Page 19 of A Touch Charmed

Because, even years after she left, I couldn’t stop hoping she’d come back to me someday.

The slider opened and Thora joined me on the cliff. She wore a simple black tank top with loose gray cotton pants and she’d pulled her hair into a short ponytail. I wanted to devour her. This would be a problem. I set my coffee mug on the iron table I’d placed in the center of my half-dead garden and approached her. Her shoulders tensed.

“Relax.” I took her hands in mine. “We’ll start slow.”

She blew out a breath. “I can work with slow.”

Our palms glowed with clear and pearlescent light. Her diamond to my opal. Everything around me slowed down to the point where it looked like time itself stood still, but it felt normal to me. Wes and Audrey had figured out how to keep their powers under control while they touched, and there were times when I’d have to do the same.

I could think of one way I wanted to practice that skill set.

While Thora and I had done plenty of fast and hard fucking, she preferred long, deep strokes. Soft caresses and slow lovemaking. All night affairs. Nothing in this world had ever given me as much bone-deep pleasure as making Thora come.

She released my hands. Our lights dimmed and time resumed normal speed. I blinked as I tried to acclimate my body to move within the regular world as I knew it.

Thora crossed her arms, her expression flat and guarded. “I can’t keep touching you if you’re going to look at me like that.”

“Like what?” I scratched my head in confusion. As far as I knew, I hadn’t looked at her in any particular way, but who knew what my face did at high speed.

“Don’t play dumb.” She lowered her voice, even though my closest neighbor was a rental cabin a quarter-mile away. “I know what you look like when you’re inside me.”

Fucking hell. Just like that, I was hard again.

“Okay.” I rubbed my hands over my eyes. “Let’s take a minute here. What did you feel? Did your magic do anything?”

“I don’t know.” She frowned. “I feel my magic inside me. I belong to it and it belongs to me, but I don’t think I can actuallydoanything unless there is an injury I need to heal. My power isn’t something I can actively practice.”

“Sure you can.” I smashed my coffee mug and sliced open my hand with a broken shard. White spots danced in my vision as my stomach rolled. Goddamn, that hurt.

Thora’s eyes widened. Her hand flew to her mouth. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

I sucked in my breath between my teeth. “Didn’t quite think that one through.”

“We’re not practicing this way. I refuse.” She grabbed my hand. Her palm gave off that clear light that wrapped around my injury. The pain began to recede, but it wasn’t healing.

“What’s happening? Why isn’t your magic working?”

“It’s working fine.” She clenched her jaw. Her palm split open, and as blood dripped down her fingers, it began to close and heal at the same time as mine.

That was the cost of using her magic. She had to take on the injury herself, too.

I was such an asshole.

“I’m so sorry.” I pulled her against me, pushing every bit of my apology into the energy that flowed between us. She shoved her annoyance back into me and it wrapped around my magic like a prickly cactus. “I had no idea.”

I thought using magic would just make her tired, like it did to me, Wes, and Audrey. But Thora’s magic was different. More complex and infinitely more precious. A single bite from the curse’s snake had nearly killed us. And that was just with its first corporeal form. We flat out could not survive continued physical attacks without a healer.

Of course her cost was greater. I should’ve known better.

“It’s fine.” She brushed it off, but I hadn’t missed the way her hand flexed, as if some pain lingered. I wished she hadn’t healed me, let me keep my pain. It was the least I deserved. “You should’ve seen how rough it got when I had to suck out the poison from your snake bite.”

I stroked the place on her palm that had bled for me only moments before, like I could take the pain back. “I should’ve talked to you first.”

“You should’ve.” She hesitated, then put her hand on my chest. “I should’ve talked to you, too. Told you about my leg breaking that first day.”

I closed my eyes and rested my forehead against hers. “I swear, I won’t do anything like that again. I trust that your magic will work as it needs to, when it needs to.”

“We aren’t Wes and Audrey. We can’t practice like them.”

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