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“But how would they find me? It took you decades, and they don’t even know I exist.”
“Their abilities and resources are way beyond anything I ever had, and it wouldn’t be difficult for them to find out I have a mate. I hired several people to search for you over the years, and I provided each of them with your name, all the details I knew about you, and a drawing of what you look like. Any one of them could potentially pass that information along to the brothers.”
“Even if they did, nothing’s under my name, including my house and car. I don’t even have a credit card.”
He grinned a little. “You were pretty serious about hiding from me.”
“I made it a way of life.”
“That’s a testament to just how awful I was when we first met.”
“But I understand what you were going through, and I also know I played a big part in what went wrong between us. I was angry and resentful, and I never really gave you a chance,” I said. “The thing is, I’d just emigrated to the U.S. with all these hopes and plans. My first nineteen years were hell, and I thought I was finally going to get a chance to build the life I’d always wanted. Then I turned twenty, and you showed up out of nowhere and tried to take over. It seemed like my independence and everything I’d been working for was going to be taken from me, along with my free will.”
“I can see why you had such a hard time with our bond,” he said.
“Even so, I feel incredibly guilty about running away, and all the years I spent hiding.”
It started to rain, so Elias led me to a covered bench on the hillside above the boathouse, and we sat down side-by-side. Then he said, “We were both struggling when we met, and the bond caught us totally off guard. We lived with the consequences of those three disastrous days for a long time, and now we have a chance to get it right.” He turned to meet my gaze as he continued, “But to do that, we have to shift our focus to the present, instead of dwelling in the past.”
“You’re right.” He leaned in and kissed me, and after a moment, I murmured, “Damn it, Elias.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. It’s just that you’re amazing, and I can’t believe I wasted an entire century hiding from you. We lost so much time because of me, and—”
He interrupted with, “Remember what we just said? We’re done looking back.”
I nodded and climbed onto his lap. He wrapped his arms around me and kissed me again, and it was sweet and tender. I parted my lips and deepened the kiss, tasting him and offering myself at the same time.
All around us, the wind howled and the rain came down in sheets. But here in our own little world on that bench, I felt safe, and warm, and protected.
Chapter 6
Elias and I spent quite a while on that bench, wrapped up in each other and deep in conversation as the rain came down. When we finally decided to move indoors, we joined hands and ran to the house, getting soaked along the way.
We hung our wet coats in the foyer, and he picked me up and carried me upstairs. The stubborn part of me wanted to argue that I was capable of walking on my own, but the rest of me shouted at that part to shut the hell up and enjoy it.
Elias drew a bath, and while the big, claw-footed tub filled with hot water, he worked on building a fire in the brick fireplace in the bedroom. After his third match failed to light, I flicked my fingers and the logs went up in flames. He glanced at me with a grin and said, “I almost had it.”
“I know. Just thought I’d help.”
He straightened up and brushed his hands against each other as he said, “It’s easy to forget you have those abilities. You don’t use them very often.”
“I’m used to keeping them hidden, same as everyone with enough witch or warlock blood to work a spell. It’s never been safe to risk revealing ourselves to humans, so hiding becomes second-nature, even when we really don’t have to.”
“I’ve always been curious,” he said, as he came up to me and started unbuttoning my shirt. “Just how powerful are you?”
I shrugged. “I could pick up that big, four-poster bed with a thought, but I couldn’t knock down this building. I guess that means on the scale of party tricks to real power, I’m pretty far down at the party trick side. But I do have the ability to read minds, which might nudge me slightly toward the power end of the spectrum.”
He stopped unbuttoning the shirt. “You’re kidding.” I shook my head, and he said, “That’s incredibly rare.”
