Page 28 of His Whispered Witch (Witches and Shifters: Scott Pack #6)

P enn drank in the sight of rich wooden furniture in the huge downstairs living room and a similarly gigantic kitchen before Malcolm led them upstairs.

The house was done in warm tones and soft fabrics, with none of the ostentation of the twins’ house in Silver Spring.

This felt like home the moment she stepped across the threshold.

She didn’t know if it was her mind desperately playing tricks on her to try to make this safe, but it felt real.

She felt real for the first time in weeks.

Malcolm led them to a landing on the right. He opened a door with a slight bow. He looked like an alpha wolf, this huge man towering over them in the corridor, but the woman at his side was tucked under his arm like she didn’t want to be anywhere else, and that helped.

“This feels weird,” Asher said. “You don’t have to escort me to my own door.”

His door? His house? Unable to stand not knowing more, Penn stepped over the threshold.

“Can we get you anything? Leftovers, pajamas, water?” Quinn asked.

Asher shook his head. “We’re gonna sleep for a week and then…” He bit his lip.

Penn shouldn’t have said anything about the snake.

It was an insane plan. She knew it wasn’t going to work.

She was just glad that immediately after Quinn had demanded to know everything, she’d stopped and said it could all wait till morning.

Penn eyed Asher, wondering if it truly could, but he’d just nodded.

At that moment, Penn remembered Asher had fled this land for reasons they’d never really dug into. It clearly wasn’t because they didn’t want him here, but something had gone down, and the awkwardness pointed to the fact that it wasn’t over.

She wanted them, the two of them, to be alone.

“And the lizard?” Quinn asked.

“What about him?” Penn asked, immediately ready to go to war.

“What can we get it?”

“A cage?” Malcolm muttered.

Quinn nudged him. “What does it eat?”

“He’s fine. He eats bugs.”

Malcolm perked up. “Great, we can set it loose in the horse barn.”

“Not that kind of bug. I’ll take care of him. Also lettuce. But not right now. He’s diurnal.”

Quinn frowned. “He’s what?”

“Not a night owl,” Penn said. “He keeps the same hours as we do.”

“And it is past all of our bedtime,” Quinn said, caressing her stomach, and Penn frowned. Was she? It was none of her business, except in a few months, she’d be living with a baby?

Was she really going to stay here? She’d lived in houses with multiple families before. It was insane chaos. No one had any privacy, and that would be even worse in a wolf pack, where they had superhearing.

But the thought of leaving and going to some tiny cabin in the woods broke her heart.

They’d just casually invited her into the heart of the pack, something that had never happened in any of the covens she’d lived in.

She’d always been on the outskirts, a valued member, but never anywhere near power.

“Sleep well,” Quinn said finally and trod away.

Asher stepped across the threshold and hit the lights as he carefully closed the door.

The overhead lamp glowed. Penn spun in a circle. It was a surprisingly big room with another door to the right.

There was a double bed with a dark plaid quilt centered under a window. Dressers and a desk ran along the walls. In the corner next to the bed, two armchairs faced each other.

She let Oz down onto the seat of the chair at the desk and shoved it in so that he would have a dark, quiet place to hide.

“He is not gonna have his own little, um, home?” Asher asked. He hadn’t moved from the door.

“He has a cage , but he doesn’t need one tonight.”

“And he’s not gonna come running into bed?”

She tapped her temple. “Animal witch, remember. He goes where I tell him. And besides, this is better for him; it’s nice and protected. He won’t want to move.”

She ran her hand over the desk. There was a battered baseball glove and ball in one corner, and a poster of a baseball star she didn’t recognize on the wall. She turned back to see a huge landscape painting on the opposite wall. It was an incongruous touch in a room of a typical young man.

“You really want to live here?” he asked. He still hadn’t moved.

“Yes?”

“Not randomly on the land, but here. With me.”

Penn grimaced. They really hadn’t had this conversation yet, had they? She tried to believe and hope that she was moving toward a future and not fleeing the intolerable past, that this was an affirmative move and not a desperate one. Most of her believed it. Most.

“I want to want to be here.”

He sucked in a breath. “God, I hear that.”

She hadn’t meant it like that, but it hurt to see the pain flash across his face. She meant in this room, not in the world.

She hurried over to him but stopped short. She wanted to touch him but didn’t want to hurt him.

He took another deep breath and summoned a smile. “How about we want to want to be here for a little bit longer, and I can have faith someday we will just want to be here…”

She stepped into his arms and hugged him tight, surprised all over by the heat he gave off.

A sudden thought occurred, and she pulled back. “They’re not going to hear?”

He raised his eyebrows. “I mean, probably something, but it’s an incredibly well-soundproofed house.” He knocked on the door behind him, and instead of hollow wood, she heard a dull thump. They’d filled the door with something, and there wasn’t the slightest bit of light escaping around the frame.

“But they’re still gonna hear something,” he repeated. “We don’t have to be here. We’ve got a lot of buildings. There were more of us once.”

Penn huffed. Yes, she supposed there would be, but getting a wolf and a snake and a kid to adulthood in one body seemed rife for disaster.

“We don’t have to live here,” she said.

“I just never imagined you would want to,” he whispered.

“Which means you do,” she said, and laughed. “Are we going to accommodate each other into shit neither of us wants? Tell me what you want.”

He squinted at her, but his mouth was curved. “You first.”

The flash of the future took her breath away, remembering Quinn’s hand on her stomach. Penn couldn’t say all of what she wanted… It was how covens operated, raising their children together.

Could this be real? Could she really have this? Was the universe going to let her?

She looked into Asher’s eyes, but he wasn’t looking at her. He was staring over her shoulder out the window into the blackness. Of course, the universe wasn’t going to let her. Number one, it wasn’t sentient; number two, she was going to have to fight like hell for it.

She couldn’t build her life on what she wanted to want to do.

“There are other rooms,” Asher said to the window.

Penn froze. “Was that a statement of fact? Because yeah, I have eyes. Or were you trying to say something else?”

He turned back to her. “If you want.”

“If I want a different room?”

Hurt almost took her breath away. It felt like that dangling, tentative future had been swiped out of her hands within a breath of thinking about it.

“If you want,” he repeated.

“What do you want, Asher?”

He closed his eyes and scrubbed two hands over his face like he wanted to rub it off.

She forced herself to laugh. “You know, besides sanity.”

“I want you,” he said to his palms.

“But not in this room.”

Finally, he looked at her. “Yes, in this room, in this bed, every day for?—”

He stopped talking, but she heard the rest of the word: forever.

She forced herself to take a deep breath. She could not commit to a man because she didn’t want to move again.

“I know I fake it well,” Asher said carefully, now talking to the floor. “I say the right things. I do the right moves, but it is an act. I forgot how much until I came back here.”

She walked over to him and crouched so she could meet his eyes.

He looked surprised to find them standing face-to-face.

“You performed for them because you didn’t want them to worry,” Penn said.

He nodded once.

“Yeah, everybody does that, Asher.”

“Okay fine, but not everybody’s hiding what I’m hiding.”

A horrible thought struck. “Do you do that to me?”

He looks surprised again. “No.”

Her relief weakened her knees, especially as he smiled. “There’s never been any point. You know.”

She nodded once. She only got glimpses of the wolf’s rage within him, but it was more than enough. “But we’re working on that, okay? I mean, the fact that you’re healthy enough to fake it is shocking.”

“It’s taken years. It might take many more.”

“I hate how painful, like, existing is for you. I hate that, but it’s because I don’t want you to suffer, not that I’m afraid of… What? You’re going to drag me down with you? Life is going to get hard? It’s hard alone.” She thought of the gaping empty roads. “I’ll take this hard.”

“You should have easy. You should have happily ever after.”

“So should you!”

He smiled a little, a devastating facsimile of happiness.

Penn was the one to close her eyes, this time. There was just too much, and it was too close. “And it’s totally possible, right?”

He snorted. “You mean reversing a couple thousand-year-old spell to create shifters?”

“I didn’t say easy. I said possible, and we also don’t have to. I will take you like this, happily. You’re, like, the best thing.”

Asher cupped her face, and she melted at the contact. She wanted the connection but was a little afraid to touch him. She knew hour by hour that there were moments he could barely breathe, but it was just unfathomable to her that it could ever be a reason to walk away.

“Welcome home,” Asher said and kissed her. It was a chaste, dry meeting of lips, but it felt like a benediction.

He stepped back and let her go, and she laughed. They’d been talking about sleeping arrangements.

“I could’ve just said, no thank you, this room is good,” she said.

He snickered. “There is more room?—”

“Ash!”

“For us. If you really want… There are suites. Hell, the lizard could have his own room.”

That piqued her interest. She knew Oz was happy, and she knew that was a privilege that few people on earth received, to know for certain how the loves in their lives were doing, but she had always dreamed of a much larger enclosure for him.

She closed the distance between her and Asher again and sealed her lips to his, deepening the kiss immediately and licking her tongue along his lips.

She backed up until her calves hit the edge of the bed, coaxing him after her with her kiss. She let her knees fold and lay back, and he followed her down until he crashed on one elbow, and she giggled.

“Wait—”

“Let me?—”

She shimmied until all of her was on the bed, and he lay along her side.

She looked up at the ceiling and the immense window above them with another shiver. Would this be her view for the days, weeks, and years of her life?

She burrowed into his arms. She would be damned if she let anyone take this away, even him. Especially him. And she hated that his wolf might not give them a choice.

They’d found each other. They had a home. Was it way too fast and ridiculous? Absolutely. She didn’t care. They should be setting out on a honeymoon loud enough to embarrass everyone within a square mile of them.

Instead, they were planning a desperate, insane spell that could kill him as much as help him.

“I hate that you’re hurting for me,” Asher murmured.

She pulled back. “Is that why you left in the first place? They were hurting for you? Even with all your faking it?”

“I suppose so? I haven’t thought about it like that.”

“I would do just about anything in the world for you,” she said, and then wanted to take the words back immediately, even though they were true.

They sounded permanent. She bit her lip rather than take them back.

She couldn’t start pretending, or their blissful honeymoon would turn into a hell of false smiles and hidden truths in a hot second.

“Just about anything, but I won’t not hurt for you. ”

“So you find your fated mate and get pain for your trouble? This is a horrible bargain,” he murmured into her skin.

He was talking about himself. He was the horrible bargain.

“ Terrible ,” she said. “You come with land, a home, an entire family, security, amazing recipes, and kindness, and you’re hot as hell. What am I thinking?”

He kissed her deeply then, and she felt the heat of his skin for the first time, which was odd given how close they’d been the last few minutes.

She could let him fold her into him, but she wasn’t done. She pulled back and said firmly, “But even without any of that. Even if we were still in a field in the backseat of your truck, you’re still the best deal I’ve ever found.”

He ran a hand over her head. The sharp, prickly ends of her hair were softening and growing. She’d have to buzz them again. She was addicted to the way his hand felt against her skin.

“I still have the best end of this deal,” he whispered.

“Now we’re going to argue about who’s the luckiest?”

“No! I believe that you have successfully deluded yourself, and I’d be a freaking idiot to try and talk you out of that.”

“Now I’m delusional?”

He kissed her then, and she had a sneaking suspicion that it was as much to shut her up as anything else, but she’d take it.

In the car, this was a frenzy—uncomfortable, sweaty, ridiculous, and perfect.

This was entirely different. They took their time pulling off their clothes and tucking themselves into this giant bed where they would sleep for years.

Doubts twisted through her, and she waved them away. They would be here for years .

When he rolled on top of her in the most classic position possible and rocked into her with gentle thrusts, she wrapped her legs around his so all of them could touch. It felt like a homecoming, a reconnection, and an affirmation.

Soon, all the existential thoughts dropped away, and the only thing she could think about was how flexible his spine was.

They were undulating together, and the friction against her breasts was magnificent, as was the feel of him within.

He had her head in both hands; somehow, the nerves of her scalp had become a massive erogenous zone.

He was everywhere, lighting every inch of her skin on fire, even the rasp of his calves against her feet.

There was no massive cliff she fell over, and her vision didn’t white out, but her orgasm grew slowly with each roll of his hips. Deep pleasure washed through her, leaving her clean and renewed.

What had she been worrying about? Nothing. Nothing important.