houses. Doing so heightened the risk of discovery for everyone.
The bathroom door opened, and she stood shivering and clinging to the knob. She had managed to wiggle into his T-shirt, but her long legs remained bare, and her wet hair hung in ropes down her back.
He shoved his phone in his pocket and sprang forward to catch her by the elbows. As she swayed against him, the scent of his soap reached his nostrils.
“Let’s sit you on the bed and I’ll get the hair dryer,” he said, putting an arm around her shoulders and leading her into the other room.
“You don’t have to do that. I don’t care if I go to bed with a wet head.” She sounded utterly spent.
“I’ve done that before. It’s cold down here in the basement, and my hair is much shorter than yours. We can at least get you a little drier. Right now you’re dripping.”
“Okay, if you don’t mind.”
He tightened his arm. “I don’t mind.”
Is Molly Sullivan becoming a distraction? Anson had asked.
And his first, most honest response had been, hell yes. Yes, she was. It was unplanned, unwanted, but it was also more powerful than he knew how to resist.
* * *
Showering was rough.
Josiah had warned her, so she’d been braced when she’d checked her appearance in the small mirror. And it wasn’t as bad as she had imagined.
It was a lot worse. Half her head was soaked in blood. Her cheek was swelling, and it looked like it had been abraded with a cheese grater.
She whispered to her image, “No jury in the world would have convicted you. You should have gotten whatever he had beaten you with and thrown it beside his body.”
Then, possibly, it might have looked like she had used Austin’s own weapon to fight back, especially since nobody from her old life knew about her burgeoning Power. Except there was no good way to explain what had happened to his BMW.
At least now if anybody questioned her, she could claim she had no idea what had happened, as long as nobody laid eyes on her until she healed.
She turned on the faucets. Pain flared again when she stepped under the warm flow of water. Injuries throbbed, and her torn skin stung like a bitch. But avoiding discomfort wasn’t an option, so she sucked it up and washed herself as best she could.
By the time she’d finished, she was so exhausted she gladly leaned against Josiah as he helped her into the bedroom. Then she sat forward, elbows braced on knees with her head bent while he plugged in a hair dryer and turned it on her, running long fingers gently through the wet strands.
He had to use his hand because he didn’t have a hairbrush, or at least she hadn’t found one in the bathroom. The repetitive motion was incredibly soothing. Soon her eyes closed. Against the blackness of her inner lids, she thought of what he had looked like when he had cast the healing spells.
He had started speaking in the foreign-sounding language again. It sounded elegant in his dark, low voice, imbued with Power and tense with a meaning that escaped her. Was it Russian?
No matter how she’d tried to concentrate, the words shot away like sparks flying out from the strike of a blacksmith’s hammer, and the spells took shape in the forge of his magic.
She had never seen or heard anything so compelling in her life. Then the pain from the healing spells had driven everything else out.
He ran his hand through her hair one last time before turning the hair dryer off. “That should do.”
“Thank you.” She tested the hair at the back of her head. It was perfectly dry, and she felt warm all over.
“You’re welcome.” He took the dryer away and returned with another glass of water and an ibuprofen bottle. Shaking out some pills, he offered them to her.
Wordlessly she swallowed them down and drained the glass. When she had finished, she said, “He wanted me to give him all the copies I’d made of the Seychelles file. He was going to kill me. I don’t know how I could see it, but I could tell he had containers of gas in the trunk of his car along with some rope that I think he meant to use to tie me up.”
“Sometimes visions come when a witch is in crisis even if they’re not normally a seer.” He sat beside her.