Back in a Spell (The Witches of Thistle Grove, #3)(44)
Now, the sight of him standing among the gravestones and crypts in that sweeping sheepskin duster, snow falling so light and slow around him you could practically count the flakes as they drifted from the blue of the late morning sky, gave me a completely unexpected flush of joy.
“Hey,” he said, turning at my approach, even though the snow-lined ground dampened the click of my bootheels.
He felt me, too, the same way I felt him; through the shielded bond, I could sense the barest hint of his own pleasure at seeing me even before he broke into a beautiful lopsided smile, those eyeliner-smudged jeweled eyes glittering above cold-flushed cheeks. I’d somehow forgotten just how pretty he was, the fine lines of his face and that sharp jaw, the softly made mouth bracketed by a shadow of dark stubble. And there was still no trace of awkwardness between us, even with everything that had happened the last time we’d been together.
“Hi, yourself,” I said, stepping into his arms without even questioning whether I should, as though I’d been doing it for years already, my face tilted for a kiss.
It was light and warm, a bare grazing of those plush lips against mine, his cologne sharp and distinctive even against the chill and woodsmoke of the air. Soft as the kiss was, it still sent a purl of pure heat coiling down my throat and into my chest.
We lingered in it for a moment, relishing the closeness of the bond pulsing contentedly between us, until the kiss threatened to grow into something more than just hello. I stepped back first, clearing my throat and rubbing my gloved hands over my upper arms. “Sorry,” I said, tucking my lips behind my teeth. “I didn’t mean to be so abrupt. I was just, uh, starting to have non-cemetery-appropriate feelings.”
He gave a soft breath of a chuckle, shaking his head, then twitching it in that achingly sexy, graceful way to clear fallen hair from his eyes. “Believe me, I get it. And it’s not even open between us, not like it was the other night. Yet still distracting as all hell. How do witch-married people ever get shit done, walking around all fired up like this?”
“I have to assume you get used to it,” I said with a shrug. My own parents were witchbound, and they certainly seemed to have no trouble not being completely consumed with each other; maybe it wasn’t the same for everyone. Or maybe with time, you learned to manage it better. “That level of intensity must fade eventually.”
His gaze snared mine, so keenly blue it was nearly painful to hold. “I’ll believe that when I feel it fading.”
“Well, ideally, you won’t have to wait that long,” I said, turning away from him with an effort and starting down one of the meandering little paths that wound through the cemetery, between snow-topped statues of angels and gleaming black obelisks.
The Thistle Grove cemetery was a strange and beautiful space, as much a daily haven for the living as a resting place for the town’s dead. It sprawled languidly across almost a hundred acres, enclosed by a fleur-de-lis-tipped wrought-iron fence, lovingly landscaped and tended to in the rural cemetery style even though many of its tombs were aboveground crypts. The kind of neoclassical, Gothic, Romanesque, and Egyptian Revival mausoleums you rarely saw outside of places like New Orleans. All of the Thistle Grove founders except for Alastair Thorn were interred in their crypts here; only the Thorn founder had insisted on being buried at Honeycake Orchards, in the family’s private cemetery.
In the summer, a luxuriant profusion of the now-bare trees and shrubbery overhung the graves, lending shade to the scattered congregations of statues and sculptures. Besides your more standard angels, there was a massive marble stag with huge, branching antlers that supported a series of globes like planets; an armillary sphere, worked in a shining metal that seemed like it might be actual platinum; and in one of the tucked-away corners at the end of a path, a sculpture of a crowned lamia sat on a towering throne, wrists crossed in front of her chest, a scepter in one hand and a skull in the other.
Town legend had it that some of the statues came and went at whim, old ones disappearing overnight to be replaced by new ones that had never been seen before. I couldn’t have said one way or the other; when I came to visit, my own favorites were always exactly where I’d left them.
“That’s what Gareth and I are trying to do,” I went on, as Morty fell into step beside me. We were still moving in that lockstep we’d fallen into at the Shamrock Cauldron, an organic tandem that somehow looked and felt completely natural. I kept having to resist the urge to hold his hand; the desire to initiate contact with him felt almost like a compulsion. “Figure out how to break this spell, or whatever it is. I assume when it goes, the witch bond will, too.”
Even through the locked-down bond, I could feel little runnels of mutual dissatisfaction sluicing back and forth between us at the idea. Bizarre as this whole thing was—unwanted and foisted upon us as the bond had been—it seemed neither of us was completely sure we even wanted it gone.
“Right,” Morty said a little hoarsely, clearly suppressing the same preemptive pang of loss. “And how has that been going?”
“Poorly,” I said, so dryly that he chuckled again. “Catastrophically, actually. We, uh, kind of burned down part of the estate, trying to get rid of that damn coin. Suffice it to say that our mother was not best pleased with the fallout.”
The flare of pain that lit inside me at the thought of her—a comet blaze of ache streaking across my chest—was so strong that it made Morty stumble, then draw up short on the path.