he reached out to touch my knee. His hand slipped right through, giving me a chill. I shivered and turned back to look at him. “I get it, okay? You’re dead.”
“Do you?”
“Of course I—Wait.” The look he gave me was pure, sarcastic, amused Gideon. I’d known the man less than a week, but I knew that expression so well it was like I’d been born knowing it. I took another less-covert-than-I-thought look down at his groin, mostly hidden by his position, but not quite.
He couldn’t possibly mean something good by “I’m dead” could he?
It wasn’t like I was unattractive, okay? I was . . . fine. Guys hit on me. They wanted to sleep with me. Small and twinky as I still managed to look at near-thirty, they were usually even the big alpha types I found attractive. But guys like Gideon were something else.
He wasn’t just strong, tall, and beautiful, he was . . . Gideon.
Still, I scooted forward on the couch until our knees were nearly not-touching. “What about when you were alive?”
“It’s been a long time,” he hedged, then sighed and shook his head. He slid forward on the coffee table, spreading his legs to bracket mine, unnecessary as that was. He reached up and let his hand hover just an inch away from my cheek as he stared into my eyes. “Sage. I can safely say that if I could, I would most definitely touch you.”
I decided, for reasons I couldn’t even give myself, to be a petulant brat. “Sure you would. Push me right down onto this couch and”—our eyes met, locked, and I had to shake my head to look down at my own knees—“force me to learn convergence magic.”
“Oh, now you can say it,” he whispered.
“Yeah, well. You inspire things in a guy. Porn things.”
His face was inches from mine, and I could feel the phantom chill of him. I tried to pretend it was warmth, as it would be if he were a huge warm living version of himself.
“If I could, Sage,” he said again. “I would take you back to that bedroom of yours and teach you not to talk back to me.”
I quirked a brow. “What, you’d go all disciplinarian and spank me?” It was a great kink and all, but spanking was not my kink. Still, if real live Gideon had wanted it, it wasn’t like I would have said no.
Instead of agreeing, he smirked. “Nah. It’d just be harder for you to talk back if your sweet little mouth was stuffed full of my cock.”
Well, that evoked a rather different image than spanking. I licked completely dry lips and took a deep breath. “Yeah?”
“Yeah,” he whispered back. “Then I’d put you on your hands and knees and ream your tight little ass till you begged for mercy.”
“Would you give it?”
“Oh sweetheart. I’d give you everything.”
How the hell was I supposed to focus on learning magic after that?
Chapter Seventeen
Fluke dropped the athame on my chest, and I recoiled. It was covered in dirt that showered over my clothes and face as he dropped it, getting everywhere. The taste even filled my mouth. I tried to pull back, to escape the falling clods, but my head hit something hard: the ground. I was lying on the ground. My eyes snapped open in surprise.
Fluke’s intentions were good, even as annoying as the dirt shower was, I knew that. He wanted me to use it, to perform a ritual, and the goal was . . .
What was the goal?
I sat up, putting the knife as far from me as I could without outright throwing it, and looked around. I was in my mother’s garden. Not my garden, you understand, my mother’s. The garden she’d cultivated for a decade in the backyard, lush and beautiful and controlled. In the present, it was still the first two, but the last had been lost almost twenty years earlier.
My garden was a wild, jungle version of this civilized countryside paradise.
Also, it appeared to be spring. The rhubarb was growing in neat rows right in front of me, mother’s familiar, Cheese, peeking at me from behind the leaves of one plant. Why she’d named the orange tabby Cheese I’d never asked, but guilt twisted in my gut.
Alan had killed him that night too, and I’d hardly thought about him since. He’d died trying to defend my mother.
“I’m sorry, Cheese,” I whispered to him, and he ducked back behind the stalk. It was a game he had loved