A Little Green Magic (The Little Coven #1) - Isabel Wroth Page 0,17

an easy rush, and for a while, they stood there like that, wrapped around one another in comfortable silence.

Ivy got herself back together and hummed to let him know she was steady, but he didn't let go of her.

“Witches don't have soul-bonds with other witches,” she told him, nuzzling at his throat, inhaling to take in his natural musky bear scent and the smell of soap. “Once we hit adulthood, we participate in a ceremony called the Paring Ritual. If you're still in school like I was, they do it there. If you were raised in a coven, the ritual is performed by your peers. It's a spell that's supposed to help find your perfect magical match—”

“Please tell me there's not some wand-waving fucktard out there I have to kill in order to keep you,” Uriah interrupted harshly, every ounce of tenderness gone from his voice as his bear made his presence—and his displeasure—undoubtedly clear.

Ivy hid her smile against his chest, digging her fingers into the taut muscles of his shoulders before tipping her head back to reassure him there was no one else coming to steal her away.

“There's not. The Headmistress of Haggara told me she wouldn't even waste her time trying to perform the ritual because none of my peers would have wanted to be paired with me.”

“Why the fuck not?” he demanded with a snarl, flashing her the sharpened edges of his teeth.

A pulse of arousal hit her square in the gut to see him this way: more than a little jealous, bristling with supernatural energy, holding onto her as though expecting some guy to walk through the front door and demand Uriah unhand her.

“Because I'm a dud.”

“A dud?” Uriah seethed, his eyes starting to go full-on bear, his temperature spiked, and she felt the stretch of his muscles as they expanded in preparation to shift.

Despite being unbelievably flattered by his outrage, Ivy hustled to try and soothe him. “It would be like two shifters who were paired up by their parents for the purpose of continuing the species, only one of them could shift, and the other one couldn't.”

“That is absolute bullshit! Shifters who can't shift into their animal form can still have babies that shift!”

Ivy hadn't known that little factoid. “Okay, bad example. What I was trying to get at, is it doesn't work that way with witches.”

“Well, fuck those assholes and their stupid ritual! You are absolutely perfect just the way you are, and not being able to do magic doesn't change that by one iota. If some potion-tossing, wand-waving, limp-dick sonofabitch shows up here and has the balls to call my mate a dud, he'll be reincarnated as bear shit.”

Somehow, with that one furious declaration, years of carrying heavy chains of self-loathing and feelings of complete inadequacy fell away. Ivy felt so light, it was a wonder she didn't levitate right out of his arms.

A giggle worked its way out of her, and soon she laughed so hard she cried tears of mirth, which was why it took a hot minute for the enormity of what Uriah had let slip, penetrate the haze of hilarity.

“You think I'm joking?” Uriah challenged, still fired up about something that to Ivy was old news.

She sighed and shook her head, wondering what the girls were going to think about all this. “No, I don't. Do shifters typically mate with witches?”

He settled down with a final grumble, the fury of the bear easing out of his expression, replaced by something much softer. “It's rare, but not unheard of.”

Ivy stroked her fingers through the soft hair at his nape, staring into his eyes, wondering how this could possibly be real. It felt real.

From the clench of Uriah's arms around her, to the heat of his skin and the hardness pressed between her spread thighs, it felt very real.

“You built my dream house.” She couldn't stop saying it, still struggling to actually believe it, and his entire demeanor changed.

A different sort of heat flared in his gaze, the deeply satisfying smugness returned to his smile, and the rumble his bear made was most definitely amorous. “You're my mate, Ivy Greene. I'm gonna make all your dreams come true.”

Ivy lifted her lips to his, intending to tell him about some of the dreams he'd starred in and how interested she was in seeing those become reality, when her damn stomach acted up and loudly announced the need to be filled.

“Right after I feed you,” Uriah told her, in a tone that