“So… you’re sure you don’t want to do this?” Ben asked me as we walked along a sidewalk in one of the historic districts of Paris. We’d already explored a bunch of touristy sights, like the Arc de Triomphe and everything near the Eiffel Tower that we hadn’t gotten to see the day before. We were planning on going to the Louvre first, but I wanted to see some of the chateaus so we were casually walking around town, looking at whatever our feet took us past.
He was asking about staying in Paris and going to school, as Mage Jaye had offered. “No, I’m sure I don’t want to do it,” I said, letting out a loud sigh. “I can’t even think about staying here with all of you so far away. It would never work for me.”
He was holding my hand and squeezed it tightly in his grip. “I don&rsq
I tried to focus on the empty seats. My rational mind told me that the auditorium wasn’t packed full. There were some seats that were empty, after all. But whenever I glanced around, all I could see was excited faces, faces with eyes, eyes that were looking at me. I sat in a chair next to the other council members on stage, a microphone in the center of the stage in front of us. The student body was filtering in, staff members directing them where to sit. I tried not to think about just how many of them there were, but the doors stayed open for so long, teenagers and college-aged kids filtering in, chatting quietly as they took the next available seat without skipping many, that I was beginning to think that there were more students who attended this school than I had originally realized.Ben was sitting in the front row next to Maggie. They were almost directly in front of me. I had no idea who the
Ben met me backstage. He wrapped his arm around me and kissed me on the cheek (I figured the only reason he didn’t seek out my lips was because all of the council members had followed us out now, and he didn’t want to embarrass me, not that it would have.) “That was great, Harlow,” he said. “The Clydesdale horse was amazing.”“Thanks,” I said with a smile. “I didn’t want to be an elephant again.”“It blows my mind that you can be anything you want to be,” he said, taking my hand. “I can’t wait until we get back home so you can be a wolf and come run around with us.”It hadn’t crossed my mind that that was something I might want to do, but seeing how happy the thought of it made him, it brought a smile to my face, to
“So… how did you find out you’re a mage?” Kayla asked me, her friendly smile making me feel slightly better despite the fact that my boyfriend was acting like he was ready to shift into his wolf form right here, dash across the table, and tear the blond, good looking, British, male mage across from me into a thousand pieces.“Well,” I began, “it took me a while to figure it all out. I mean… no one ever just came right out and told me. It was like a mystery I had to solve.”“Really?” Liam asked, his blue eyes wide. “That’s crazy!”“Yeah, all of us have known that we were mages since we were little children,” Lluvia said.I shrugged. “My father refused to accept what he
“You’re telling me that you think Liam is the guy you saw in your vision, the night Verina died?” I asked Ben, once I could form words again. His confession of why he was so upset at Liam Finch, the member of the student council we’d just met with, still had me in shock.“Not just Verina,” Ben said, shaking his head as if I was an impetuous child who simply couldn’t grasp the concept he kept trying to present to me as the gospel truth. “I died that night, too, Harlow.”I stared at him for a second and then decided to put the second part of what he said on the back burner for now and concentrate on the first part of what he was saying. “You think that Liam is the person you saw me all smiley and happy with in your vision, right?” Ben nodded. “But… I definitely didn’t imprint on
“Harlow? Ben?” Maggie’s voice filtered through the door, and I breathed a sigh of relief, even though she hadn’t picked the best time to interrupt us. At least it was her and not some blond Adonis from Britain come to prove me wrong about my imprinting testimony.I got up and opened the door. “Hi there!” Maggie said. She was smiling brightly, as if she hadn’t just heard us arguing, but I was pretty sure she had. The look in her eyes was slightly uncomfortable, like she thought we might launch into another disagreement right in front of her. “I just have the flight information for tomorrow for you.”She handed over an itinerary. I glanced at it and saw it was basically the reverse of what we’d done to get there. We’d be leaving around noon the next day. I also noticed that it said three passengers
Maggie came into my room and sat on an armless chair in the corner while Ben and I sat on the bed. She’d closed the door behind her, which all seemed a little secretive to me, but I waited to hear what she had to say before I jumped to any conclusions.“Liam is a particularly odd fellow for a number of reasons,” she began.I cocked my head to the side to listen with interest. He hadn’t struck me as odd. Certainly not in the way that Sean had done so. “Why is that?”“Well, his father is a mage, and his mother is a shifter. He is the oldest of three children, so he’s a mage, but oddly enough, his brother and sister are both shifters.”Ben and I exchanged a glance. That was odd. “I thought only the oldest chi
My mouth hung open for what seemed like five minutes after Maggie dropped her bombshell. Once I could move my head again, I turned and looked at Ben and saw a similar expression on his face. “Twins?” I repeated, looking back at Maggie. “Liam and Leo are identical twins?”“Yes,” she said with a nod. “And their sister is their triplet. It’s odd to have identical twins and a triplet, but then, for the second and third born children to be shifters…. Well, like I said, we have never heard of such a thing.”I was on the same page as her now, I thought. When she’d mentioned a mage and two shifters in the same family, I absolutely thought that was crazy odd but now that I understood that they weren’t just siblings but all kids that had come from the same womb at the same time made more sense to me
Neither of us said a word as we peeled each other’s clothing off. Ben undid the buttons of my red dress slowly as I stripped his T-shirt off over his head. I ran my hands over the muscles of his chest, my fingernails dragging down the stone-like surface. I had to let go of his lips with my own so that he could pull my dress up over my head and toss it aside, leaving me in a matching red bra and panties, lacy and silky, and needing to come off.His hands slid my bra straps down to my elbows, and I lifted my arms out before he unhooked my bra. He circled my nipples with his fingers before he took my left breast in his mouth. I tipped my head back and moaned, pushing tighter against him, wishing his jeans and my thing were not in the way, but I didn’t want him to let go of me in order for me to get up and remove these final barriers. The idea of magicking our clothes away came to mind, but I let t