Page 20 of Vengefully Matched

CHAPTER 8 Agatha

That slit in the side of Priscilla’s skirt was driving her fucking crazy.

Obviously, she did not give a fuck about a bit of tasteful midriff, but thighs? Thighs were her kryptonite; they always had been. There was something about a firm, curved thigh that she wanted to squeeze a shade tighter than comfortable.

She knew she ought to be listening to Hart, who was seething about the flash mob.

“—total disregard for my bodily autonomy,” Priscilla—no, that was wrong, thighs be damned, Hart—Hart was saying, chest heaving. Behind her, Agatha’s pothos twisted, agitated. Even her plant thought she’d taken it too far.

Goddess, was she the lady version of a dirty old man at work? Hart was annoying enough to have lived a thousand lifetimes, but she knew from the rather ugly campaign of mudslinging back and forth that Hart was twenty-six, which cognitively should have been the point at which the human brain was fully developed. Her face was unlined, or at least it was normally, when she wasn’t twisting it into that scowl. The things she would do to those lips, even snarling like that, were depraved.

“Oh, because changing my clothes and hair right before one of my most important meetings of the year was totally respectful of boundaries, wasn’t it?” If they were going to talk bodily autonomy, Agatha was certainly not going to let Hart off the hook.

From his desk in front of her office, Kevin looked aghast; he had only just made it back in after a leave of absence. Speaking of toned thighs, she was doing impeccably at ignoring his. It was easy not to ogle Kevin, even though he was the appropriate age. He was her assistant, and at six-foot-four, he was the stuff of romance books, but somehow, and maybe it was a sense of propriety, she had never lusted after the cornflower blue of his eyes, or his blond flip of hair that always landed perfectly.

She was a professional, that was why. And Kevin was kind, which historically was not her type.

Her lack of interest in Kevin was not because of the decidedly licentious thoughts she had about her nemesis, who was currently standing in front of her, fuming. It was not because of gold-tinted brown eyes, raven hair, and a jawline that begged to be licked. It was definitely not because of those lips.

“I’d say we are even,” she said, and she immediately regretted it, Priscilla blushed, actually blushed, and she hadn’t seen the woman ever do such a thing, not even when booking it out of her own wedding, and fuck, why was that blush so pretty on the smooth skin at the nape of her neck, the way it crept up toward her face and down her chest?

Agatha wanted to know how far it went. She wanted to trace it with her fingers and her tongue. She was down bad, and the plants on her wall reached toward Hart. Agatha ran her thumb across her fingers, magicking a warning for them to keep their tendrils to themselves.

Agatha rubbed her fingers on her eyes. They were just coworkers, and practically rivals, to boot. There would be no licking here.

“I swear on the name of every single Hart that has graced these halls, all the way back to my great-great-grandmother, to start with, that this indignity will not go unanswered.”

Hart’s voice was booming, magic unspooling, possibly unbidden, from her. Her fingers twitched; she was one irritation away from snapping something terrible.

“Let’s talk about it in my office,” Agatha said, looking pointedly around. Kevin was not the only one staring, and that seemed to wake Hart from a trance of outrage; she looked around and blanched.

Right. Hart might not give one single fuck what Agatha thought, but she did care about the Council. She’d tried to lead it herself, after all.

After driving out the previous president. With her thighs, probably.

“Fine,” she said, gesturing for Agatha to go first.

Agatha sighed and adjusted her lavender vest. She could hear Hart on her heels, could smell her, all lemony, with a hint of something herbal—mint, maybe—and she’d be kidding herself if she didn’t admit that she smelled good, even after dancing her ass off in a flash mob hex that Agatha was quite proud of.

It may have been devious, but the magic was impeccable.

They were only a few feet into the office when everything went white, the force of the explosion tossing them both back into the hall.

From behind the ringing in her ears, she could hear Kevin panicking, and someone else—Nancy, maybe?—shouting for help, but she was too dazed to be sure. Her ankle twisted at an awful angle that would hurt to high heaven once the pain registered, and her back would ache later for this. They had certainly never warned of this sort of prank in any workplace mockumentary sitcom. She should be outraged. She had every right to be outraged; someone was clearly trying to kill her. But for now, all she noticed was Priscilla, limp on the floor, a trickle of blood oozing from her forehead.

Panic spiked through her, blood rushing, and she reached for the other woman, desperate to find a pulse.

Hart’s wrist was cool to her touch, the skin impossibly smooth, but she couldn’t find one, quite possibly because she absolutely had little medical training beyond the required yearly magical resources sessions on how to magically administer Narcan and an EpiPen, neither of which would help in this particular instance.

She moved two fingers to the space just below Hart’s jaw, the way she’d seen people do on medical dramas, and there it was: a fluttering, living pulse.

The tension eased, she rocked back onto her heels, not taking her hand off Hart, but feeling the agony of her ankle—twisted, for sure—beneath her.

Priscilla’s hand rose up in a flash, circling her wrist, cool against the warmth of her own.

Her eyes shot open, and there they were, deep brown, only the slightest bit of gold rimming them.

Agatha’s breath caught, and not just from the pain in her ankle.