Witcha Gonna Do? (Witchington #1)(65)
“Tilda,” he says the second before our lips meet in a kiss that melts my brain.
It’s not “I love you,” but to my ears in this moment it sounds a lot like it. I undulate against him, riding him as we chase the orgasm we’re both reaching for. It’s so close, like the storm I can hear outside the train’s windows, turning the sky into one bright flash after another. Again and again I impale myself on him, sliding up and down his length as I rock my hips. I plant my hands on his thighs behind me to change the angle, take him deeper as the ball of electricity in my core builds, tightening. One of his hands sneaks up from my hip, slides up my back, and pulls my hair, sharpening the arch of my back, and it’s more than I can take. My nails sink into his muscular shoulders as I break apart into a million waves of pleasure that make the whole world disappear before bringing it all back brighter than before.
Letting out a muttered curse, he picks up the pace of his upward thrusts at the same time that he slams me down on his cock. The world around me is electric and it’s like I can feel every part of the universe as I roll my hips, smoothing the hard edge of his need. His breaths are ragged and his body tense as he fights the inevitable as if he can make this single moment last forever. But it doesn’t work like that, life never does.
“Tilda,” he says, “I—”
Everything else is lost though when I take him in deep one last time and he comes.
A million years or a few seconds later, our breaths are still coming in hard, and his arms are around me as he holds me close to him on the chair. I’d get up if I could, but my legs are mush and the rest of me is awash in happy hormones.
“I got you,” he whispers, and then scoops me up in his arms at the same time as he gets up from the chair and carries me across the room to the bed.
Tucked up against him under the covers a second later, his arm wrapped around my waist as he spoons me, I don’t even try to fight falling asleep. Tomorrow I’ll freak out about what I said, but now I’ll take this perfect moment. Life doesn’t give someone like me many of those, so I’m going to appreciate it.
Chapter Thirty
Gil . . .
Hours later, the sun is just starting to peek over the horizon when I tiptoe back into my room carrying an armload of plundered goodies. Tilda is sitting up in our bed, staring out the window with the unblinking blank look of the non-morning person who has just woken up.
“Morning, sunshine,” I say as I close the door with a backward foot shove.
“Morning.” Her gaze is unfocused as she glances over and her smile shy. She picks up her glasses from the bedside table and slides them on. She glances at the box tucked under my arm and her jaw drops. “Are those Vance’s Lucky Charms?”
“I’ll get him more when we get to Wrightsville.” Okay, I’ll probably end up buying him a case of the sugary stuff and have to pay some kind of embarrassing penance for snagging Vance’s favorite food, but it’s worth it to make sure Tilda is taken care of. Fool in love? Yeah. Guilty. “You needed sustenance after last night.”
She shifts in the bed and the sheets fall down to her waist. “You’re either incredibly brave to take a unicorn shifter’s food or—”
“It’s that.” Walking over to the small table in front of the window, I nearly trip over my own feet because ninety percent of my brain function is taken up with checking out Tilda’s perfect tits.
Tilda smothers a giggle as she leans forward, giving me an even better view of her breasts, obviously more than aware of what is distracting me from the basics of putting one foot in front of the other. “You didn’t hear the other option.”
“Don’t need to, it’s definitely brave,” I say as I lift my arm and let the cereal box drop to the table and then set down the tray loaded with our bowls, spoons, and one very large, very heavy book.
Her glance drops to the items I’m unloading and her flirty smile disappears. “You brought the spell book.”
“Yeah.” I’d spent most of the night trying to figure out a plan for how I am going to tell her the truth and how long I’ve known about it. Brainiac that I am, I still don’t have one, but I can’t put it off anymore—not after last night. She needs to know. “I have to show you something.”
Still, I delay for as long as possible by pouring her a bowl of cereal and bringing it to her along with a cup of elderberry tea on the tray. While she eats, I sit next to her on the bed and flip through the The Liber Umbrarum.
It’s more than just a magic recipe book like some spell books. There are highly skilled illustrations that go along with semi-fictional fairy tales, profiles about historical people, encyclopedic descriptions of various magical creatures, studies of different types of witches, deep dives into the hows and whys of specific ingredients, and—finally—spell after spell after spell. There are hexes for everything from painlessly extracting newts’ eyes to turning your annoying neighbor into one. No wonder the thing is so heavy.
As Tilda finishes up her cereal, I turn the pages past a ton of entries to a double-page spread where the words all curve around a gorgeous watercolor of a witch in old-timey garb, complete with a black pointed hat and a purple robe that the artist has painted so it looks like it’s in motion on the page and the witch might just fly off of it at any second. The title Spellbinder is written in calligraphy and stretches from one side of the left page to the other side of the right.