Page 12 of My Hexed Honeymoon (The Bridgewater Pack #2)

CHAPTER TWELVE

The fire’s calmed to a low, flickering blaze, the kind that settles into the bones and makes it easy to forget we’re being hunted.

Diego and I are sitting on a large, flat rock a few feet from the pit, our knees brushing as sparks dance up toward the dark sky, popping like little stars before disappearing.

He holds a perfectly toasted marshmallow at the end of his stick, rotating it with a kind of reverence. “The coals are the best,” he says. “They give the marshmallow that perfect toast without lighting it on fire.”

I raise an eyebrow at the towering inferno in front of us. “Then why have a raging bonfire?”

Cockiness packs every inch of the grin he flashes me. “Well, because the thing about us werewolves—we’re of the opinion bigger is better.”

A laugh spills free, so there’ll be no playing it cool. There’s something about tonight that has me feeling carefree in a way I rarely get to be. It feels like a real party, an activity I’ve so rarely been allowed to participate in.

We celebrated sanguine moons and took advantage of their timing and impact on our magic.

But I was home-schooled, my subjects predominantly Herbology, Astrology, Spellwork, Hexes, and Advanced Curses, Warding, and an hour of Astral Projection, followed by at least an hour lecture in Ways I Disappoint My Mother.

Shaking off that memory, I do my best to hold onto the happy. “Okay, but as you’re puffing up your chest and showing off how manly your big bonfire makes you, you should also know you have melted chocolate, like, all over your face.”

I gesture toward him with my half-eaten s’more, licking chocolate off my own lip. “And it’s not exactly giving off scary-alpha vibes. Just saying.”

“Honey, when you’re as big and tough as I am,” he says, placing a proud hand in the center of his chest, “I don’t need to bother giving off scary-alpha vibes. I simply do.”

Juggling my melty dessert to my other hand, I shake my head and do my best to act unaffected. “Whatever, tough guy.”

“Hey”—Diego wipes at his lips with his thumb, missing the smear of chocolate in the corner entirely— “You’re looking at my mouth, aren’t you?”

“Oh, is that how you wield your power?”

The log we’re perched on rolls the tiniest bit as he shifts closer. “Nah. It’s a rather effective distraction technique, though.”

I’m about to ask how, despite the fact that I’m very much distracted, when he lunges forward and takes a bite out of my melty square of deliciousness.

“Ah! Thief!”

“You hesitated. I didn’t think you were going to finish it.” He unabashedly licks his lips, and now I’m recalling having them pressed against the column of my neck in the forest.

Fine. Maybe he did have a point about his methods of distraction. While I loathed the hikes and overwhelming feelings of failure of our outings, my entire body anticipated the moment he’d distract me with the callused pads of his fingers or kiss my neck.

“I guess I missed that chapter in the supernatural etiquette handbook,” I say. “Weird because Andromeda made me read it front to back, too.”

Now I’m the one earning chuckles from him, and butterflies swirl in my gut.

For a while, I didn’t think I came with those—or that maybe my mother had beaten them out of me. A funny thing happens when your nerves are always cranked so high. You forget they’re capable of attraction and excitement and not just compliance and fear.

I’m obsessed with the moment he’ll press those lips to mine, while afraid it’ll be before I’m ready or after we’ve had our third magical, shifting child.

Diego lifts his metal stick, eyeing the pair of perfectly toasted marshmallows at the end. He snags a piece of chocolate from the unwrapped foil at his side, along with a sheet of graham crackers.

His big hands and long, strong fingers are precise in a way I didn’t expect. He builds an oversized, four-square, two marshmallow s’more, the firelight flickering across the unyielding line of his jaw and ridged slope of his nose.

Then he breaks the entire thing in half, crumbs flying, sticky marshmallow goo spilling out the sides in melty threads, and hands one half to me.

Rather than demurely showing him the last bite I still have left in my hand, I shove it in my mouth and accept the warm, fresh offering.

His fingers graze mine.

My breath catches.

I nearly choke on my s’more, my inhale sending crumbs to the back of my throat, and it takes every ounce of self-restraint not to cough cracker bits all over him.

I manage to shove it down, and he grins like he didn’t notice the struggle.

Dare I say he might not even hesitate if I actually required the Heimlich maneuver. Funny how big that feels.

“Thank you,” I manage, once I’ve ensured everything goes down the right tube and I can still breathe through my windpipe.

As we sit by the fire, licking sticky remnants of the confection from our fingers, I find myself staring at his mouth again.

Great, now I’m reliving how he looked at me earlier as he leaned in close, lips brushing mine so softly it almost felt as if I imagined the featherlight contact.

I don’t hate you, he whispered, and I almost believed him.

The thing is, I want to believe him, and that’s the most surprising and unnerving thing of all.

Would it be so bad to let myself believe I could be accepted for who I truly am at my core, even if only for a moment?

Just Talia, a girl who connected with the critters in the forest more than most people, who loved botany not because plants could be used in potions, but because they were just really fucking cool.

Like how calendula petals can speed up healing or how plantain leaves pull out poison and calm angry skin.

From moths and butterflies and even Asian longhorned beetles, with their bright spots and spindly antennae, I could lie in the dirt all afternoon.

My friends were raccoons, foxes, and the fisher cats that freaked out local residents because they sound like a child screaming in the middle of the night.

Hell, I’d rather hang with a stinky skunk than most people, and that went double if we were talking witches.

There wasn’t a number high enough for Mother.

Since I tended to wander and lose track of time outdoors, my mom began keeping me indoors, trying to mold me into something rigid and refined—so determined to shove me into a box I didn’t fit in.

A prison from which I could only glimpse the outside world.

Even though I never understood why, I swear she was jealous and vengeful against my love of nature and the way it’d always called to me.

Those rare stretches of solitude were the only times I felt like I belonged, when the threads of the universe would wrap around me like we were one without beginning or end.

Then I’d be called home to be surrounded by women who called me “sister” but always made me feel alone. My mother welcomed and allowed them mistakes and weaknesses she never accepted from me, not even on my worst days.

Great Goddess, I was so starved for affection that at the tiniest show of it—even from a werewolf—melts me like the puffed-up marshmallows melted the square of chocolate against the graham cracker lid.

“What do you think?” Diego asks, and I’m so terrified for a moment he’s read what I’m thinking that my cheeks burn with embarrassing heat. “Is dessert enough for you? Or would you like to roast up a few hot dogs for dinner?”

I blink at him, a softer, more affectionate warmth pouring through me like honey.

“Hey, you guys coming to the ax throwing contest, or what?” Kerrigan asks from behind us, with her hand linked in Conall’s elbow. She’s looking at me like she actually wants me to come, which seems unfathomable after what my mother did to her.

After what I did to her.

Although to be fair, Kerrigan had also chucked a heavy silver collar at my head that knocked me silly.

Diego raises an eyebrow at me, making it clear I get to decide whether to stay here by the bonfire or go watch a bunch of werewolves flex their muscles in a machismo display.

Come on now, there’s not really a choice here. I’m only human. Albeit with the blood of witches running through my veins.

I’m also not the type of girl to dig in my heels and fight the inevitable—I’ve learned through the years it’s a painful lesson in futility. I only get one life to live, even if it involves being in an arranged marriage to a werewolf who maybe doesn’t totally hate me.

Which is why I decide that at least for tonight, it’ll be okay to pretend I’m just an ordinary girl, out on a real date with a super-hot guy and his group of ludicrously ripped, werewolf friends.