Joy Springs was a pretty place, but the spring and summer greenery tended toward scrubby rather than lush, and the summers could be unseasonably warm if the weather mages didn’t step in. Rowan’s land settled the restless pieces of my soul.
He wanted me here. Or at least he had before our make-out session in the cocoon had gotten so out of hand. With him being so weird now, had he changed his mind?
I blew out a breath and shook the thoughts away. No reason to let my anxiety spiral into full-blown paranoia. We’d never kissed before today, and that kiss had turned into something far deeper. I rubbed the place in my chest where that light had penetrated through. The warmth was still there, and I could swear I still felt a piece of Rowan.
“Paranoia will get you nowhere,” I said in a little sing-song voice as I sat down on the edge of the garden beds. The temperature here was cool but warm and humid enough to keep everything alive. Rowan had installed heaters inside, but the roses would do better if there were a few nights of frigid temperatures. I’d boost everything up before I left this eveningso no harm would come to any of his plants if he didn’t turn them on.
My magic was almost back to normal levels again, the nap I’d taken doing much to restore me. I had a while before I needed to siphon again, but working in here today would keep that at bay a little longer.
With a smile, I gently extricated the roses, my heart tugging a little at the reminder of just a little while before when Rowan told me I was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. I’d never be able to look at these and forget what had almost happened between us. Once I’d situated the roses in the ground, I closed my eyes and got to work.
Chapter
Fourteen
ROWAN
“Are you mad?” Cernunnos seethed. “She does not know what you two almost did today!”
Evie’s father was furious, far angrier than I’d ever seen him, and I could recall at least two other instances where I thought he might murder Caelan. I had to tread carefully.
“Are we not going to speak about the fact that you were spying on us?”
Cernunnos blinked. “What.”
My eyebrows went up. “How could you have possibly known what was going on if you weren’t watching us?”
Cernunnos turned away and gagged. “Aaagh! Gods above, man! No!” He scrubbed a hand over his face. “I am a lot of things, but she is my daughter!”
I crossed my arms over my chest and waited. “Then an explanation would be nice.”
He glared at me, nostrils flaring, before he let out a long sigh. “Danu rarely rises. When she does, our kind pays attention.”
“Danu is Mother Earth?”
“Never say that out loud.” Cernunnos rolled his eyes. “If she had her way, she’d destroy all the trinkets that have her paintedblue and green with the earth in her stomach. She is far too vain for those.” But he saw through my tactic of changing the subject and waggled his finger in front of my face. “I arrived a few minutes after you and Evie awoke and did not want to…interrupt.”
My god. I was a grizzly for crying out loud, but even I was horrified at what he must have heard.
Cernunnos held a hand up. “I left for a little while because I assumed you were intelligent enough to stop what was happening in its tracks.”
“I was,” I snapped.
“Barely. And you hurt her in the process.” He poked a gnarled finger into my chest. “When will you Lords stop hurting my daughter? I am patient because she asks me to be, but you are both walking a very fine line between life and dust.”
I spread my hands out. “I have no intention of hurting her and today was…regrettable.”
One of his eyebrows went up, rage making his eyes flare green and gold.
“Regrettable,” I hurried to say, “in that I had not had the chance to tell her what was happening between us to give her the time to accept or reject the gift.”
“If you had, what do you think her answer would be?”
I shook my head. “I think she would tell me no.”
Sympathy flashed in the old god’s eyes, there and gone so fast I thought I might have imagined it. “I agree,” he said quietly.
We fell silent before I admitted, “I’m floundering. She’s everything I ever wanted, and I feel like I’m fucking this up. Today was…” My voice trailed off and I raised my face to the sky. “Beyond anything I’ve ever experienced. She heals my land and my people. She heals me.”
