Dying.
He didn’t have three minutes.
She dropped her hands, cutting off her spellwork, and pressed them back against the implacable barrier, thinking—demanding—open! Open!She’d teleported in a split-second simply because she’d absolutely needed to. Well, she needed this.Him.She felt a hundred conflicting things about this man, but none of that mattered, because he couldn’t die and leave her on her own with his weapon of mass destruction catastrophe and her wizard assassin crisis.
His body convulsed.
Open, open, OPEN!
Then she realized what it was, that thing skittering on the edges of her memory, why spellcasting the proper way felt off.
Not a demand. A plea. Not a tightly held position. Arms thrown wide.
Please. Please oh please oh please.
She could picture the imprisoning spell disappearing. She needed it to happen as badly as he needed oxygen.
Please—I can’t lose him.
The barrier separated with a tremendouscrack—real, not imagined—and disintegrated. She sprang forward, sending morepleasesinto the universe, and he detached from the wall and slumped into her arms, pulling in wheezing gasps of air.
“Peter?” His name came out an octave too high. She sat on the floor, taking him with her. “Are you—OK? Peter,don’t leave me.”
He said nothing, simply breathed, head heavy against her shoulder. It surely did her heart no good to be beating this fast. But she was petrified that he’d been irreparably harmed because she hadn’t arrived fast enough. Had let precious minutes tick away after it first occurred to her that he might be in trouble. She clutched at his back, her tears dripping onto his face.
He groaned. Then he shifted, sitting up under his own power, and stared at her with an intensity that offered entirely different fuel for a rapid pulse.
“Definitely hallucinating,” he croaked.
And he kissed her.
Familiar and foreign at the same time—the brush of his lips, the warmth of his hands, the swoop of her stomach. God help her, she kissed him back. He wasalive, he was all right, he was so close his heart seemed to be beating directly against hers.
She breathed in the faint, intoxicating scent of his bay rum aftershave, grasping his arms, every nerve ending at attention.
Only when he pressed her toward the floor did she find the strength to pull away.
“Peter,” she murmured, putting her fingers to his lips, “this is real.”
He kissed her fingers one by one. “You’re a figment of my imagination. Of course you would say that.”
She sighed. Which of her feelings for him were hers, and which were twisted by his desire for her? Impossible to tell.
“This is really and honestly happening,” she said, the words coming out more apologetically than she’d intended, “so I cannot kiss you. You wouldn’t imagine me saying that, would you?”
His smile was rueful. “Yes. Adds authenticity.”
Lord give her strength. She bit her lip to keep from laughing, or crying.
“You’re alive, I promise you,” she said, extricating herself. “And I’m taking you to a hospital.”
“It’s not going to do any good.”
“Why? Because you’re hallucinating me?”
“That, and they don’t have wizards on staff around here. There’s a spell.”
She grasped his arms. “Where—in the Brown’s Lexicon?”
