Page 14 of Mochas and Minotaurs

Griselda

Marcus’s kiss sent theheated memory of our night together surging through me. His scent, a crisp blend of masculine cologne and something more natural, more primal, filled my nose. I wanted to roll around and revel in it.

Firm hands held me a willing prisoner against taut muscles, pressing me so that I fit against him perfectly. I slid my hand, which had been by his ear, into the denser hair around his horns.

He’d worn his glamor when we first met, but I remembered how much he loved it when I pulled his hair or touched around his ears. It made sense now as I scratched the sensitive area at the base of his horns. He reacted by grabbing my ass and squeezing, pressing me against the large erection that had sprung up between us.

Now that I saw him for what he was, the feel of his lips made a lot more sense. When he’d had the glamor on his mouth felt much larger than it looked, but seeing was believing, and I didn’t question it despite knowing he wore glamor.

That was the thing about living in Darlington. Many people were covered by illusion, and this was especially true when meeting bed partners at places like Delirium. I just rolled with it.

I moaned into his mouth, my own hunger growing. The need started in my center, deep and aching, even as he parted my lips with his thick tongue and swept it into a dance with mine.

It was Triscuit who ended our kiss. He flew up in our faces and started harassing Marcus, who quickly scrambled away and put his arm up to protect his face.

This reminded me why I never brought anyone home. It was always their place, not mine. That was the thing about parrots. It was easy to trigger their overprotectiveness and jealousy.

Triscuit had actually quite liked Marcus when he first came in, probably because I had preemptively given him a treat to offer the bird. And he’d been relatively accepting while he vacuumed. In fact, Triscuit had been so unobtrusive that I’d forgotten he was there when the kiss had started.

“If you spring away every time, it’ll just teach him that attacking you will make us stop.” I pulled Marcus back onto the couch next to me. “Here.” I quickly tossed Marcus a pack of pistachios. “Offer him a few, but only if he’s nice.”

After a while, things calmed, and Triscuit started playing on the coffee table with some toys.

“I’m going to extend my ward to cover the entire building. It’s not foolproof though, so people can still look into the windows, but they won’t be able to cast any spells into the building.”

“Thank you. You don’t have to do all this, but I’m glad you are.”

“It’s for selfish reasons,” I admitted. “First, if you’re gone, that will give Arcane Development an in. And second, who else is going to vacuum topless for me?”

That had him grinning, and I was glad I could lighten the mood.

Triscuit was shouting about biscuits, which meant it was his dinner time. And any sexy or romantic feeling had to wait. Seriously, it was impossible with a shouting parrot.

“Before you go, can you put up the glamor and walk me around the building?” I asked. “I want to extend my wards to cover everything.”

Technically, I could cast a spell without drawing a demarcation by simply asking the spell to follow the outside of the wall, but it was a lot easier if I could see it. Just to save myself some energy, I grabbed a thick, black permanent marker so I could draw an uninterrupted ring around the property.

By the time I returned to my home, sans sexy neighbor, Triscuit wasthis closeto tearing apart the fabric of reality because his dinner was late. Luckily, I’d put him back into his cage before leaving to fix the wards so all he could destroy were his toys.

I quickly fed him and myself, throwing together a dinner of whatever I had in the fridge. I really needed groceries.

But did I head to the grocery store? Nope! I went online instead, scouring the collective knowledge of the internet for any information I could find about minotaurs and mazes. I had to wade through pages of results repeating the same story from Greek mythology until I found something that mentioned a dragon. Except this was an unknown fantasy novel written in the late Victorian era, and aside from a single paragraph mentioning it, there was nothing else.

All I had was the author's name, not even a title! It was a nom de plume by the looks of it. Comtesse du Taureau. The Countess of the Bull. Interesting, because female authors at the time usually used a male pseudonym. This author decided to keep her female identity.

Was it the other way around? A man writing as a woman in the nineteenth century? That was very common now, but it was unheard of back then.

It was well past my bedtime by the time I looked up from my research.

Shit. It was Nick’s day off tomorrow so I had to wake up early to open, but I did get half the day off since both Jules and Alyssa were coming in tomorrow afternoon. Maybe I’d take a trip downto the library and see what else I could find about this Comtesse du Taureau.

It was just beforenoon when a car alarm started going off, and Faux Hobo ran off, leaving all of his change. Hey, when you gotta go, you gotta go.

“About flipping time,” Jules said. “I thought he’d never leave.”

A few minutes later, Alyssa stepped in, panting like she just ran a mile.

“What's wrong?” I asked, my eyes scanning the windows for danger.

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