But we had practiced warming and chilling objects, liquids, and even the air. Like the damp, miserable, thin layer of liquid coating my skin under my clothing. Or the oven-like east wind trying to ruffle my limp curls. Reaching my power came naturally to me these days, given the expert tutelage I’d received and…a little quiver went through my stomach, and no, I couldn’t think about theotherreason my power had been so consistent. Not here surrounded by people!
I couldn’t help glancing across the lawn. I’d been trying to avoid looking at him. But Stefan’s embroidered lime-colored taffeta caught the eye even surrounded by the garden’s greenery, and his golden head shone in the sun. His height and broad shoulders made him unmistakable in a group of other gentlemen—at least to me. I could always pick him out of a crowd, and it didn’t have much to do with his eyewatering taste in clothing.
As if he’d felt my gaze, he turned his head, seeming to meet it with his even from a hundred feet away.
The jolt of the connection sizzled all the way down to my toes.
Use it. I had to use it, this simmering heat his very existence stirred up in my magical senses and my inner being, or I’d be giving in to what he did to me for no reason at all.
I raised my fan and closed my eyes behind it, going to my center, pulling power from the wellspring under my ribs. The air around me and the perspiration under my clothes delineated the outside of my skin, and I traced it with the invisible brush of my mind, tugging gently on the motion of it, slowing and cooling it, strands unfurling like a spiderweb…
“Lord Stefan, come to collect your consort?” The strident voice of one of the gentlemen in our little circle of conversation struck me like a blow. My eyes opened wide, and there was Stefan standing next to the lady with the plumes, rightthere, and my control faltered.
Only for an instant, but it was enough.
I yanked on those delicate strands, startled and off-balance, and they whipped past the barrier I’d put up in my mind, shredding the energy of my skin, my magic unraveling.
Cold. So cold, goosebumps breaking out all over me, my teeth chattering instantly, the fan slipping from my numbed hand…
Stefan lunged for me, the lady crying out in anger as he pushed her aside and the gentleman expostulating, but they didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but the support of Stefan’s arms closing around me, the relief of letting my shivering body droop against him while he led me away.
He held me up until we’d gone around the tree and down a short flight of steps. A sunny bench sat there against a brick wall, deserted because it was far too warm for comfort in this weather—for anyone but a mage who’d frozen himself nearly to death. Stefan lowered me down and crouched in front of me, taking my hands in his. I sucked in a shaky breath. His touch heated me more than the sun beating down or reflecting from the wall, but it wasn’t enough.
I focused on his eyes. They bored into me, darker than I’d ever seen them.
“Remi,” he said, and his voice wasn’t the calm drawl of the society fop who’d been my model husband for the last two months. It sent a shudder through me completely unrelated to my shivers. “What happened? I walked over and you collapsed. What do you need? What the fuck did I do?”
“Tried to use,” I chattered out. He thought he’d caused this? In a sense, he had, but not at all the way he seemed to mean. “Magic. To cool m-myself down. But it di-di—” Didn’t work, but I couldn’t get the words out.
“Fucking hell. Look at me. Feel my hands? Remi, use your magic again if you have to, make it work, because there’s no other mage here. And you’re turning blue around the edges!”
Make it work? Who the hell did he think he was, ordering me to simply “make it work,” as if it could be that easy?
Stefan’s hands tightened, and he started chafing my wrists. His fingers. His skin. The heat and energy of Stefan’s body, seeping into mine…and suddenly it was that easy, as if his body were an extension of mine rather than a separate entity, the way it felt sometimes when he was in me, filling me, fulfilling me and my magic.
I warmed from the inside out, my magic pulling on his complementary strength and suffusing me with it, all the way out to the goosebumps. They vanished as the shivers calmed and faded away.
Stefan peered at me for a moment and then slumped back on his heels, blowing out a long breath. “What were you thinking? Remi, what the hell were you—and it was the moment I came over to you. Was it because of me? The truth, if you please.”
The truth would be far too complicated for me to try to explain, let alone for him to understand. How could I tell this man, who’d been acting like a polite stranger to me for two long months, that he’d become essential to me? Not because mypotions had failed—I didn’t even know where the box had gone to in the back of my wardrobe, it’d been so long since I’d thought about using them—but because of something fundamental to who he was.
He’d maintained his urbane demeanor while he fucked me. Every other day, times that occasionally fell in the middle of the night, when I’d had to go down to his study and tell him, trying not to blush too much, that I needed him. And then he’d set down his brandy glass, and he’d follow me up to my room, and he wouldn’t say a word as I bent over and he pushed into me, made us one, even though we couldn’t have been farther apart.
Months of entering ballrooms on his arm, of circulating through crowds and nodding and smiling and laughing, frequently enough to grow used to the parties and the company…but never enough to grow used to touching him only for show.
Because his touch…his touch. Lighting up my magic, grounding me in the security of his strength. It acted on me like a drug, and late at night, after he’d finished with me and I’d lain down alone in my bed, I drifted in the dark like one intoxicated, imagining what would happen if he kissed me again.
Right now he was close enough to kiss me if he wanted to, or for me to lean over and press my lips to his. But he wouldn’t, and I didn’t dare.
I swallowed hard, the motion painful.
“You startled me, that’s all,” I said at last. “I was in the middle of concentrating on my magic when you joined us.”
“So anyone else walking up would’ve caused the same distraction?” His frown deepened. “You shouldn’t have been doing that. Using your magic like that. It’s reckless.”
“Reckless.” Now that I’d thawed, I had the strength to take umbrage, and the fact that he was right—my tutor would’ve used that word and many others that were harsher—only fed myanger. “You’re a fine one to talk. If it embarrasses you to have me using magic in front of people when it’s not in fashion for the nobility to be practitioners, then you can—”
“Embarrasses—I don’t give a fuck what’s in fashion!” His voice had risen, his face flushed, and he stopped suddenly and glanced around, as if afraid someone might hear the eminently fashionable Lord Stefan blaspheming against Nevaian society like that. “I don’t fucking care,” he hissed, much more quietly.
