Page 43 of Cast in Shadow
“I’m just buying time. If you call your people, you’ll leave, and I have no idea how long it will take to track you down again.”
His energy pulsed around me, then his big hands were on me, pulling me up and turning me so I was sitting on the floor with my back against the bed frame. Like positioning a goddamned doll.
“This is not the way to make friends, Emerson.” I tried using my magic to break his paralyzing hold, but his hands had already fallen away.
That was the kicker about touch-based magic, it could only do so much when I couldn’t actually touch anything. Now, if I’d been smart about it, like trying to use my magic when his hands were still on me, it might have gone a different way.
What the hell was wrong with me?
I was better than this. Stronger than this.
He let me sit there glaring at him as he crouched in front of me, his eyes still pulsing that deadly red as they danced between mine. “Are you reallyyou?”
“Seriously? That’s what this is about?” I would have killed to be able to throw my hands up in frustration. “Yes, I’m me. I figured you might know that, since you just fucked me senseless.”
A smirk lifted his lips. “That was just a hello. Fucking you senseless will take days. Weeks.”
I wanted to fire back with a snarky response, but the thought of spending days on end tangled up with Emerson triggered a flood of lust-riddled memories.
His smirk blossomed into that cocky smile I remembered all too well. A look that said he knew exactly which gutter he’d just sent my mind careening down. “You have a harder time keepingme out when you’re aroused, don’t you?” He leaned in and pressed his lips to my neck, right against the pulse point that gave away how rapidly my heart was beating. “Tell me how we met.”
Again, that kiss would have been the perfect opportunity to use power to shove him away. But no. The best I could do was to snort out a huff. “You know how we met.”
He eased back. “And if you are really Senna Dalgaard,mySenna, you’ll tell me.”
A test? Really? I tried like hell not to let him see how much that hurt.
At least I didn’t have to reach far to find the memory of our meeting. It was one of those moments that was burned so deeply in my memory that it would always be a part of me.
Instead of telling him what I remembered, I tested my newfound ability and shoved the memory at him through our connection.
I was just shy of twenty-three and already a widow. Of course, that wasn’t uncommon back then, when so many of the country’s men heeded the call to fight in yet another war.
My husband had been a decent enough man, courting me for the better part of two years before we married when I was twenty. Afterward, he’d moved me seven hundred miles away from my family to live with him in his cottage on the outskirts of Hingham, Massachusetts. Less than a year later, he died a horrible death in a pointless battle with a noble name.
It would be a stretch to say I was heartbroken by his death. He was handsome enough, and kind enough, but ours was not a marriage anchored in love.
Iwaslost, though, and quickly found myself surrounded by other women like me. Some widows, a handful of spinsters, and a few burned-out housewives who desperately needed a break from their lives.
The whole experiment with magic started out as an innocent game. I’d found a collection of occult books at an estate sale and thought they would be interesting to share with my circle of ladies. Two of those musty old books contained spells.
We were foolish. Or maybe just uneducated in the ways of the real world. No one who had any standing in polite society believed in witchcraft back then. If they did, it certainly wasn’t something anyone discussed in public.
Casting that first spell was supposed to be fun. The off-limits kind of fun that made your heart race because—deep down, in that part of your brain that knew things about the universe your conscious mind would never accept without solid proof—you were terrified it might actually work.
And oh boy, had it worked.
With the power of the thirteen of us, we’d managed to call down a rainstorm from a perfectly sunny sky. It sounded like a lovely and harmless thing to try in the stifling summer heat. The problem was, once the rain started falling, none of us knew how to stop it.
Ten days later, when the streets of Hingham were flooded and everyone was convinced the end of days were near, three strangers swept into town.
I would never forget the moment Emerson and I locked eyes. I’d tried to forget it, about a million damned times, but there was no erasing his furious stare or the disdain etched across his face.
He’d thought we were a proper coven that had summoned the storm for some nefarious reason. It had taken a great deal of yelling (and crying and screaming by the others) to convince him and his Brethren that we were just a gaggle of bored women who’d found a couple of interesting books.
Emerson and the others had walked us through how to endthe spell. Then they’d packed up the books and left with a warning that we were never to attempt magic again.
“You never did like doing what you were told,” he said with a sad smile.
