Page 115 of Marked By Moonlight

Her eyebrows knitted together. “Looking for my mark. Tell me I didn’t screw that up.”

Only Mina would worry that a high this good could somehow be a failure.

I shook my head.

“But there’s no glow. No mark…” she fretted.

I wrapped my hand around hers, then held both against my chest. A faint glow appeared around our interwoven fingers.

“Oh,” Mina breathed.

“I guess it manifests itself differently when a shifter mark mixes with magic,” I whispered as the glow spread up our arms and connected with the shimmer around her neck.

“Wow,” Mina breathed, looking down.

When I lifted our hands away from my chest, the glow faded. But when I pressed them down again, the glow illuminated the space between us like candlelight, and my blood heated. So much, we found ourselves slipping into another round of slow, hungry lovemaking.

At some point, when we were spent, Mina lay curled against me, absently running her fingers over my forearm.

“Do you think tomorrow will go smoothly?” she whispered.

I would have loved to say yes, but that would have been a lie.

“Guaranteed not to,” I murmured, holding her closer.

She thought it over, then kissed me. “Well, a good thing that’s not until tomorrow. Until then, I guess all we can do is get some rest.”

Rest, notsleep. A critical difference.

I nuzzled her shoulder, then started working my way lower. At some point, we would sleep. But we were too keyed up for that yet, and there was only one antidote to that.

“Mmm,” Mina murmured, wrapping her legs around me.

Chapter Twenty-Three

MARIUS

Mina and I managed a few hours of sleep, but not enough. Intense, emotional sex wasn’t entirely the reason (but okay, partly) because we were too keyed up to sleep even when we tried. Mostly, we’d settled for curling up together and staring off into the darkness.

“One more night after tonight, and we can go home,” Mina whispered at one point. Then she sighed. “Back to stripping paint.”

Ha. Even stripping paint would beat what we were in London for.

A million things could intervene, but I played along in a more upbeat tone. “Don’t forget fixing the roof.”

“And hosting weddings…” Mina said, then rushed to explain. “I mean, for other people. I mean, for money. I mean…”

I chuckled, holding her tighter. If she thought I would bolt at the W word, no. But I needed to be sure she was safe first. So, if she spent the night obsessing about the painting, I spent it worrying about how to keep my past from catching up to us in the worst possible way.

Szabo,my dragon hissed in my mind.Or that son of a bitch Etienne.

They were my top two worries — the vampire and the wolf shifter I’d tangled with a few months ago. I’d turned a blind eyeto most of the illegal activities in Etienne’s bar/fight club, and I’d even picked up a little cash through a string of wins in his subterranean fight pits. But in the course of hounding him for my prize money, I’d discovered that sex trafficking — of minors — was another keystone of his business, and there was no way I could turn a blind eye tothat.

A verbal spat had turned into an all-out fight, and I had been well on my way to ridding the world of one wolf-size packet of evil when his minions intervened. We’d both ended up before a tribunal of supernaturals who handled such things, all in a hush-hush way that protected the many pies they dipped their dirty fingers in.

All that had led to my involvement with Gordon, but that had also brought me to Mina. So, maybe I owed Etienne in a weird, twisted way.

In my half sleep, I pictured his ruthless, mud-colored eyes. The flash of his bright, long teeth. The nick in his right ear from some long-ago fight…