Heart of Stone by Christine Warren

Author:Christine Warren [Warren, Christine]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

The binding spell had been brief, simple, and disarmingly anticlimactic, especially since when it was over, Ella felt absolutely no different. She even asked Alan if he’d done things properly, and he laughed as he assured her he had. She and Kees had been well and truly bound.

She supposed the short, simple nature of the spell should be counted as a plus. After all, being new at this whole magic thing, she wouldn’t have wanted the unbinding Alan had taught her—and included in her textbooks, as she called them, just in case—to be something long and complicated that had to be recited in ancient Sumerian under the light of a gibbous moon and over the body of a sacrificial salamander, but still. She’d expected something a little more impressive. Would one tiny whiff of frankincense have hurt anybody? A tingle in her right big toe? Something.

But no, Ella had felt nothing.

Kees had wanted to wait for morning to do the spell. By the time they found Parsons and made their request, it was nearly three in the morning, and Ella was swaying on her feet—but no, she’d wanted to get it over with before she lost her nerve. Sleep, she figured, would come the instant her head touched the pillow, so better to have it done now, when she wouldn’t have time to lie around and brood over it.

Famous last words.

Turning her head, she glanced at the small alarm clock that sat on the bedside table in Alan’s comfortable guest room. The Rose Room, he called it, not because it was pink, but because a beautiful climbing rose twined around a trellis just outside the bedroom window. Ella had cracked it open before she climbed into bed, and the sweet scent of cool and fading roses soothed her into sleep.

Or it would have. If she hadn’t been lying here wide awake, trying to count sheep and force herself into dreamland. At this point, she thought she had enough of the woolly little beggars to start her own ranch in New Zealand.

She knew exactly what her problem was, of course. It was hard to miss, considering it stood over seven feet tall, growled like a grizzly bear, and currently slept in the room beside hers.

Ella tugged at the covers and twisted onto her side to stare out the rose-bordered window. Every time she thought she’d adjusted to the Guardian, regained her equilibrium and had her feet back on solid ground, he went and jerked the rug out from under her. Did he realize how maddening that was?

It had started That Night, which now glowed in capital neon letters in Ella’s confused mind. He had spent all that time telling her that he experienced as little emotion as the stone he appeared to be carved from, yet all the while he treated her with a tenderness she had never expected. He had touched her as if he cared for her, and when he emptied himself inside her, he’d done it with her name on his lips like a prayer.

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