She’d never been drawn to meditation, but ten minutes at a time sounded doable, and she would gladly take up yoga again. “What kind of technique?”
“It can be anything that calms you down in a stressful situation and allows you to maintain self-control. You could try the four-seven-eight breathing technique. Breathe in to the count of four, hold it and count to seven, and breathe out to the count of eight.” One corner of his mouth notched up. “If nothing else, all that counting should ground you. And if a situation is too stressful to count in, you have worse things to worry about than fluctuating Power.”
Reluctantly, she smiled back. “That’s the worst attempt at reassurance I’ve ever heard.”
“You should see my bedside manner.”
Ha. She eyed her beer. If she was going to be cautious, she should never have contacted Josiah to begin with. Screw it. She reached for the bottle.
“Molly,” he said. She looked up from her drink and met his intent amber gaze. “Meditation, yoga, and breathing techniques—those are all Band-Aids. You have far too much Power.” He paused, and then for the first time in her life, someone else’s voice entered her head.
The meaning of his message slid away as she realized he was…
In. Side. Her. Head.
The beer bottle fell out of her lax fingers. She launched off the picnic table and didn’t stop until she had put fifty yards between them. Then she turned in a circle, hands clapped to her temples.
“You could have given me some warning!” she yelled when she faced him again.
He laughed so hard he nearly fell off the table. “How could I know you hadn’t tried telepathy before now? It was the first thing I reached for when my Power awakened.”
“I’ve been a little preoccupied with other things!” She stomped toward him. “Don’t talk to me that way again!”
He waited until she had almost reached him.
“Agh!” She clapped her hands to her head again. “I don’t have to get used to anything right now! Seriously, stop!”
His face was still creased with amusement. “When I offered to take you on as a student, I didn’t realize how entertaining it could be.”
“I’m not your student,” she told him irritably. “This is a onetime lesson, remember?”
His laughter faded, and he eyed her with a leisurely, almost sensual glance. “It doesn’t have to be. Nobody else can teach you what I can teach you. Nobody else will encourage you to be whoever you want the way I would. To shed your inhibitions and explore everything you’re capable of being.”
She let herself be ensnared by the allure in his words, by his sexy voice. Just for a moment. It was such a dangerous, pretty fantasy to run to someone who claimed to have all the answers.
Then she looked away, and the fantasy burst. “I still don’t trust you,” she heard herself saying. “You’re too ambitious, too manipulative. I can see you calculating every move as you weigh what’s in it for you.”
He didn’t try to deny it, nor did he sound angry, just matter-of-fact. “Doesn’t everybody? You’re lying to yourself if you try to claim otherwise.”
Her lips tightened. “And you threw spells on and around me as though they were confetti.”
The last of his amusement vanished, and he pushed from his sitting position on the picnic table. He looked like a tiger about to pounce on its prey. “I already said I would stop. If you don’t believe me, why are you here?”
“Because in spite of all that, I think I like you.” She surprised herself, and she could see from his expression that she had surprised him too. “At least, I don’t dislike you enough to want to avoid you. Besides, I don’t have anybody else I can call right now.”
As that last left her mouth, she marveled at her own tactlessness. Go ahead, genius, piss off your only teacher for miles around. But thankfully he looked amused again.
He studied her. She wanted to squirm under his scrutiny and tightened her muscles against the impulse. Backing down or flinching away from the tiger sounded like a very bad thing to do.
“Fair enough,” he said at last. “Now, why don’t you tell me more about that tip? You said earlier you were filing for divorce and getting a restraining order.”
She hesitated. The lone female jogger and her dog had long since vanished, and the solitude made everything feel riskier, the approaching night full of shadows and unseen peril.
But she was the one who had started this, so she gestured to her upper arm. “I still have bruises where Austin grabbed me, and he showed up at the hotel last night. He’s very angry, and when he gets the divorce papers and settlement offer, he’s going to get angrier. You see, when I left on Thursday, I cleaned out our house safe and took everything.”
A small smile touched the corners of his hard mouth. “You were very upset that night, but you didn’t let that stop your thinking.”
“No, I didn’t. Since then, I’ve discovered something that doesn’t add up in a—well, in a pretty major way.” She dug into her pocket, pulled out the folded paper, and handed it to him. “This was in one of the files from the safe. Nina Rodriguez is my lawyer.” The legal community could be a tight-knit one, and she paused to ask curiously, “Ever heard of her?”
Silently, he shook his head.
“Well, she’s very sharp. Nina and I constructed my settlement offer so Austin gets to keep what’s in this bank account while I keep everything else. At first glance, it looks like he gets the better end of the deal, because… just look at those totals.”
He unfolded the paper, and his lips pursed in a soundless whistle. “That’s a shockingly healthy bottom line.”
Now that she had taken action, the tension left her body. Walking back to the table, she picked up her beer bottle. “Like I said, the numbers don’t add up. Everything else looks fine. Our assets and retirement and savings accounts are what I’d expected from what we’ve accrued. But I didn’t even know this was from a bank account in the Seychelles until my lawyer recognized the format. Austin has be dirty. I don’t know how else he could have accumulated that much money in a hidden account.”
He looked over the paper and met her gaze. “In your settlement offer, you’re keeping all the legitimate assets and leaving him with only this. And you just informed the DA about it.”
She lifted a shoulder. “If it’s legitimate and he was just hiding it from me, he gets to keep a lot of money. If it isn’t, he deserves whatever he gets.”
“And he loses everything.” He smiled. “I like the way you think.”
She nodded and looked away. “Either way, I’ll get more than enough from the settlement to meet my needs, and I’ll be free of him. But this only works for me if you don’t do anything until after the divorce is finalized.”
“You think it will be uncontested?”
“Oh yes. I don’t think he wants the court to get this information.” She shrugged. “It’s possible he made that money legally. I don’t know how, but he didn’t keep me current on everything he was doing, so…”
“Did you file taxes jointly?”
“Yes.”
“So you’ve seen your tax returns for the past several years? You must have, in order to have signed them.”
“Yes.”
“And none of your tax returns declared this income?”
She made a face. “No. Of course not.”
“Then you’re not wrong. If nothing else, he’s guilty of tax evasion and liable for quite a lot of money. Since he hid the income, he probably didn’t get it legitimately, although it’s possible he was only hiding it from you and the US government.”
She could feel her teeth grinding. “I thought of that too. He might have
wanted to hide some of his assets if he was getting ready to leave me.”
Josiah folded the paper and tucked it into his jacket. “If your divorce is uncontested, it should be finalized in sixty days or so, and careful investigations aren’t like hour-long TV shows—they take time. Even if this does lead to something, my office wouldn’t be ready to make a move for several months anyway.”
She blew out a breath. “So you are going to investigate?”
“Oh, yes. I can’t wait to follow the threads and see what’s behind them.” He paused, and his expression turned calculating. “And Sullivan didn’t acquire that money in a vacuum.”
Briefly, her mind opened up to just how big Josiah’s investigation might get. Other people had to be involved, powerful people. Probably even people she had met at their many dinner parties. The amount of money involved all but guaranteed it.
With an effort she pulled out of conjecture. “I’ve been wrapped up in my own concerns. I didn’t consider how big this could get. And you know what? I don’t care. All I want is to decouple from him legally and financially so I can move on with my life.”
Josiah leaned forward. “This all ties back to that defensive spell you want to learn.”
“Yes. I switched to a new location, but I want to be prepared just in case.” She gave him a level look. “I will buy a gun if I have to, but is there a protective incantation or potion that would be better?”
His keen gaze probably saw more than she wanted. “I’m not against guns. I own several myself, but you’re right. You don’t need one to protect yourself. There are more elaborate incantations, potions, and spells you can learn over time, but you’ve already demonstrated you can call up everything you need for now.”
She blew out a breath, feeling both exasperated and intimidated at once. “What does that mean?”
“Come on.” He scooped up the six-pack from the table.
Grabbing the empty dinner bag, she tossed it into a nearby trash can as she followed.
Halogen streetlights had switched on, casting white light over their cars. Josiah strode to the middle of the parking lot. Pulling out an empty beer bottle, he set it on the asphalt. Then he walked back to where she had stopped, several feet away.
“Everything you need is inside you.” He looked down into her eyes. “You don’t need a spell for this.”
She thought she knew where this was going. “You want me to knock that over like I broke the vase at my house.”
“Yep.” He set the six-pack beside his feet and crossed his arms. “Go ahead. Do it.”
She threw up her hands. “I can’t.”
He lifted one broad shoulder. “If you think you can’t, then you can’t. But the Powerful woman I saw at the party didn’t say she couldn’t do things. She just did them.”
“That’s overly simplistic.”
“Is it?” he replied. “Watch this.”
He turned to look at the bottle. An invisible force shot out of him, blazed across the intervening feet, and the bottle exploded.
“Holy crap,” she whispered. Turning her back, she scrubbed her face with both hands.
Like darkness eclipsing the day, he came up behind her and whispered in her ear, “I would never have been able to learn that if I had said I can’t.”
She spun around again. “Okay, I take your point. But the last time I did this, there were sparks of lightning at the edges of my vision. A huge emotion had built up in my body and it didn’t have anywhere to go, at least not until it shot out of me. I don’t know how to access that. I can’t…” At his expression, she swallowed down the rest and made a frustrated noise at the back of her throat.
He snatched up another beer bottle, stalked to the center of the parking lot, and set it into place. As he returned, he pointed at it. “Go.”
She glared at the bottle and tried to push out mentally. It remained upright. She tried again. And again.
And again, until her head started to pound with a dull ache. Josiah stood watching, arms crossed. He looked unimpressed, impatient.
“Stop staring at me,” she snapped.
One dark, sardonic eyebrow rose. “Certainly. That should fix everything.”
“Oh, shut up. I can’t—” His face darkened, and the words hitched in her throat. She growled and started again, this time reaching for better words. “I don’t know how to access that part of me. It’s… it’s…”
“Tied into your emotions, you said.” He sounded bored, his voice cutting. “So access your emotions.”
“Agh!” She pressed her fists against her thighs and tried to remember just exactly how it had happened. She had felt so full of pain and rage she could barely see straight, let alone talk coherently.
The memory was easy enough to access. But pulling up the emotion itself was another matter. Violent, powerful emotions didn’t just lie around waiting for someone to trip over them.
Maybe she was defective. Maybe she wasn’t going to be as Powerful as he thought she was. Maybe she didn’t have the full range of capability other awakening witches did…
Josiah hauled her into his arms. Her lips parted on a shocked gasp. He clamped a hard hand at the back of her neck, and his head plummeted down.
What. The. Hell.
That was as far as she got. Then her spinning thoughts blew to smithereens as his mouth came over hers. He kissed her hard, clamping her against his long, muscled body.
It had been years since anyone other than Austin had kissed her. Years and years. The shock of contact jolted everywhere, followed swiftly by astonished pleasure and outrage.
No, she was pretty sure that was pleasure. Wait, outrage.
Pleasure. Outrage?
She forgot to breathe as her lips moved tentatively under his. Somewhere in her head, a siren began to blare in a klaxon warning.
Austin might have cheated, but she never had. Even though she was getting divorced and no longer owed him a damn thing, she was deeply faithful by nature. This felt like crossing a line she wasn’t supposed to cross. It felt good, but it also felt wrong.
Then Josiah’s tongue plunged into her mouth. His tongue.
Inside her mouth.
A muffled, wordless hnnnf came out of her. Her body caught up with what had happened, and she started to struggle. For a moment his arms remained around her, as unbreakable as iron bands.
Then he let her go. Panting, she fell back and glared at him. He glared back, his amber gaze lambent. She couldn’t tell if he was close to laughter, anger, or arousal—or if it was a combination of all three.
She needed to slap him. Lightning sparked at the edge of her vision.
His eyebrows rose. He pivoted to point at the beer bottle in the middle of the parking lot.
She swiveled to stare where he pointed, and there it was. Power rose up inside, and as she focused her attention on the bottle, the Power shot out of her like a lightning bolt.
Fifteen feet away, the bottle wobbled and fell over.
The bottle fell over.
She whispered, “I did that?”
“You did that,” Josiah said. Fierce satisfaction filled his voice.
She remembered what had just happened and rounded on him. “What the hell!”
He gave her an insolent, unrepentant look. “Now do that five hundred times. Don’t overthink it, don’t doubt yourself, and don’t split your energy by worrying about things.” He stuck his face into hers and snapped out, “Don’t make me kiss you again unless you really mean it. You reach that part of yourself and pull it out on your own. Make it happen.”
Don’t make me kiss you again unless…
He hadn’t meant the kiss. She had tied herself up in knots and felt like she had crossed an ethical line when she hadn’t—and he hadn’t even meant it.
She scrubbed her mouth with the back of one hand. “You manipulative son of a bitch!”
He pointed at the fallen beer bottle. Turning, she glared at it.
There it was, inside her, just as J
osiah said it would be. She knew how to find it now. Her magic flared, bright and deadly like a supernova. She focused it on the target.
This time when the bolt left her, the bottle shattered.
“There you go,” Josiah said. He gave her a nod. “You’re welcome.”
She was so furious she didn’t know what to do. She spat out, “Try to manhandle me like that again, and you’ll regret it.”
His eyes glittered. “I tolerated the first threat you made. Be careful. I won’t be tolerant very much longer.”
The tiger was no longer amused. She forced herself to take in a deep, shaking breath. “You’re such an asshole.”
“That must make you Captain Obvious.” He shook his head with a snort. “It was a kiss. Get over it. I manhandled you a little, and I let you go as soon as you started to struggle. More importantly, it gave you the shock you needed to get the job done. Now, I have a breakfast meeting with the mayor in the morning and a major new investigation to start. Do you have any more tips for me?”
Still breathing hard, she shook her head. She didn’t trust herself to speak. She wanted to plant her fist in his arrogant, unrepentant face.
“All right,” he said. “Remember, do it at least five hundred more times. Do it until it becomes second nature and you don’t have to struggle to access that part of you. Practice it on different targets—on moving targets, if you can find any. Practice it when you’re exhausted and when you first wake up. Good night.”
With that, he turned and strode to his car, leaving her standing alone in the parking lot, staring after him. Her lips still throbbed from the hard pressure of his mouth, and adrenaline pounded through her body.
Just a kiss, he said. Get over it.
But it had been more than just a kiss. It had been her first delicate exploration beyond her dead marriage. Her first hint of pleasure with someone other than her husband.
But he hadn’t meant it.
And for the space of a moment when she had struggled against his strength, she had been very aware that he could overpower her with little effort. And that she couldn’t get free of him unless he chose to let her go.
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