“For the love of Gaia,” Brodie groaned as I turned away. His fingers curled around my upper arm, and the next thing I knew he’d yanked me into the circle. “Did they not teach ye anything in that blasted school?” he snapped, crushing me against his broad chest.
“The academy?” I asked, trying to ignore the way his strong arms felt as they wrapped around my waist. “No, they taught us how to enforce law and order, not how to draw chalk circles.”
“If ye weren’t so bonny, I’d turn ye over my knee and spank that perfect arse of yers,” he muttered, and my cheeks flushed. He thought my ass was perfect? “It’s not just about the chalk circle. The world is full of currents. Ye gather the right herbs, find the right spot, and say the right incantation, and you?can ride those currents if yer good at what you do.” He winked at me. “I dinnae think it would surprise ye to ken that I’m very good at what I do.”
“What do you mean by ‘riding currents’?” I shook my head. “It’s chalk on the ground, Brodie. Two more lines, and we could play hopscotch.”
“Maybe later.” That mischievous grin grew even wider, and his grip on me tightened. “Ye better hold on tight, lass. We’re in for a wild ride.”
I was about to ask what he meant when the ground suddenly shook beneath us. Crying out, I grabbed hold of Brodie as tight as I could just as a green light exploded from the ground and swallowed us whole.
5
Arabella
When the blindinglight finally subsided, everything around me had changed.
Well, not everything. Brodie was still the same. Same lively green eyes. Same ridiculously handsome face. Same hard, muscular arms wrapped securely around me, same calloused hands gripping me tight in a way that sent warm tingles through me, and made a part of me ache for something I had no business thinking about right now.
But the rest of it was completely different. We weren’t in a back alley anymore, crammed together in a chalk circle and suffocated by the stench of rotting trash and oil. No, the circle we stood in was now ten times the size of the other, and in the center of a large field. The foul air had been replaced by a clean scent laced with sunshine and grass. Above us, a thick blanket of stars blazed so brightly in the night sky that I knew we had to be far from any urban area.
Nausea rose into my throat, and I retched. Quickly, I stumbled back from Brodie, so I wouldn’t hurl all over him, and fell to my knees. I curled my fingers tightly into the stalks of grass as my stomach heaved a few times, but it was empty as a vampire’s grave, and nothing came up.
“Dinnae worry, lass,” Brodie said, crouching down next to me. He placed a hand on my shoulder, and the warm touched helped settle me a little even as my cheeks flamed with embarrassment. Leave it to me to make an utter fool of myself in front of the most gorgeous man I’d ever seen in my life. “Riding the currents can be very unsettling the first time, even to someone like yerself.”
“What happened?” I asked, swallowing down a bit of bile that had worked its way up my throat. “How the hell did we end up here?” I had no clue why Brodie kept talking about me like I was something special. What did he think I was, anyway?
“I told ye, lass. We rode the currents.” He took my hand and gently pulled me to my feet. As I rose, the world began to spin, and I clutched his tattooed forearm for balance. “I dinnae ken why yer having such a hard time comprehending that.”
“Because it doesn’t make sense!” I snapped, snatching my hand away from his arm. My body still ached from the car accident, but I refused to lean on Brodie for strength any more than I had to. I didn’t like showing weakness to strangers, and even though Brodie had saved my skin, it just didn’t seem right to let my guard down around him so soon. In a man’s world, showing weakness was a sure ticket to getting walked all over. And I sure as hell wasn’t about to let that happen.
I took a deep breath to try to calm myself before saying, “You’re talking about riding currents, magic Irish Druids, and exorcisms. I would think you were a crazy person if those so-called EMTs hadn’t done some pretty strange shit, and if you hadn’t just teleported me to some country field.” I crossed my arms against the chilly breeze and scowled at him. “So just which one of us is the crazy one?”
“You, obviously.” He grinned, and my heart skipped a beat. “Anyone with a working pair of eyes can see that I’m not a filthy Irishman. I’ve the classic good looks of a Scot.” He turned his nose up at me.
“I’m serious,” I said, doing my best not to give into the smile twitching at my lips. God, but did he have to be so stupidly charming? There was an impishness about this man that made it difficult to stay angry with him. I held his gaze for a long minute, and his smile gradually faded away.
“Ye are being serious, aren’t ye?” he asked, shaking his head. His jaw clenched, and he scraped a hand through his hair. “Christ Almighty! How is it I get the one bleeding Sentinel in all of creation who isn’t shoving her ideology down my throat?” Those gorgeous eyes narrowed, sparkling with ire. “Take off yer shirt.”
“What?” My cheeks flushed, and I took an involuntary step back. “I’m not getting undressed, creep!”
“Calm yer tits,” Brodie snapped, rolling his eyes. “I just need to see what’s under there is all.”
I folded my arms across said tits, refusing to budge. “I’m pretty sure you can figure out what’s under here without having to look under my shirt.”
He let out a long-suffering sigh, as if I were the one being unreasonable. “There’s a mark on you, a mark that all your kind have,” he said, jabbing a finger at my chest. “I can see it peeking out from beneath yer shirt, but it doesna look right for some reason. I need to take a look at it.”
I clutched my torn shirt closed as another wave of embarrassment heated my cheeks. How did he know about the mark stretching across my chest, the same one Lucas had scrutinized earlier?
“I don’t have a ‘kind,’” I said defiantly. “Unless you’re referring to me being a Baptist.”
“Baptists?” Brodie raised his eyes to the sky, as if imploring some god above to save him. Hell, I wished someone would come and save me from this craziness. “The woman has Demonkin coming out her backside and she tells me she’s a Baptist.” He turned his green gaze back to me, his shaggy hair falling into his eyes. “Yer not a Baptist, lass. At least, that’s not all ye are. Now let me see the mark on yer chest.”
His tone softened. For some reason, it touched something inside me. The knot in my stomach loosened a bit, and I suddenly found it hard to come up with a reason to refuse him. The look in his gaze told me he wasn’t some perv—and besides, he had rescued me. I could show him the mark on my chest, if it would help get some questions answered.
Swallowing hard, I loosened my grip on my shirt, then undid the rest of the buttons. Cool air caressed my bare flesh, but the shiver that raced down my skin had nothing to do with it. No, it was the way Brodie’s nostrils flared, his eyes heating up as they traveled up and down my torso. My cheeks flamed as he leaned in to examine the mark, and?his?warm?breath?fell?against my bare skin. His fingers grazed the unsightly expanse of flesh, drifting?left and right across it?as though he were reading over a treasure map, or perhaps trying to understand a lost language.
“It’s a birthmark,” I said, my voice more breathless than I would have liked. God, but the sensation of those strong, calloused fingers caressing my chest did wild and wonderful things to me. Suddenly, I wanted to grab his hands and pull them against mine, to run them all over my naked skin and relieve the sudden ache that blossomed in my core. I had no doubt those hands knew what to do with a woman’s body, and that mouth…
