Chapter Nine #3
That knowing inside his chest howled. It did not want distance.
Especially now, with the scent of her warm skin in his nostrils.
She smelled like sunlight on the fields, like rain, like cake.
Like home. Something with claws scratched at the inside of his chest in response.
He stumbled, biting back a growl. Civilized men did not growl. Earls did not growl.
Earls did not press ladies against stone walls and sink their teeth, however lightly, into their necks, either. He could blame that on the wild magic inside him.
The lick of his tongue was entirely his doing. It was not magic or a curse. Only need. Desire. For her.
She had no idea how much danger she was in. From the wolves. Magic.
But, most of all, from him.
But the shimmer of gold that heralded magic could not be denied. Not if it meant what he thought it meant.
And Sorcha could not want him to touch her.
He might be an earl, but he was also a wolf.
The scar that slashed across his left eyebrow.
The ragged mark left by the one who had turned him on the Isle of Orkney.
The fact that, even human, he was too big and too quiet and his eyes were too “unnerving.” There was a reason he wore spectacles that he did not need for his eyesight and kept his voice low and soft. He was made for dark nights.
And Sorcha was pure sunlight.
None of which mattered when his vision shimmered. He knew his eyes went gold when he tracked and hunted, just as they did when he wore the wolf. The tent stayed sun-bright, dancing with dust motes. The trampled grass underfoot remained, the coverlet on the bed.
But also: gold threads.
They gleamed and glimmered, invisible to others but connecting witches to magic, talismans to places of power, artifacts just waiting to be found. There was a delicate gold chain linking Sorcha to her familiar, a crow that flew over them to land on the edge of the trunk.
Usually it was a thrill, a primal edict. His natural magic finding its purpose: track, hunt, find.
But today there was a hint of something else: a threat to Sorcha’s well-being.
And that was unacceptable.
He might have thought it spooled out toward Brutus, that maybe he was returning to find Sorcha. But it wasn’t that. Brutus would not challenge him. Aidan might not have a Pack, but he had a certain reputation.
Something told him it was so much worse.
“Aidan?” Sorcha spoke his name again, and despite the pull of his magic, of his wolf, of his legendary, unbreakable focus, he paused. Because he had to. Because it was her.
She poked him in the arm. Hard. There were ladies who were too frightened to look him in the face, but she drilled her sharp little finger into his muscle with a huff. “What are you doing?” she asked.
“Tracking.”
“Is that why your eyes are gold?”
“Aye.” Was she disconcerted? “I’m sorry.”
“You are sorry rather often for someone who keeps saving my life. That was you, wasn’t it? In the Cauldron.”
“Aye.” He lowered his lids.
“Why are you doing that?”
“I’ve been told my eyes can be unnerving.” Mostly in London.
“They’re pretty.” She shrugged, so easily.
“Pretty.” He kept forgetting how different life was in Lyonesse.
“Now you’re the one who’s offended,” she said, grinning.
“I am not.”
“You’re not about to turn into a wolf, are you? I don’t think there’s enough space in here for that, do you? Shall we move outside?”
His mouth twitched in amusement. “I am not about to wear the wolf.”
“Oh.” She wrinkled her nose, looking disappointed. “What are you tracking?”
“Magic.”
“But as a witch, not a wolf.”
“Precisely.”
“And I expect you’d like me to hush now. Granny says I chatter on like a flock of songbirds at dawn.”
“You can talk all you like, songbird.” He liked the sound of her voice. The way she glowed brighter than any gold threads. The way she was beaming at him right now.
He cleared his throat and returned to the work at hand.
The threads twisted through the air, some frayed where the magic petered out, others knotted from being too long unused.
He expected them to lead him out of the tent, to the charms hanging from the trees, the spelled wind chimes, the magic of the equinox all over the island.
But they did not. Or rather, they did, but not in any urgent, meaningful way.
All of the intensity was reserved for the single thread that glowed sharply, blindingly.
The one leading him to Sorcha.
It did not curl around her throat to his mark, nor travel down her arm to the cut there, already healing—the one that made him want to snarl.
But it touched her collarbones, dipped under the neckline, and snaked down between her breasts.
The gold glow sharpened, red at the edges.
He tasted smoke and fennel in the back of his throat when all he wanted to taste was Sorcha.
He did not like that thread touching her.
Neither did his wolf. Not at all.
“Damn it.”
“What is it?” Sorcha asked. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
The threads were familiar. They tasted like the forest, like moonlight. Like a wolf. But also like iron and thorns and silver daggers.
Like a warning.
He tugged at the gold thread, and it rippled, shooting sparks of power into his bones.
His wolf stirred again, scratching inside his ribcage. There was a frantic edge to the warning, a flare of power that Aidan struggled to control.
“Lady Sorcha?”
“Yes?”
“Forgive me another impropriety,” he said, before hooking his fingers under the neckline of her dress.
Her breath caught, pushing her warm, rounded flesh against his knuckles.
He tried very hard not to think about it, not to wonder if she would make that little sound again if he lowered his mouth to her breast and sucked.
Instead, he slipped his fingers slowly into her cleavage until one of the tangled gold threads caught at him like angry little thorns. He reached down a little further and pulled out the charm that burned between her breasts with a poisonous fire she did not feel.
A wolf’s tooth, capped with silver and carved with sigils.
He closed it in his fist, snapping the gold threads with one vicious pull. The shimmer remained, sparkling on Sorcha’s skin, in her hair. Across her lips.
“You have no idea what you’ve done.”