Chapter 7
The entire time the magic-blocking walls surrounded Pippa, she had assumed they would dissolve slowly, like a trickle of water worrying away at a crack in limestone. Little by little, she would feel the world return.
Instead, one moment she was focusing on how the magic was off in the distance—hard to parse, but still there—and the next, the walls crumbled and the world crashed over her in a brutal surge.
Pippa gasped at the suddenness of it. She felt the sparkling pressure of the air, the low rumble of magic at her fingers and below her feet.
Alive and vibrant, tangible enough that she could reach out and snatch handfuls of it if she wanted.
And there as well was the reassuring nudge of Maxim’s entirely human aura: comfort and spice and warmth.
She slumped forward onto him, surrounding herself with that aura, her forehead pressed tight against the curve where his neck met the broad sweep of his shoulder.
The collar of his shirt had managed to retain some of its starch, and the sharp corner of the fabric tickled her nose.
Harsh scruff along the edge of his jaw scraped along the curve of her ear.
Waves of magic rolled over her, bubbling up through her limbs and clustering around the wound in her thigh. As it battled whatever poison remained, the sharp, fiery pain of healing eased.
Pippa gripped Maxim’s shoulders as if she could keep herself anchored by the warm, firm feel of him.
The smell of his skin invaded her senses.
Heated ginger, sour sweat, the earthy and deep blend that Pippa had begun to recognize as his.
He sucked in a breath, and she felt it in the rise of his shoulders and the expansion of his rib cage, felt it in the squirming aura that grew even warmer.
With her senses amplified, with the smells and the feel and the nearness of him, it shouldn’t have been a shock when arousal followed.
It was a general sort of arousal, Pippa decided, and not because of the man she was slumped on.
She slid her clutching hands from his shoulders down to a set of quite solid upper arms, and, all right, she could concede that he was a part of it.
A sound plucked at her awareness: high and pleasured, like it had come from a private browser tab she’d forgotten to close on her phone.
Oh, wait. That had been her. She had moaned.
Maxim’s swallow was as loud as a thunderclap and just as startling.
Mortified, Pippa froze. Against her forehead, his neck grew hot. She cleared her throat, muttered “Sorry,” and straightened without meeting his eyes.
“What just happened?” Maxim’s voice held a tight edge to it, and it emerged a little more graveled than before. “What’s back?”
Oh. She’d been so distracted by the magic returning, and then the ecstatic feeling of the magic returning, she hadn’t realized how truly bizarre the whole scene would have appeared to him.
Was she dying? Warning him of an upcoming attack?
In the midst of a masochistic, pain-fueled orgasm? All three?
“The, um, the magic is back,” she said. “It took me by surprise.”
“So you can . . .” Maxim gestured at her thigh, and when Pippa glanced down, she realized her sensible skirt had ridden up all the way to her waist and her floral underwear were wholly revealed.
She let loose an internal scream. “Yeah, yep, yep,” she said, and made awkward wiggling movements to start pulling the hem down her thighs.
Maxim cleared his throat and stared at the floor to his side, attempting to give her some form of privacy. As if she hadn’t just lasciviously moaned on him a few seconds earlier.
“Is it working yet?” he said.
She assumed he had meant the magic, and when she replied in the affirmative, his attention snapped back to her thigh as if he couldn’t help himself.
The sight was undoubtedly strange to someone unused to it. Even though the wound was smaller than it had been before the stitches, and it wasn’t close to the size of the wound she had healed on Maxim yesterday, she could see flesh wriggling and reforming beneath the little lines of thread.
Pippa tugged her skirt’s hem down to cover it.
Stars, she had slumped onto him and moaned while her crotch was on display, and the only thing making it slightly all right was that he appeared to be just as startled by the whole situation as she was.
And that he seemed more interested in her healing wound than her displayed crotch.
So why was she a little disappointed?
“How are you feel—”
“When did—”
Pippa wasn’t sure what form of magic made it so that, when two people sat in uncomfortable silence for any length of time, they always seemed to find the exact same moment to begin talking.
“I’m fine,” she said, answering his interrupted question.
He leaned back and settled on his heels.
It couldn’t have been a comfortable position in those shining black shoes, which looked stiffer than she’d assumed his personality to be.
Stoic and proud Maxim Sheppard, with as much personality and flexibility as patent leather Oxfords.
Then he had gone and shown joy and worry and excitement and an unexpected softness completely perpendicular to the man she’d worked alongside for the past few months.
Maybe Maxim just needed a little breaking in before he became comfortable.
Pippa realized he had asked her another question and in answer, she had simply stared at one of the buttons on his shirt.
“Mmwhat?” she said.
Maxim set his hands on his hips and exhaled a small snort. “I’m baffled, really.”
“Why, because I ignored your question?”
Now he crossed his arms over his chest, covering the button she’d focused on earlier.
The rolled-up sleeves look was creating warm tingles low in Pippa’s stomach, and although she’d been appreciative of the style before (because, come on, it implied the wearer was about to get into something dirty) it just really fit Maxim.
Possibly because the rolled-up sleeves had allowed her to watch the flex and strain of his forearms as he’d stitched her leg.
That train of thought led to some mental acrobatics as she fought the urge to picture him naked. He'd been meticulous, considerate, and dexterous about pushing a needle into her skin.
There were parallels. Definite parallels.
Maxim sighed. The once-white shirt stretched tight over his shoulders, and Pippa tore her gaze away from the forming creases.
“I didn’t ask you a question,” he said.
“Then what—”
“I said, ‘No, you can’t possibly be fine, I don’t believe you,’ to which you responded by staring through me for a solid minute.”
Pippa shifted on the toilet seat and winced when her thigh stuck to the warmed plastic. “I’ve had a hard day.”
“I know!” Maxim said, exasperated. “I know that! So I want to know, are you all right? Are you going to be all right? Are you just tired, or are you going to collapse in a second from blood loss and infection, and . . . and, I don’t know, just be lying on the ground half-dead if something with fangs and horns barges in through the front door? ”
He was worried. It was as startling as it was confusing, until Pippa remembered how he’d whisked her out of the office and demanded a hospital.
There was something in her head that continued to rail against the idea that he could be capable of empathy.
Despite the concern he had demonstrated just today, the concept of him kept springing back to “Taciturn Dick” like it was made out of memory foam.
But he was here. Concerned. Worried. Alarmingly endearing.
“I’m okay,” she said, surprising herself with how gently it emerged. “Really.”
Maxim’s jaw twitched, and he tapped a finger against his bicep. Pippa was losing track of how many nervous tics the man had.
“I am.” She caught herself reaching out to lay her hand over his to stop the fidgeting and instead redirected her movement to brush some invisible grime off her knee.
“But, yeah. I’m tired. I have to direct the magic.
I can’t just relax and let it work, I have to channel it.
Guide it. It’s almost done though, and I’ll be all better soon.
Tomorrow it’ll be impossible to tell I was hurt at all. ”
“Tomorrow.” He tapped his finger faster. “And until then?”
“The apartment’s warded. Nothing can get in.”
“Was the office warded?”
“No.” She should probably fix that at some point. Nothing had ever tried to attack her at work before; warding the building hadn’t seemed necessary.
Maxim was silent for a moment, though the continued twitch in his jaw and the near incessant tap of his finger implied his thoughts were far from quiet.
“Do you want me to stay tonight?”
The question caught Pippa off guard. Not for the thoughtfulness of it, or the furthering of the whole “break him in like a shoe” metaphor, but for the images it conjured.
Sleep-rumpled and sockless, he would sprawl his long body across her couch, an arm flung over his head and his face smashed into a decorative pillow.
Or he’d join her in her bed. She would roll over on the mattress and into him, startle him awake, apologize, then get caught up in the feel of him and the smell of him and the taste of him and he would roll over in her bed and into her.
Her body thrummed at the thought of it.
No matter where he slept, she’d make coffee in the morning—the crappy kind, bought from a grocery store and slow-dripped into acidic oblivion—and maybe he’d give her another one of those lovely concerned looks over an old ceramic mug as he asked how she felt.
Like the look he was giving her now.
No, actually, that concerned look was fully due to the fact that she was once more sliding hard into fantasy instead of responding to his question.