Page 88 of Star-Crossed
“If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were trying to romance me, Lyra McKendrick,” Cy teased, his eyes twinkling.
“Good thing you know better,” Lyra replied with a laugh, handing him a glass of Syrah and kissing its rim with her own. “I don’t know shit about romance. But I will warn you now, I’m trying to get in your pants.”
“At least you have the decency to feed me before—what did Myrtle call it?—plundering this booty,” Cy retorted, feigning indignance as they settled down on the blanket. “I’m making you work for it this time.”
Despite the playful banter, Lyra couldn’t shake the lingering unease that had plagued her all evening. She attributed it to the stress of the party and Halloween’s overwhelming tourist presence in Townsend Harbor. While she’d been busy with tarot readings at the shop, Gemma had hired a woman who could both read auras and claimed to be a medium.
A medium who hadnotbeen impressed when Lyra congratulated her on her dual spiritual gifts… It might have been that she’d used the word “twofer.”
Somehow, Lyra had still made more customers cry with her straightforward fortunes, and she barely even brought up dead relatives.
She really needed to stop doing that.
Whatever disturbance she was feeling in the Force, it just refused to settle. Even though the evening was temperate, but chilly enough to drive them to snuggle into each other, Lyra noted a tension in Cy’s body that hadn’t been there before. It seemed he was chewing on a gristly thought that just wouldn’t go down easy.
Likewise, her world was tilted a bit off its axis. The tilt had been increasing all day, until it was causing vertigo. The night sounds were a bit too loud, the fruit too sweet, the cheese too fragrant. Even her favorite sipping wine was sour on her palate, like it’d perhaps been corked.
She suddenly needed some help breathing. “I’m a little dizzy. Could you…undo my corset?”
“Of course,” he replied, concern creasing his brow as his deft fingers worked at the laces. Once free, Lyra let out a sigh of relief, now clad only in her sexy witch shift and revealing spiderweb tights.
“Thank you,” she murmured, leaning in for a brief, tender kiss that quickly deepened as they lost themselves in each other for a moment.
This, at least, soothed her senses and alternately brought them to life.
“You know you always smell delicious,” she murmured against his mouth.
“Yeah?” He pulled back. “What do I smell like?”
She thought about it. “I don’t know… Something woodsy, for sure, but salty too. Like popcorn.”
Cy’s snort didn’t quite turn into a laugh. “Does popcorn turn you on?”
“It’s the sexiest of all the corn,” she said, relaxing back into the cradle of his chest and arms.
As they gazed at the waning moon and the lights of the town sparkling across the water, Lyra couldn’t help but think about the choices before her: the job offer, her newfound happiness in Townsend Harbor, and the man wrapped around her who had become such an important part of her life.
“Tonight is…perfect,” she whispered, trying to commit the magic of the moment to memory. She took in the glitter and glow of urban sprawl further across the water, beyond which Seattle lay just barely too far south to be seen.
“I used to sneak out at night and come up here alone,” she went on. “I’d imagine what it would be like to live on the other side, with all the opportunities that the city offered. The bright lights, the freedom…”
With her back pressed to his chest, she could feel Cy’s inhale as he prepared to say something, but ultimately didn’t.
She hesitated, her heart racing as she considered how much to reveal. “Now, I find myself thinking—well, maybe not thinking—more like feeling…I don’t know, different.” Wow, had one of her professors called her “erudite” at one point?
Maybe falling for someone really did turn your brain to mush. Because that’s what she was doing, wasn’t it? Falling.
Or maybe, judging on how sore and weird her body felt right now, she’d already landed.
Landed in love? Waslovethe word she was working her way up to using?
Her heart throbbed and her stomach churned with nerves and carnival food.
Just say it, you fucking ween,she berated herself.Don’t use the L-word if you can’t spit it out, but fucking tell him how you feel. Tell him he’s the sexiest man alive. That he’s the only one who can make your body feel like it’s supposed to. Tell him that he makes your mind quieter and your heart louder. That you love his smile, his empathy, his kindness, and his ass. Tell him you think of what beautiful brown babies you’d make sometimes. Tell him that—
“I think you should take the job.”
Lyra’s inner record scratched. The stars stopped twinkling. The moon pulled sinister clouds over itself as if to hide from the stew of emotions brewing inside of her.
