“I want my office back, Taliesin.”
For the first time since he had collapsed on the couch, his expression lightened, his lips curving into a grin. “I thought it was ours.” Her stomach gave a traitorous flip, and she wondered if he could see it on her face. He unwrapped the ginger candy that was still in his palm and placed it on his tongue.
“What else?” he asked.
She didn’t hesitate. “Eight thousand dollars from next year’s alchemy budget, returned to the linguistics department for special projects,” she said with a nervous swallow.
She waited for him to push back and say she couldn’t risk her life. She wanted him to say it was too much money. Waited for him to question why she had asked for eight thousand dollars exactly so she could stay mad at him and start yelling. Any of that would be better than whatever this strange, agonizing tension was between them. Instead, he kept looking at her with that grin that seemed to say he was getting exactly what he wanted somehow.
Finally, it was as if his mind had caught up with what she was saying. “Returned?” he asked, a small frown on his face, as if he didn’t know exactly what he’d done during that budget meeting in November.
“Yes, returned,” she repeated. “That’s the least you could do.”
After another agonizing moment when she waited for him to ask for an explanation, he instead said, “Fine. I can agree to your terms.”
So, before she could think too hard about it, she held out her hand for him to shake. He stared at it for a second and then reached for her.
Why did it feel, suddenly, like she was the one who had bargained something away? She didn’t have time to think about it before his hand was enveloping hers, and she had that strange sensation of smallness again as his fingers closed around her palm, their calloused pads reaching down to the soft skin at her wrist.
Chapter Nine
Arthur Taliesin knew three things for certain as he shook his office mate’s hand:
He never should have taken the job at Hawthorn College.
He never should have done that ill-fated demonstration in his Materials Alchemy class.
And the woman he’d kissed on Beltane was, without a doubt, Maggie Linden. He never should have done that either.Fuck.
Now his hand pumped up and down and he had a stupid grin on his face, one that he hoped looked mysterious instead of how he actually felt on the inside. Which was utterly and completely panicked, for the record.
The magic the mask’s rune had wound around his memories was unraveling, and, bit by bit, fragments from Beltane crashed into him. The curve of her ass in the sand. Her hair falling down her back, bare in that slip of a dress she’d worn to dance beneath the stars. Worse, her cheek on his chest, surely listening to the way his heart had crashed, beating too fast and too hard for her.
The way she moved against him, their legs intertwined. How he had consumed her when they kissed. Not some nameless woman he’d never see again, but Maggie.Maggie.
Gods below, he was going to throw up, and not because ofthe pall sickness that still roiled his gut. Even on Beltane he had known the mask’s magic was flimsy, but the idea of ever running into the woman again had seemed impossible. But now, the magic seemed to be undone by a simple handshake and the velvet-soft skin of her wrist. That night, he had stroked her wrist as they’d danced, focusing on the way her skin felt beneath the pad of his thumb, because if he didn’t, he’d think about elsewhere. About his other hand, resting on the swell of her hip, about the heat between her legs, about his swelling cock. His face burned as that particular memory overtook him.
Maggie finally tugged her hand out of his, and his eyes flicked to her lips, which were tipped downward in a frown. He could hardly remember what he’d agreed to, but he knew he didn’t like it much. Something about her helping him, something about the linguistics budget. He couldn’t remember what she’d meant byreturned, as if he’d somehow stolen the money from her, and he couldn’t focus long enough to parse what any of it meant. All he could think about was that kiss and whether Maggie was having the same horrifying realization he was. But she just shook her head, and Arthur dropped his hands to his sides, flexing them slightly.
“So, what do we do first?” he asked, his mouth so dry the words caught in his throat.
Her frown deepened, and she looked at him as if she’d never seen him before in her life.What do we do first, he mimicked himself in his head. He sounded like a fool.
“I’m assuming,” she said slowly, like she was giving careful instructions to a child, “that you have donesomeresearch, other than making yourself sick in the pall?”
“Right,” he managed to say.Get it together.“Of course.”
She sighed, the sound painful and drawn out. “The brain fog must be horrendous,” she cooed sympathetically.
“Mm-hmm,” was all he could manage in return.
Maybe she was right. He couldn’t think straight. His brain only had space for the memories the mask’s magic had kept hidden from him in some dusty corner of his mind. His fingers twisted in her hair, auburn turned to flames in the firelight, the soft skin beneath her ear on his lips, the way he’d pleaded with her to take off her mask. Yes, he was definitely going to throw up.
It had already been impossible to think with her sitting behind him all day. He had felt her eyes on his neck while he worked, resisting the urge to turn, desperate to hide any indication that he ever thought of her in any way that wasn’t strictly office appropriate. He’d done a good job of it, too. Perhaps too good a job, considering she seemed to hate him. No, Arthur could say with confident certainty that Maggiedidhate him. So, he put aside any notions of attraction. He would never consider getting seriously involved with a colleague anyway, and he’d known within a month of meeting Maggie Linden that it could only be serious between them.
The responsible thing to do now would be to tell her what he remembered. Obviously, that’s what he should do. But she was making plans as his mind spun. “The next two weeks are ridiculously busy,” she muttered, flipping through the little calendar she kept on her desk.
“Graduation,” he said unhelpfully. She glanced up at him while he tried to string more than two words together. Finally, he found them. “I can go over the results of my experiments so far with you. It shouldn’t take more than a couple hours.”
