Page 72 of Bad Witch

As we passed the north side of the house, a light came on in one of the rooms on the ground floor. We both froze. Aradina strode into what looked like a library, lifted a bottle of gin from a small table, and poured several fingers into a crystal glass. She downed it, filled it again, then sat behind a big desk and opened the laptop there. We stood in the shadows of the hedge, making sure we hadn’t been discovered, but Aradina didn’t seem to be concerned about anything, the opposite in fact.

“She’s beautiful. I can see why you wanted to have sex with her,” Tempest whispered. “I bet she was good at it.” Her gaze slid to me in the darkness. “She was good at sex, right?”

Fuck. The shit Temp said. The urge to laugh, something that had rarely happened before I met her, now hit me often. The only reason I bit it back now was because I knew she didn’t mean it as a joke. Tempest either said nothing, hiding so much, or she thought something and said it without bothering to filter it, not worried if it made her vulnerable or if it gave too much away. Temp was a contradiction, but she was also sweet and funny, and I didn’t want my awkward little female to stop saying the random shit she did to me ever. “It was fine,” I said. Honestly, I barely remembered it.

“Fine? Wasn’t it…I don’t know. Mind-blowing? Didn’t the earth move?”

Fucking hell. “The earth didn’t move, peaches, not with her.”

“Does it ever?” Again, there was nothing but sincerity in her voice. She was genuinely curious.

I didn’t want to talk about fucking other females. None of them existed to me, not now that I’d found Tempest, but she wanted to know because she’d never experienced it herself. “Sex can be really fucking good, Temp, but it depends on who you’re sharing that with.” Squeezing my hand around hers, I led her away from the side of the house and deeper into the garden. Cupping her beautiful face, I looked down at her. “When we finally go there, baby, I promise you, your mind will be blown and the earth will move.”

“How can you know that?”

Because you’re my mate, made for me in every way, and nothing will compare to the way we come together. I couldn’t say any of that though. “Because I just know.”

“How?” she asked again.

Leaning in, I slid my mouth along her throat, kissing her tender skin, then sucked on her delicate earlobe. She shivered, a full-body quake, and I grinned and breathed her deep into my lungs, making the beast rumble contentedly in my chest. “You feel that?”

“What?” she whispered.

I chuckled. “You felt nothing when I kissed you just then?” She’d shivered, and I’d heard the catch in her throat.

Her breath shook from her. “I mean, yes…I felt something.”

“Explain it to me.”

Her gaze slid over my face, to my mouth and back up. “It’s hard to explain, it was like…like⁠—”

“Like we were sparking off each other? And when we’re close, we’re drawn closer so we can get another hit of the electricity between us.”

She swallowed audibly. “Yes, that’s…very much what it’s like.”

“It’s not like that with just anyone. At least not for me.”

“It’s not?”

I shook my head and slid my fingers down the side of her smooth cheek. “Like I said, when you’re ready and we finally come together, baby, the earth will move.”

She blinked her big green eyes up at me. “That sounds kind of terrifying, Fender.”

“Maybe, but it’ll be the kind of terrifying that’s addictive. You won’t want to run from it, you’ll want to run at it. Over and over again,” I said roughly, hunger in my voice now.

She shook her head. “That can’t happen.” Her thick lashes fluttered. “I can’t get addicted to you.”

“No?”

Her distress was being broadcast loud and clear. She was trying to hide it from me, but it radiated off her. “I have to avoid that at all costs, for both our sakes.”

She wasn’t going to tell me why she felt that way, not yet. What I did know was that she’d convinced herself this thing between us couldn’t last, that for some reason she couldn’t have anything permanent. “You want to tell me why?” I asked anyway, because this female had secrets, so many secrets, and I wasn’t sure how I was going to get her to open up to me.

Her mouth opened and closed. “I…I have boundaries,” she blurted.

“Okay.”

“And rules of engagement.”