19 #2
“Is that a question?” I grumble, reaching back out to touch him, magick trembling at my fingertips.
Finn turns abruptly, catching my wrist in his hand. “Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Use more of your magick. I’m fine, I really am. There’s no reason to—”
“Oh, for pete’s sake. Turn around.”
“Who’s Pete?” he asks, but he turns.
“No one. It’s a human saying that means, I can’t believe we’re having this argument again. I’m not going to burn myself out. Just going to do a little touch-up, and…”
My words trail off as I brush against his skin, drawing on much less power than I had to last night, but enough to draw a sigh of relief from Finn’s chest.
“Goddess, that’s… I don’t even have the words for it.”
“Good, right?” I tease, letting my fingertips trail across the burn, watching the redness recede in their wake.
The pain in my own hands is more of an itchy tingle this time, and I am absolutely not going to mention that part of my magick to Finn. Not unless I want him to get all noble and dramatic again, and I absolutely have no intention of doing that.
“Sit over there?” I murmur a couple of minutes later when I’m nearly done, pointing to a fallen tree trunk off the path that will make a suitable bench. “I want a better look.”
Again, Finn obeys, and as I come to stand behind him and get a better vantage point to the top of his burns, I’m even more satisfied.
“I don’t think the fire touched your wing,” I say, examining the expanse of muscled shoulder where his skin meets the base of his wing.
From there, I can’t help myself.
My fingers trace from the base and higher, over the black, leathery skin that stretches between thick tendons which hold the structure of the wing together.
It’s fascinating—imagining what he must look like in flight, feeling the shift of skin and muscle and sinew, the power of him waiting to be unleashed.
It’s so fascinating that it takes me longer than it should to realize Finn has gone rigid beneath my touch.
My stomach falls all the way to my feet.
“I’m so sorry,” I gasp, withdrawing my hand. “Am I hurting you? Goddess, I didn’t mean to—”
Before I can finish, he’s reached back and hooked an arm around my waist. Hauling me into his lap, he holds me tight enough to his chest for me to feel the laughter shaking his whole body.
“You’re not hurting me, sunshine.”
Again with that nickname.
It makes a bright little frisson of pleasure spark through me.
Silly, to be so affected by it.
No one in my entire life has given me a nickname—with the exception of Seren calling me Sol—and I should take myself seriously enough for sunshine to be an absolute horror.
Really, I’m the opposite of sunshine, holed up in my workshop until all hours of the night, preferring silence and solitude to crowds and noise.
But on Finn’s lips, it’s not a horror at all.
I want to hear him say it again.
Asking for that would be a horror, though, so I make myself focus back on the conversation at hand.
“If I wasn’t hurting you, why did you just turn to stone?”
He laughs again, an undignified snort. “‘Turn to stone’ is accurate enough, isn’t it?”
I don’t know what he means. At least until I shift a little against him and feel…
“Oh.”
“Yes, oh.” He rubs the tip of his nose against mine once, playfully. “You’ve never heard about what happens when you touch a demon male’s wings?”
I thought I had reached my quota for blushing today, but apparently I still have a little more in me as his words sink in.
“S-sorry,” I stutter as I try to wriggle off his lap. “I really didn’t mean to—”
“I don’t mind,” he says with a chuckle, keeping me firmly in place. “And I don’t presume it means anything more than a healer diligently doing her work. I just thought you should avoid any other, ah, misunderstandings.”
More color on my cheeks, but I make myself push the embarrassment aside.
“So your wings weren’t hurt, then?”
“Our wings are much more durable than other parts of our bodies,” he explains. “The flames probably did touch me there, but they only would have singed, not burnt. And with your healing, they’re good as new.”
“Durable and sensitive?” I muse, unable to stop my fingers from seeking the curve of his wing, even knowing what it means. Maybe because I know what it means and I can’t stop myself from doing it, anyway. “That seems like a contradiction.”
“You’ll have to take it up with the Goddess,” he tells me, eyes lit with molten rubies and a slight shudder moving through his frame when I touch him there again. “She’s the one who made us that way.”
“She really knew what she was doing, I guess,” I murmur, and he shudders again when I move on to the other wing.
“Sunshine,” he says in a low, graveled rasp. “I’m trying really hard to remember you’re a healer and I’m your patient.”
I give him a cheeky grin, feeling entirely unlike myself.
Since when do I flirt?
Since when am I so forward with a man—okay, demon—I barely know?
Since when do I feel this kind of wild attraction and give myself permission to act on it?
The answer is staring me right in the face.
Golden-haired and crimson-eyed, gaze tracing over me like he’d have no problem tossing professionalism right out the window.
I’m only this way since Finn, apparently. Since the Goddess took it into her head to match the two of us together.
But that doesn’t mean I need to push it.
It doesn’t mean I need to rush into anything, and as I slide off Finn’s lap and circle back behind him to give him one last look—as a healer, of course—I mentally toss a bucket of cold water over my head.
“Your burns look good,” I tell him, putting on my most neutral, imperial Crescent witch voice. “A couple more applications of salve, maybe a little more healing tomorrow, and you should be set.”
He stands and stretches his wings.
Probably just because they were stiff from being tucked in while I examined them.
Definitely not because he’s trying to impress me.
And I’m not impressed, I’m absolutely not, even while I watch them expand to their full width, while my wide eyes trace the impressive mechanics of them, their graceful sweep, all the power they hold.
“Thank you for your expert care, Healer Soleil,” he says as he tucks them back in and turns to face me. “Shall we return to camp?”
Suppressing a giggle at the formality in his tone, I give him a sage nod and fall into step beside him on the path.
While we walk, he asks about my day. I tell him about the work we did to map the stellarin patches, the plans we have to go back tonight and start harvesting.
He’s entirely engrossed, listening carefully and asking a ton of insightful questions about our methodology, apparently not bored in the slightest to hear me drone on about the intricacies of the process.
The conversation takes us all the way back to camp and through supper, where we sit next to each other at the fire and continue talking softly while everyone around us is occupied in their own dinner conversations.
The topic meanders from the stellarin blooms to Ariana’s grimoire—the work I ostensibly came to this realm to tackle—and even into some of the work I was occupied with back in the human realm.
None of the details seem to bore him. Even the technical stuff about my dreamsbane potion and the breakthrough I made in the brewing procedures, the minutiae of it all, he seems to absorb everything.
It has me feeling all warm and floaty as we pack up after dinner so we can head back up the mountain to gather blooms.
Finn gets ready to come, too, and I don’t try to talk him out of it.
He’s on duty as a guard, and if I’ve asked him to respect my judgment and capability as a healer, the same goes for him knowing his own limits.
Besides, after last night and the lingering anxiety of it all, I don’t blame him for wanting to come.
The drakons stay away tonight, though, and we get dozens of blooms to process tomorrow. It’s an incredibly successful night, all things considered, and enough to have me breathing easy as we descend back to camp around two or three in the morning.
In the center of camp, the fire still burns low, throwing all the handsome angles of Finn’s face into golden relief as we stand between two tents. One is mine, and he nods to where his sits on the opposite side of the clearing.
“I should probably go get some rest,” he says, though he makes no move to leave.
“Yeah, me too.” I stay right where I am.
This isn’t a date. We’re not on the doorstep of one of our houses, waiting to say goodnight, but the feeling is exactly the same as we linger and look at each other, as magick shimmers between us.
“There’s plenty of room in mine for two, you know,” he says, and I laugh.
“Incorrigible. Just like I thought.”
“You said you weren’t going to tell me,” he murmurs, and I feel a gentle pressure at my waist.
His tail.
Pulling me toward him in a hold light enough that I could easily step away if I wanted.
I let him reel me in.
For a few long moments, time slows down.
Finn looks at me.
I look at Finn.
The firelight gilds us both, and the moon above shines its silver-white light down over the mountains.
“Goodnight, sunshine,” he says finally, one hand reaching up to cup my jaw.
Is he going to kiss me?
Do I want him to kiss me?
The magick fluttering in my chest says yes, absolutely, but my more rational brain can’t quite catch up.
In the end, it doesn’t matter, because his lips land on my forehead, brushing against my skin so softly I’m not sure he kissed me at all.
He steps back, grins that devastatingly handsome, crooked grin, and gives me one last lingering look before he heads to his tent.