Banishing the Dark (Arcadia Bell #4)(68)
Lon didn’t say anything. He just rolled off onto his back and took me with him, settling me on top of his chest, penning my legs between his, as if we’d done this a million times. He held me loosely and kissed the top of my head as it fell against his neck.
The lingering, pulsing pleasure that steadily thumped through the middle third of my body made me forget my own name for a long moment. But somewhere in the distance, in a deep, quiet place inside him, I heard something. It spread like warm honey, slow and unmanageable, a wild thing that had no center or borders. I didn’t know what it was, but it grew so loud that I was overwhelmed by the unexpected strength of it. I felt the wet tickle down my cheeks before I realized I was quietly crying.
And then he said something that turned my world upside down.
A simple thing. Innocuous, almost. A sentiment that clearly just slipped from his lips. A casual confession that was an outgrowth of the thing I could already hear him feeling.
He said, “Jesus f*cking Christ. I’ve missed you so much.”
And that’s when I absolutely knew something wasn’t right inside my head.
I slid to my side, heart hammering in my chest, and stared at him. “What did you say?”
Had I not been wielding the empathic knack, I might have believed his poker face when he said, “Hmm?” God, he was good. Better than I ever realized. Because behind his languorous façade, his emotions were going haywire, practically screaming Oh, shit! in my face.
My mouth dropped open. “We’ve had sex before.”
“Cady—”
“My screwed-up memories . . . that night I can’t remember before our road trip. Did we have sex that night?”
“No.” He was telling the truth.
“But we’ve had sex before,” I said, putting a palm on the center of his chest.
He closed his eyes and let his head loll on the rug. “Yes.”
“Not just once. Lots.”
His panic slowed and trickled into heavy resignation. “I haven’t kept count.”
“Try. How many?”
“Once or twice a day, four or five days a week, give or take . . .”
“Mother of God. Since when?”
“Six months.”
I covered my mouth with my hand. “You haven’t taken me in like a refugee. I live here.”
“Since October.”
My brain fired through all the missing pieces of my memories, thinking back to the first day of our road trip, when he was quizzing me on the way to Golden Peak. “Oh. My memory loss isn’t a holdover from my coma, and I didn’t get drunk that night.”
He groaned, exhaling heavily as he draped a forearm over his eyes. “No.”
“H-hold on. This has the stink of dirty magick all over it. You did a memory spell on me!”
“It wasn’t my idea.”
Anger flared. “Whose idea was it, then?”
He lifted his arm briefly to squint an accusing look at me.
Crap. I bit the inside of my mouth. “I asked you to?”
“Argued it until I couldn’t see any other option.”
Oh. That did sound like me. “Why?” But as soon as I said it, I knew. “My mother. To keep you out of danger.” But that didn’t seem like Lon. He was too proud, too selfless, to care about his own safety. The only person he’d worry over would be—“And Jupe. To keep Jupe safe, too.” That sounded right, but there was something he wasn’t telling me.
“The spell is temporary,” he explained. “We wanted to keep certain things out of your mind in case your mother tapped into your dreams. And since she did exactly that last night, and the spell was active, then I guess it was the right decision. I just didn’t know it would be so broad.”
“You didn’t expect me to forget about us.”
“We didn’t expect that. We.”
Right. Because this was my idea. “Why didn’t you just tell me?”
“Because I didn’t want to risk you remembering everything.”
“Like now.”
He grunted.
I fell onto my back beside him and stared up at the pendant lights dangling from the library’s ceiling. Had I done this before? Had crazy monkey sex with him on this rug? It was surreal to think about and gave me a nasty headache. Yep. That was magick, all right. Pretty freaking good magick if I hadn’t realized it until now. Then again, Lon always could work a decent memory spell.
My arm bumped his. I immediately heard an erratic mix of angsty emotions, from regret to begrudged resignation to something that felt a lot like guilt. And that’s when the other emotion jumped back into my head, the warm-honey feeling I couldn’t identify before, only this time it had an undertaste of ache.
I pushed up and leaned over his face, pulling his arm away from his eyes. “Lon Butler, you’re in love with me.”
He reached up and ran his fingers along my clavicle. “Nope.”
“Liar.”
“You’re just some girl who shows up for dinner and ends up hogging all the covers.”
“Double liar.”
“And you aren’t in love with me, either. You just stick around because I’ve got money and a nice cock.”
“It is pretty nice,” I admitted.
Jenn Bennett's Books
- Starry Eyes
- Jenn Bennett
- The Anatomical Shape of a Heart
- Grave Phantoms (Roaring Twenties #3)
- Grim Shadows (Roaring Twenties #2)
- Bitter Spirits (Roaring Twenties #1)
- Binding the Shadows (Arcadia Bell #3)
- Leashing the Tempest (Arcadia Bell #2.5)
- Summoning the Night (Arcadia Bell #2)
- Kindling the Moon (Arcadia Bell #1)