Page 58 of Of Magic and Murder

True, but that’s not the point. “I mean it! We… okay. We take it to our graves. We forget it happened.” I slash my hand through the air. “We tell no one⁠—”

“I’m sorry, Penelope. I can’t do that.”

Right. Because Max is the prime example of what happens when an alpha wolf shifter thinks he knows best and tries to keep secrets from his mate. Eventually, his future mate might ask him if he ever kissed that broken witch while they were investigating those murders in Moonburrow and he’ll have to say yes⁠—

“I can’t do that. Keep our kiss a secret? After months of obsessing over it, I finally got my mate to trust me enough to not only let me use my curse against her, but she kissed me. You kissed me, Pen. You’ll be lucky if I don’t take out an article in Moonburrow Gazette so I can tell the whole damn town that I finally found out what my mate tastes like.”

My brain screeches to a halt. For the first time in a long time, it’s empty. I have no thoughts. Riordan’s off-handed comment is enough to knock them all out of my head.

If only it lasted…

He kissed his mate.

He kissed me.

Ergo, I’m his mate.

That’s what he just said, isn’t it?

Mate? I’m his mate?

I gape up at him.

Looking a little sheepish but also undeniably unrepentant, he nods. “It’s you, Penelope Willows. It’s always been you.”

Again, my brain stops working for a moment before everything rearranges itself at once and I finally see the events of the last few months with clear eyes.

The way he looked at me when we first met. His wolf. His reaction to me. The way everyone in Moonburrow seems to exchange knowing looks whenever Riordan gets too close. Honey insisting that I cast the locator spell despite knowing perfectly well that asking me to perform ordinary magic is generally a terrible idea.

Riordan coming back.

Riordan staying.

Riordan sleeping downstairs because he refuses to leave me alone while there’s a murderer targeting witches.

My sweet witch.

Oh.

Oh, Goddess.

“You knew,” I whisper. “How… how long have you know?”

Riordan braces himself as though he’s sure I’m not going to like his answer. “Since the moment I walked out of the sheriff station and saw you standing there. I caught a whiff of your scent, saw the wonder in your pretty blue eyes, and I nearly fell flat on my face. That is when I knew that you were meant to be mine.”

I blink. “You knew the whole time?”

“Pen—”

“The whole time? And you never once told me. Not before you left⁠—”

“I know. And I’m sorry⁠—”

I don’t think I’m ready to hear that again. “And you did leave. How can you leave your mate? If that’s what I’m supposed to be, how could you walk away from me for two months, Riordan?”

He sucks in a breath. “How? It’s easy when you use a curse on the gentle witch that’s supposed to be your mate and she looks at you with both fear and hatred. It’s easy to convince yourself that she’s better off without you. And now she’s in danger just because she’s a witch, and even if she never accepts you as her mate, you’ll die before you see anyone hurt her. Never again.”

What makes it so much worse is that I… I get that. I really do. And if he’d explained his curse, waited with me while it wore off, and listened to me while I told him what happened, told him that I had nothing to do with Olivia’s ‘death’, we could’ve started over.