Chapter 20 #4
Though his adoration of her hand had grown ardent and swift, Nigel forced himself to move slowly once more.
Releasing her sweet, sweet fingers, he reached instead for her face.
Using just the tip of his pinky, he pushed a messy curl off her forehead.
Then, still slowly, cautiously, he tucked another strand behind her ear.
She trembled, eyelashes quivering.
He trailed the tips of two fingers along the line of her jaw, tilting her chin. Every nerve ending in his body screamed with need, but he refused to let haste drive him. Not now. Not in this most exquisite sliver of time and space.
His gaze lowered to her soft lips, parted and panting.
He knew the shape of them so well and all the little expressions they made.
In anger, in sorrow. In laughter, in teasing, in pain.
And now this. This expression which he scarcely dared name, but which he knew.
He knew. He wasn’t making it up, he wasn’t deluding himself.
She was really here, sitting with him beneath the star-flecked sky.
Looking at him like that. This was real. This was real.
All the usual excuses were there, screaming in the back of his head.
You’re no good for her.
She deserves better than you.
You’ll only cause her pain.
She doesn’t know the whole truth.
You must protect her.
But though the voices echoed wildly, they weren’t loud enough. Not this time.
Nigel tilted his head forward. It didn’t take much. Their noses bumped, a tiny collision, and Luna closed her eyes, uttering a little mewling sound that threatened to unspool his very soul.
He leaned in, his mouth searching. His lips met hers. Softly, gently. A delicate pressure, uncertain at first, and wholly one-sided. But the shock of it, the sheer audacity of his choice, sent shards of molten glass shooting through his veins.
Part of him expected her to push him away.
To hear her voice, harsh with betrayal, exclaiming, “What are you doing, Mr. Grimm?” To realize with terrible shame that he had done exactly what he had vowed never to do, that he’d taken advantage of this woman who had so graciously bestowed her trust upon him.
But she didn’t push him away.
Her lips were cold, frozen under his for a long, agonized moment.
Then they began to move. Slowly, hesitantly. The shyest, sweetest, most tentative giving back of what he offered, and—
“THERE YOU ARE!”
A harsh beam of torchlight burst the shadows into tatters, blinding and startling and utterly hateful.
Nigel yanked his head about to see the imposing figure of Bonnibelle the tour guide, puffing up the final steps of the turret, her flashlight held in a meaty grasp as she trained it upon them.
“I knew it!” she bellowed. “I knew you two would be back to give me grief! Get down from here at once, before I call the wardsman!”
Something very dark, very evil bellowed up from the core of Nigel’s being.
He felt his eyes flick from human eyes to the black voids of Dire Space, felt the rumbling burn of disastrous and destructive magic striving to rise against the bonds of the Sovereign Troth, which only just restrained him.
The outline of a murderous sigil blazed bright in his mind’s eye, bursting with all the strange colors of the Void, and he found himself scrambling to his feet, drawing himself upright, prepared to damn his own soul in a storm of fury.
But then Luna giggled.
Nigel blinked, shocked. He turned to see her bundling up the blue dressing gown in her arms and stuffing it back into the carpet bag.
She let out a little squeak and a, “I’m sorry!
We’re sorry! We’re going now!” even as her voice broke in another bubbling stream of nervous tittering so wildly at odds with the wrath in his soul that, for a moment, Nigel didn’t know how to function.
Luna looked back over her shoulder, saw him standing there. With a little dart, she reached out, clasped hold of his hand. Her palm was once more pressed against his, their fingers interlaced. When she tugged, he stumbled into motion, propelled by nothing but pure need to maintain that connection.
They had just taken the first staggering steps toward the top of the turret stairway, when something brilliant burst overheard.
Nigel tilted his head back to see a ball of burning fire, trailing a long tail of sparkling, mystical energy in all the colors of the rainbow across the night-deepened sky.
He felt an intensity of magic unlike anything he’d ever known or imagined, and realized with a lurch of his heart that Luna was right.
If there was Dark Magic and there was Green Magic, there was room in this universe for Miracle Magic as well.
“There it goes again!” Bonnibelle snarled, breaking the spell of the moment.
“Like clockwork, every dratted night! You know what I’d wish for if’in it were me?
I’d wish for just one night of not having to chase young idiots like the two of you off this here tower! I’m getting too old for these stairs.”