Fortunately, the Magician couldn’t read my thoughts. I was one of the few people in the world who held that distinction, and I held on to it with both hands and a foot. He wasn’t an idiot, however, and he could still read my expression and pick up on all the feels I was giving off.
“There’s so much we have to discuss, Miss Wilde,” he said. “Much I want to discuss. But only when you’re ready.”
I sighed. I was never good at discussing my feelings, but I also felt an urgency to get this particular conversation out of the way. It gave us a chance to begin again, in a whole new way, a portion of our relationship that had started out not so favorably the first time around.
I took a long pull on the wine, savoring the rich dark slide of the complex flavors down my throat. I gestured to the tangle of vegetation spread out below us. Far from the usual lines of carefully tended grapevines, this vineyard was more of an overgrown thicket. “Is there a pathway through all that mess?”
He nodded and pointed to the stairs that led down to a small apron of manicured lawn before the vines took over.
“I am given to understand that there is even a gazebo with lights,” he assured me. “However, I have not had the opportunity to investigate this claim myself. Shall we?”
There was no denying the flirtatious undertone to Armaeus’s voice. It was exciting and unnerving and a tiny bit scary, and I fiercely longed not to be reacting like a fourteen-year-old girl. But as I lifted my glass for another drink, I also couldn’t deny that my hand was shaking. I was ridiculous.
“Sure.” Wineglass in hand, I stood and moved toward the stairs, trotting down them as I peered into the overgrowth. As promised, there was an archway cut into the tangle, cool and inviting. I headed toward it, slowing only slightly as Armaeus reached my side.
This wasn’t a foot race, I reminded myself. This was supposed to be a conversation. But I couldn’t force myself to look at him as I spoke again.
“You still can’t remember me, can you?”
In the hushed closeness of the overgrown vineyard, his words were easy, unapologetic. “I have come to the conclusion that I am not meant to remember you, Miss Wilde. I am meant to rediscover you.”
I closed my eyes for a second, absorbing his comment like a physical blow. Something about those words drove a spear through the hard shell I hadn’t even realized I’d constructed around my heart. I had believed so fiercely that Armaeus would eventually remember me, that the hard work of our shared wins, our messy beginning, and slow understanding of each other would not have been in vain. But this, this was something else again. Something different.
Something better?
I grimaced, forcing myself to push onward. We had to have this talk, I knew. It was well past time. “So, way back in the beginning, we didn’t really start off on the best footing, relationship-wise,” I said. “You were my client, and I didn’t know who I was. I still don’t know, in some ways.”
Armaeus transferred his own wineglass to his left hand and then reached for my hand with his right. The two of us walked deeper into the vineyard, the path clearly marked despite the lengthening shadows. Sure enough, I could see the twinkling of fairy lights ahead and to the right, indicating that a gazebo had, in fact, been constructed in this near-silent idyll. The peace around us was broken only by the soft rush of birds overhead and the hum of insects.
“One could argue that perhaps we are both meant to discover you, then,” he said. “I believe the investigation would be rich with opportunity.”
I pursed my lips, girding myself to speak. But no words came.
Armaeus finally continued. “These are simply words between us, Miss Wilde. Words have no weight, no power that we don’t give them. Speak the ones that lie so heavily on your heart. I sense your hesitation stems mostly from your memories of our first attempt at intimacy?”
I sighed, watching the wine tremble in its glass. “Yeah. You could say that.”
We turned the corner, and the gazebo lay in front of us, a carved Victorian delight complete with padded seating around its ornately detailed railing. Armaeus drew me up the stairs and tugged me to one of the cushioned benches. We sat, and he took my glass of wine away, setting it to the side along with his own. Then he turned back to me, and I realized almost belatedly he had taken both my hands in his.
There was nothing innately magical about his light grasp, and yet the energy that buzzed between us was electric with possibility. “What happened, Miss Wilde?” he asked quietly. “What did I do to you?”
That made me jerk my attention upward, and I met his gaze directly. “You didn’t do anything to me, truly. I wanted your body, your touch, everything you wanted to give me. I just didn’t realize how mind-blowing it all would be. There was so much magic in you, and, I now realize, so much magic in me that I had never fully tapped. When I allowed myself to be vulnerable to you, to lie down beside you in your bed and let your arms close around me…when I fell into your kiss and opened myself to what you could give me…I—well, I couldn’t handle it. I blacked out. Then, when I came to, you were studying me from ten feet away like I was some sort of lab experiment you thought might spontaneously combust. It was mortifying.”
His lips twisted into a smile. “I’m sure you are mistaken about my expression.”
“Trust me, I’m not. It’s your favorite expression. But I was still embarrassed. It took me a while after that to be willing to connect with you again. You were fascinated by me, I think, because you realized why I had blacked out. You sensed the underlying ability within me that I wasn’t fully accessing, and you wanted me to access it. So you didn’t give up trying.”
He chuckled. “I suspect there was more than a simple academic interest in your abilities behind my desire for you.”
“Yeah, well…” I flushed and dropped my gaze again, staring at our clasped hands.
“There certainly is more than an academic interest behind it right now, Miss Wilde.”
I glanced up, and if I hadn’t become used to the force of the Magician’s gaze, it would’ve blasted me all the way back to Las Vegas. There was a question in his dark and fathomless eyes, their ebony depths ringed with gold, a question in the curve of his lips, that didn’t need to be spoken—but I nodded anyway.
“Yes,” I murmured.
He leaned forward to brush his lips against mine.
Time didn’t just slip away, it fully fractured. Lost in the Magician’s touch, I only vaguely sensed his hands coming up to lie gently on either side of my face as his kiss deepened, fully consuming my every sense. My mind went cartwheeling through space and time, my heart surged with relief and joy and surprisingly—pain, breathtaking and magnificent pain, to be once more in the Magician’s arms. Every nerve ending in my body flared to life with a pleasure so acute, it transcended any sense at all and became a force unto itself, a live wire of sparking possibility.
I gasped at the immense and absolute knowing of how much I had missed about the Magician, how much I’d never truly grasped, and how much was left before us to explore. Because now we were on equal footing, or perhaps better stated, now I understood there was no inequality between us. There was only strength matched up to strength, weakness matched up to weakness, light matched up to shadow in equal measure. And I saw a glimpse, the barest glimpse, of an arcane and wild darkness, a feral, raging joy deep within the Magician’s heart. As I watched, transfixed, it exploded in a dance of death and fire, bursting forth, consuming itself, then raging once again, over and over. It was glorious and terrifying and—