The Entanglement of Rival Wizards (Magic and Romance, #1)

by Sara Raasch

The protection ward currently keeping me out of the second-floor Conjuration Lab might as well have To Sebastian Walsh, With Love woven into the fabric of the barrier that glimmers an ethereal blue every time I try to break it.

Lock up your kids, Sebastian Walsh might come along and tempt them to fall upon the sacrificial altar of student debt.

What’s the point of magic if you don’t get to use it for silly shit anyway.

Impulsive? Me? How dare you.

You are whatever’s the opposite of a wingman.” “A thigh-woman,” I say without missing a beat.

My hackles go up. They were already up. They go up higher. I’m wearing an Elizabethan neck ruff of hackles.

“You know the family’s expectations,” she hisses. The family. Like they’re the mafia.

Am I attracted to Elethior? Oh. Oh, fuck no. I have a fairly masochistic personality, but that’s taking self-flagellation too far, even for me.

He grabs the grocery sack and pulls out a—not a bag of chips. A thing of dog food? He checks a few other items, a container of dried fruit, one of birdseed, before he decides they’re unharmed and slides the bag closer to his workstation. Okay. I got nothing.

I feel the memories of joking with him, of him smiling at me, of all this bonding we’re doing. We hop-skip-jumped right over professional and into camaraderie, and no part of me is okay with that.

He played a prank on me. Elethior, king of maturity, played a prank on me.

I’d rather this be one of my fuckups. Then at least it’d be something I know how to deal with.

I can still taste him. Mint and coffee and the external layer of his cologne teasing the edges of my senses. I can still feel all of it, everywhere, the kiss remembered in parts of my body that weren’t complicit in it. The inside of my elbows. My eyelids.

“What if I want to talk about it,” he repeats, “because I can’t stop thinking about it?”

He feels … safe.

Kissing Elethior Tourael should be as catastrophic as the worst thing I’ve done. And it is. But it’s not a bad catastrophe, and I never knew, never fucking knew that calamities could be wondrous, too.

What are we gonna tell them? ‘Hey, turns out the secret to rectifying interdepartmental differences is horniness.’” Elethior’s grin widens.

“Another of mine is that I don’t share. Even if this is only physical, I won’t be fooling around with anyone else. And I don’t want you to either. For safety reasons, and because I’m a possessive fucking bastard.”

I’m going to have sex with Elethior Tourael, and I’m okay. Why … why do I keep not freaking out with him? And what am I doing up here if I’m all right?

Three days. It’s only been three days since I kissed him—earlier tonight was barely a kiss, not like this—and the moment we connect, it’s oxygen after being submerged, it’s something I missed. How could I have missed it? I’ve kissed plenty of people and never craved it as it was happening, never felt it trigger some otherworldly hunger that possesses me in a rage.

“Can I suck you off?” My brain shuts down. No one’s home, forward the mail, hire a plant-sitter.

“I’ll help you forget, I promise. I’ll fuck you so good you won’t remember your own name beyond me calling you baby. But I can do that and still respect you, so look into my eyes and tell me you want my mouth on your cock.”

“I need to get this out of my system before you drive us anywhere,” I whisper against his skin. He shivers, hands going down to grab my ass. “I don’t know about you, but I’ve stopped believing there’s a way to get this out of my system at all. I’m pretty sure you are my system now.”

“Please,” I relent, tugging at his arms, his neck. “Please, Thio, fuck me. Fuck me, own me, ruin me—” He kisses me to silence. Eats the last few garbled words. “Oh, I’ll ruin you,” he tells me. “But you’re mine, so I’ll always put you back together again, too.”

grabs my hand and puts his mouth at my ear and snarls, “Mine,” and it doesn’t matter that he stopped me from touching myself, I almost come on that hair-trigger word.

We’re both broken, though. And our jagged pieces don’t exactly fit together, but we know how to move around the sharpest points of each other’s, how to adjust and make space so no one bleeds.

For two people who built a relationship on screaming at each other, Thio’s good at saying things I can’t argue with.