Oh, she liked it all right. It and all the other slow ones that gave her an excuse to get close and cozy with Tate. She nodded and tried to fight the yawn that hit her out of left field.
Chuckling, Tate angled her face so he could murmur against her lips. “You’re adorable when you’re sleepy.”
“It’s the wine and the music.” And the empty study time last night staring at her computer screen thinking of nothing but Tate. And how comfortable and safe she felt tucked close to him tonight. But that was probably too much information to share.
He pressed a soft, but lingering kiss to her lips, clearly not concerned about the change to an up-tempo song and the others dancing around them. “I should take you home so you can get some sleep.”
He said it softly. Sweet and full of care. But it knifed so deep behind her sternum that drawing breath after the fact was almost impossible. She didn’t want sleep. Didn’t want the night to be over or to be without him. “Probably,” she forced out instead.
Cupping the side of her face, he traced her lower lip, an understanding in his amber eyes that made her wonder if mind reading wasn’t a part of his warrior magic after all. “It won’t be the last time we dance, Elise. It won’t be the last time for anything.”
There it was again. That delightful dip and swirl in her belly paired with a lightness that defied gravity. From the time she’d opened the front door and he’d languidly taken in every inch of her appearance, to the possessive weight of his hands at her hips during their first dance, he’d stirred the disconcerting sensation over and over again. It was glorious. Downright addictive to a degree that made her want to demand a blood vow to go with his promise.
Shoving the thought away until she could dissect it later, she backed away and smoothed her hand along her belly like that might somehow calm the nervous flutters inside. “Okay. Just let me run to the restroom really quick.”
He aimed that knowing look at her again and dipped his head toward the hallway she’d spied behind the band. “It’s back there. I’ll wait for you at the table.”
She wove her way through the crowd, more cognizant of not just how much more dressed up she was than everyone else in shorts or jeans and casual tops, but how much more exposed she felt without Tate beside her. Not once tonight had she been aware of or worried about what others might think of her or what she had on, but now that she was alone, reality seemed sharper. Closer and more chaotic.
Fortunately, the restroom proved a respite of sorts, the lack of people and the muted thrum of the music giving her heart and head time to settle. No matter what happened after tonight—whether he was sincere in what he’d said about wanting more than just tonight—she had fantastic memories to hold close. A new start she could build on.
The click from the auto-mechanism that controlled the tap’s flow sent cool water rushing over her hands just as the door swept open behind her. The music from outside swelled along with a cluster of feminine laughter then muted once more.
“Elise?” One word carried on a candy-coated, but incredibly snide voice.
Elise forced herself not to flinch, finished rinsing her hands and casually lifted her head to meet the cluster of women reflected in the mirror as she reached for the towel dispenser. “Hello, Vanessa.” She let her gaze drift over the other women and tried for what she hoped was a confident smile. “Good to see you all again.”
“Wow, look at you,” one of the other girls said as Elise faced them. The way Tate had introduced them the night of Beltane, she didn’t have a clue what the girl’s name was, but she eyeballed Elise with a mix of shock and appreciation. “That dress is a killer.”
“It sure is,” Vanessa said, sauntering a little closer and doing her own head-to-toe perusal. “Not exactly the kind of thing most people wear here, but it sure explains why Tate’s so into you.”
The temptation to curl her shoulders inward and downplay the figure Tate had openly admired all night tapped between her shoulder blades. Even more pressing was the urge to simply duck her head, avoid the lot of them entirely and escape.
There’s nothing wrong with you, Elise. Nothing to hide. Nothing to be ashamed of. How another person reacts to who you are is a reflection on them and their own insecurities. Nothing more.
Elise clung to the remembered words from her therapist, straightened as much as her five feet two inches plus heels would allow and forced her shoulders back. “I don’t think you know me well enough to know what does or doesn’t make Tate want to spend time with me, but I doubt he deserves being labeled as a man driven only by physical appearance.”
The other women sobered from their lighthearted demeanors and volleyed their attention between Vanessa and Elise with wide eyes.
Vanessa glowered, pure venom burning behind the peaceful sky-blue color. She opened her mouth to speak.
Before she could, the bathroom door swept open leaving Tate braced in the entrance. His suit jacket was back on, obviously ready to leave. He held the door open with one hand splayed in the center and swept the scene with all the alertness of a SWAT team braced to infiltrate a hostage situation. His gaze rested for all of a second on Vanessa before it shifted to Elise. “Everything okay?”
Vanessa spun and faced him. “Tate, it’s the women’s restroom. You can’t just barge in here.”
“Funny. I just did.”
“Everything’s fine,” Elise said answering his question. Granted, her insides were as shaky as her first steps in high heels and her palms were sweaty enough she wished she hadn’t thrown her paper towels in the trash already, but she’d held her own and not backed down. She tipped her head politely to the lot of them and strolled toward him with as much grace as she could muster. “Vanessa and her friends were just saying hello and commenting on my dress.”
Tate pulled Elise into the circle of his arm. “Which part? The fact that you look amazing in it, or how you being here in it made a dive bar look classy?” Without waiting for an answer, he scanned the women behind them with a look that said he wasn’t blind to the near showdown he’d interrupted. “Night, ladies.”
Just a few subtle sentences and an understated farewell, but the way he’d crafted and delivered them as he steered her through the doorway, he may as well have dropped a grenade in the room.
With the band playing their final set at full throttle, talking on the way to the exit wasn’t an option. The thirty-minute drive back to her home seemed even less opportune for casual conversation, let alone addressing what Tate had walked in on or what had him so tense in the aftermath. In the end, she opted to let sleeping dogs lie, let the steady drone of the tires against pavement lull her into a peaceful place and surrendered to strains of Lissie’s “Daughters.”
The approach seemed to have worked, because by the time Tate pulled into the drive and circled around to help her out of her seat, he was back to his usual laid-back, yet controlled demeanor. He shut the car door behind her and guided her to the front door. “What are your plans for tomorrow?”
Given how quiet he’d been on the way home, the question startled her a little. “Um... I don’t know. I hadn’t really made it that far. Before we found out about Draven, I’d just planned to work at my assisted living job through the summer and save up some money for tuition and books.”
“Good.”
“Good?”
“Yeah, if you don’t have plans then you can come with me.”
“Come with you where?”
When she stopped at the bottom of the steps to her porch and faced him for an answer, he just urged her back into motion. “To work.”
She put on the brakes again, this time turning more sharply. “I can’t go with you to work.”
“Why not? Katy goes with Priest every day.”
“Well, yeah. But they’re a couple.”
“They’re mates.” A calculating look crossed his face. One of thos
e sly expressions reserved for men fired up with a sudden bout of wicked inspiration. “Have you learned about mates yet? How that works with our clan?”
“What do you mean, How it works? Isn’t it like how most couples work? They meet, things work out and they live happily ever after?”
His lips twitched and he inched closer. “Happily ever after?”
“Okay, maybe that’s not how all couples work out. Priest and Katy are the type that make other miserable couples want to stab their eyes out with a spoon.”
This time he couldn’t fight the smile and the way he looked grinning down at her in the moonlight, she couldn’t find the strength to bust his chops for laughing. What he shared next, though, knocked her completely off-center. “Voláns don’t have miserable couples. Not unless they fight being with the mate they’re given.”
She rewound his statement in her head, then repeated it out loud for good measure. “The mate they’re given? You mean like an arranged marriage?”
“Yes and no. Yes, it’s a fated match, but it’s not the parents who arrange it. You understand what the Keeper is to us?”
“Jade said he’s the one who does the soul quest. Like some right hand to the Big Guy who makes sure we’re paired up with the right magic and companion animal.”
“The Keeper’s a he to Jade, but might be a she to you. He or she appears to every one of us in a form that will speak to us at the deepest level. The soul quest is a kind of test. A deep look into who and what we are.”
Yeah, Jade had mentioned hers was intense and that no two experiences were ever the same. Given how hard it’d been just to sit through a year’s worth of counseling, Elise wasn’t too excited to dive into a mystical psyche session with a nonhuman. “What’s that got to do with Volán couples?”
“The Keeper picks them for us.”
“What? When?”
His brows lifted as if she’d caught him completely unaware. “I have no idea. Could be when we’re born. Could be five minutes before it happens. I only know that it happens. And like our companions and our magic, the mate that’s chosen is the one best suited for us. I don’t think there’s been one story in our history about any couple unhappy with their match. Only unhappy stories where they fought the connection.”
Huh. Well, that was an interesting nugget to chew on. Definitely something to pester Katy about the next time they saw each other.
Tate cupped the side of her face, effectively dragging her thoughts from the topic at hand. “Come with me tomorrow, mihara. Let me show you what I do for a living and spend more time with you.”
More time with Tate.
As tempting propositions went, it was the mack daddy of them all. Especially the prospect of seeing him work. Plus, she’d be able to pester Priest and Katy with more questions.
But as she’d learned tonight, time with Tate came with difficult complications. Complications she’d have to be prepared to face with or without Tate beside her. “I like being with you, Tate. I like talking with you and learning about who you are, but I know women like Vanessa. If I keep spending time with you, run-ins like tonight aren’t going to stop. They only escalate and get worse.”
His jaw hardened to the same stubborn line he’d worn most of the drive home.
She pushed a little more. “You were with her before me, weren’t you?”
His lips thinned and a muscle ticked at the back of his jaw, but he held her stare. “A few years ago. It was casual and didn’t work for either of us. I think the only reason she showed interest in me was because of my relationship to Priest.”
The truth. Laid fearlessly in front of her for her to work with. Yet another reason she found him so appealing. “How did you know to come check on me in the restroom?”
“I saw Vanessa and her crew come in while we were dancing. When I went to pay the tab, I watched them head to the restroom.”
And he’d moved in to protect her. The same way he’d stood beside her at the party. Why the action warmed her the way it did, she couldn’t say, but it nudged some sleeping part of her to life. “You didn’t have to save me. I’d have been okay.”
“I know you can hold your own. I also know her bullshit has got to be digging up a lot of crap from your past. But you’ve also got to understand—there’s a huge difference between what you went through in high school and where you are today.”
“What’s that?”
He lowered his head, his mouth close enough her lips tingled. “You have me.” He brushed his lips against hers, a there and gone temptation that made her mouth part and her breath catch. “You won’t go through this alone.” Another kiss. “Not this, or anything else.” The next time his mouth lingered, coaxing her lips apart with a teasing swipe of his tongue. “Say yes, mihara. Say you’ll come with me tomorrow. One day at a time, say you’ll take a chance and stay in this with me.”
His breath mingled with hers, the ragged in and out of their escalating breaths and the feel of him pressed against her fogging what was left of her common sense. The past was over and gone. This was now. Her new story. Her new beginning. Whatever that looked like.
Beneath her palm, his heartbeat a steady, reassuring rhythm. Nothing like the galloping pace of her own. She pulled back just enough to fully meet his gaze and took the risk. “Okay. One day at a time, I’m in.”
Chapter Nine
One nice thing about tattoo artists—their 10:00 AM start time sure beat Elise’s 7:00 AM shift at work. A definite plus today considering it’d been nearly one in the morning by the time Tate had finished kissing her senseless on the front porch. It’d taken another hour and a half to stop floating through the memories of her first date and fall asleep. Even then, she’d tossed and turned, an odd flailing sensation leaving her out of sorts.
From her place in the passenger’s seat, she nursed the coffee she’d brought from home and snuggled into her fleece jacket, letting her thoughts drift as the rich green trees along the winding roads and the isolated stores as they neared the town whipped by. “So, tell me how a day in the life of a famous tattoo artist typically plays out.”
“Priest is the famous one. Not me. And I’m still not sure famous is the right word. More like insanely talented and able to charge ludicrous fees for his work.”
“Right. Like I said. Famous.” She flipped the top on her travel mug and shifted a little to better watch him while he drove. Like everything else Tate did, there was a grace about how he handled the curves. A casual confidence in the way his big hand gripped the stick and shifted from one gear to the next. His casual attire was back—this time sporting a white Glass Animals concert tee—and his hair was back in a low ponytail. Which really sucked because she’d had a fine time feeling it in her hands every time he’d kissed her last night. “Jade said there’s more to his tattoos than just ink. That they’re like talismans.”
He glanced at her and grinned. “Talisman is a good word. They can also be a locator or a protection. Jade, Katy, Alek and I all have them. But he doesn’t do them for just anyone. Mostly just the people in our clan. Every now and then, though, a singura will come in and he’ll sense they need something. A boost to help them through something hard. It’s one of the things he did to balance out the darkness before Katy came along.”
“Something positive to offset a negative.”
“Exactly like that.”
“Do they know what they’re getting?”
“People in the clan? Sure. But singura, no. Priest wants to get us more integrated with mainstream society—more modernized than what we were before the Keeper named him high priest—but singura aren’t ready for us yet.”
“More modernized?”
Tate nodded, downshifted for the traffic light ahead and turned on his signal. “I told you things were different for my dad’s generation. It wasn’t just attitudes. It was proximity and sophistication, too. We re
ally lived like a clan. Mostly isolated to the forests that run through Colorado. That was fine before technology, but Priest knew if we didn’t do something to integrate with the rest of the world, we’d die out, magic or not.”
“Is that why Draven tried to get control?”
“Who knows. Maybe.” He shrugged and turned onto Main Street. “Could just be he was a crazy fuck who couldn’t stand his little brother had been picked to serve as priest instead of him.”
For a Thursday approaching ten o’clock, the main drag where the bulk of tourists congregated was surprisingly busy. Most likely in part due to a quickly warming morning and a cloudless May sky. Unlike some touristy towns, the appeal for Eureka Springs was its quaintness. Like the people who lived there hadn’t yet gotten the memo that malls and fast food were the way to go. The streets meandered up and down some pretty significant inclines and the buildings on either side were mostly two or three stories high, the architecture that of a classic 1850s American town house. But rather than an endless stream of buildings, there were trees, too. Lots of them. And where many tourist towns had a hotel every other block, Eureka Springs had mostly bed-and-breakfast options.
Tate pulled into an isolated parking lot behind a redbrick building with tall second-story windows and gorgeous ironwork. Well, calling it a parking lot was a bit of a push. More like an oversized alley someone had opted to completely pave forever ago so as not to take up precious shopper parking spaces out front. He parked between a Harley and a pretty teal convertible Mini Cooper, yanked the parking brake and killed the engine. “Ready for the high life of the tattoo business?”
Oh, she was ready. Honestly, he could have mowed lawns for a living and she’d have still happily followed him around all day. The fact that she was going to get to see how the whole process behind tattoos worked was just icing on the cake. She nodded and pushed her door open. “Please tell me the high life includes a functioning coffee machine. I don’t think the cup I snagged on the way out is going to hold me.”
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