was some way to get a second opinion, but there was nobody she could ask.

She thought of the room full of books on wolves and made an abrupt left turn off Main Street to sneak into the neighborhood behind the main strip of businesses.

She parked in front of the giant purple and black house again and questioned her sanity as she jogged up the walk.

She hit the doorbell and took a deep breath.

Annie opened the door, her freckles extra vivid in her pale face.

“Is everything okay?” Penn asked.

Annie met her eyes for a second. “Yes. Fine. Why.” She spoke in a monotone.

“Because you don’t look okay,” Penn said.

“You fled your coven, rather than marry some dude, right?”

Penn’s eyes flew to the interior of the house, expecting the twins to come barreling out. She thought of them as the twins, little old ladies in a crazy house, but Niamh was Annie’s adopted mother.

She grasped Annie’s elbow, pulled her out the door, and shut it quickly. She looked around at the swing, two rocking chairs, and one tiny bench. She headed for the bench at the end of the porch, the only seating option not dangling from the ceiling, and sat down.

“First of all,” she said, “I fled from adifferentcoven that had taken over mine and didn’t have my best interest at heart, only theirs. But, yes, I was meeting guys before that with my coven. The women I trusted and loved me and wanted the best for me were sending me on dates that I vetoed all the time.”

“Right.”

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