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Rose considered the house for a minute and then glanced at me. “If I’m supposed to have figured out where you’re going with all this, I’m lost,” she said. “You’ve got something you’re thinking of doing with all these properties? Isn’t the one house we can’t even use that much enough?”
I’d shown her seven spots at various points around the town. Closer than the farmhouse I’d renovated a couple months ago before everything had gone to hell.
I ran my hand over my hair. “Well, you can tell me if this sounds crazy.”
“Crazy? You?” She raised an eyebrow with more of her usual good humor. “You’re the last person I’d expect that from.”
I chuckled. “Me too. But I was sitting with my dad this morning, looking at the painting Jin did for their living room, just being impressed by how well he worked in the glyphs you used for your magic—you’d never know it was anything other than a work of art. And my dad started talking about the addition we were building, the one that collapsed. Saying how we must have gotten too ambitious. We’d have to tell the clients we needed to cut back on the plans.”
“And?” Rose said when I paused. “I guess you couldn’t tell him there wasn’t any problem with the plans to begin with.”
“No. So I guess we’ll just build a smaller addition there. But it got me thinking—maybe that’s looking at things the wrong way. That’s howI’dusually look at things: if something goes wrong, scale back until you get it right. The cautious approach. But maybe what we need right now, with as big a threat as that faction of witches is posing… Maybe we need to go big too. To do something that does sound crazy. I mean, magic is kind of crazy in general, to me anyway. So, who cares if it’d look bizarre to anyone who doesn’t understand, as long as it works?”
Rose nodded, her expression thoughtful. “What’s your big crazy idea, then?”
I held out the notepad of graph paper I’d been sketching on to show her the rough plans I’d been making. “We’d need to hire on someone professional to make sure the engineering side is all up to snuff, but the general idea is… build a little house on each of these properties using the shape of one of your protective glyphs in its structure and layout. Like seven huge protective symbols you can fill with magic, spaced all around town.”
“Seven houses,” Rose said, blinking.
I hurried on. “The witches like Lesley and Thalia who have nowhere else to go could stay there, and maybe they’d like to have that independence. More people like them could end up joining us too. And Damon might be able to convince his mom to move into one. Maybe he’d want to take one for himself. Jin too. I’m not sure how the magical side works, but if you could string a spell between them, maybe you could protect the whole town? At least more than you already can.”
Rose’s lips had parted. “Oh, wow. That’s—that’s amazing, Seth. I never would have come up with that on my own. But you know… with a glyph construction that big… I might be able to get the effect to radiate pretty far.”
A rush of relief and joy swept through me. “That’s great. I’d help as much as I can. Obviously I don’t have the funds to buy up all the properties myself—”
Rose waved her hand dismissively. She was beaming now, her whole face lighting up as she considered the possibilities. “I’ve got the Hallowell accounts now. Our pockets run pretty deep. I can fund the properties and the building materials and whoever you need to hire on.” She paused. “We wouldn’t be able to get these up all that quickly, though, would we?”
“No,” I said with a grimace. “The real estate side alone will take at least a few days, and then getting the permits, and construction… It isn’t going to fix things right now. But it’s something we can move toward. Something to offer any witches who need your help, so they know they’re not going to be dependent on your estate forever. If we end up in a standstill instead of immediate victory, we’ll be able to fight back harder next time once we have that infrastructure in place. If I could have come up with something that’d help us sooner…”
“This is wonderful,” Rose said, touching my arm. She pulled me into a kiss, her light floral scent wisping around us. “Very ambitious, but not crazy at all.”
Her gaze slipped past me for a second, and her body tensed. She eased away from me, turning as if to get something from the truck. I glanced behind me and saw a couple I recognized from town ambling along the country road. Just out taking a walk, it looked like. Of course they’d had to come along this lonely stretch while Rose and I were here.
Resolve tightened around my stomach. It feltwrongto stand here pretending there was nothing between me and the woman I’d just been kissing.
“Rose,” I said, quietly so my voice wouldn’t carry, “who are we protecting with that rule about not letting anyone know about our relationship?”
Rose looked at me with a frown. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, we don’t have tohideit because of the oath. That just stops you from talking about it. Are you at all worried about what people would think aboutyouif they found out?”
She hesitated. I could almost see her weighing the truth against what she thought I’d do it if she told me to. But this was Rose. She’d never been anything but honest with me.
“No,” she said. “They already think I’m weird. It doesn’t matter to me if they think I’m weirder. I just—you guys still have to deal with your parents, your friends—you live there in town…”
I stepped closer to her, setting my hand on her waist. Her eyes darted toward the approaching couple and back to me.
“It’s okay,” I said, bowing my head toward her. “They can say whatever they want. The other guys can decide how they prefer to handle it, but I’m proud of what I have with you, and I don’t give a shit what anyone else thinks. I’m in this with you until the end, in every way I can be.”
“Seth…” A shimmer that looked like tears had come into Rose’s eyes, but she was smiling. I cupped her face and pressed my lips to hers.
She kissed me back cautiously at first and then with growing heat. The movement of her mouth against mine sent an eager shiver through me. I nudged her back against the side of the truck, leaning into her. More heat flooded me where her breasts brushed my chest.
“I want you,” I murmured against her mouth. “I love you. So goddamned much. I don’t care who knows it.”
She let out a shaky breath and then she was kissing me again, her arm slung around my neck as she bobbed up on her toes. I teased one hand into her hair as the other gripped her waist. If my neighbors were watching, they were getting quite an eyeful, but I didn’t feel the slightest regret at that. This was what I’d signed up for—to have this spectacular woman at my side. Why the hell would I hide that?
All that heat shot straight to my groin. My cock hardened against the fly of my jeans. It took all my self-control not to grind up against Rose right there and then. But we were still in view of that passing couple, and I didn’t want to embarrass Rose with too huge a PDA.
