“He went home with a friend. They hit it off. Something happened between them during…you know.”
“Do I?” Her eyes rove over my face, reading the details I’m giving away without trying. I send a silent prayer asking Brennan to forgive me. “Can you be more specific?”
“It was in private. Like,veryprivate,” I flounder.
She sucks air through her teeth, annoyed, sounding snakelike. “About the magic, Jude, not the sex. I’ve got that part.”
“Oh, right.” I scramble for an answer that will satisfy her without implicating Brennan. “It’s within the scope of his usual power; he assured me of that much.”
“You spoke with him about it?” She gets up, paces a moment, turns toward me. “And the friend? What did he say?”
I swallow. “He called it sex magic. He’s clueless. You don’t need to worry about him.”
Her eyes narrow almost imperceptibly, but she doesn’t press it. “Pretend I’m a child,” she says. “Spell it out for me, kitten.”
The truth is, Brennan was wrong. I was never going to be able to keep this from her, and he of all people should have known that. “Levitation.”
Her composure slips, jerking to regain balance the way someone does on an icy step. But I’ve seen it in those unguarded milliseconds, the fury. It’s the most undone I’ve ever seen her.
Brennan is going to hate me.
“They levitated during—”
“Sex. Yes,” I cut in, trying to recover, to make it sound more mundane than it is. “Aaron was quite taken with the whole affair,” I prattle, catching myself too late.
Arla purses her lips and walks to the windows, gazing out. Herlong hair sheets down her back, softer than usual. “So, he’s growing.” She says it under her breath.
“Sorry?”
“Levitation,” she says. “It’s not something he was capable of before. I wonder what else he’s capable of that he’s not sharing,” she says quietly, an edge to her tone.
I hate being caught in the middle. There’s always blowback.
“Can you imagine?” she asks quietly. “Others knowing what we can do?”
I swallow even though my throat has gone dry. “Aaron would never talk, especially if I tell him not to.”
She turns to me. “Even one is too many.”
She’s right, but Aaron isn’t a threat. I can convince him to keep quiet, maybe even that it was something else—a dream, a drug, a hallucination brought on by the best sex he’s ever had. I press my lips together until they flatten. Arla looks out the window.
“What will you do?” I ask though I’m not sure I want to know. The conversation will be excruciatingly awkward. “What will you say to him?”
She sighs, then rubs her brow with a hand and lets it drop to her side. “Let me worry about that.”
I try to imagine what she’s thinking, but her mind is a fortress. Guilt steals over me in a dark cloud. I came here to fix the situation, to give Arla just enough to get her off my case and to give Brennan some measure of reassurance. But instead, I’ve done the opposite, spilled Brennan’s secrets across the rug and driven a deeper wedge between them. I never should have agreed to this in the first place. “I don’t like being put in this position. I don’t want to do something like this for you again, Arla. It’s not my place. You should have confronted Brennan directly.”
She scoffs. “As if he would have told me the truth.”
I can’t argue with her logic, but still, there’s something slippery to her thinking. I stand and start to drag my purse strap over my shoulder. I should leave, go back to the office. I’m long past a normal lunch hour now. “So we’re clear. I’m done spying.”
She watches me, a shiftiness behind her gaze, as if I can see her thoughts.
I’m about to ask for her help with the ATM footage Jessica has requested when her hand darts out, palm up, waiting for me to take it. “Come. I have a reward for you.”
It feels dirty, like blood money. For so many reasons, I shouldn’t. I tell myself it’s a gift I don’t want.
Sensing my hesitation, she purrs, “I promise it will have been worth it. Thank you for displacing your own principles for me, Jude. I had to know.”
