0.5 One Wilde Night by Jenn Stark Read Free Book Online

sleeping chamber, the enormous bed almost embarrassingly plush to my exhausted eyes. As I staggered to it, dropping my towel to the floor, I thought about what Father Jerome had said about the amulet and its potential to have a strange effect on its bearers.
    Well, other than Fernanda, I’d arguably had it next to my skin the longest. Was it a good thing or a bad thing that the amulet had reacted to me? Had it found me weak or strong?
    And how had it reacted when it’d come into contact with Nigel’s unmentionables?
    The sound of my own laughter echoed through the room as I crawled beneath the covers. Even my eyelids ached. Still, sleep wouldn’t come. I lay there for several long minutes, eyes closed, willing myself to sleep.
    No dice.
    I tried meditation. Deep breathing. Even planned a grocery list for an imaginary future when I’d learn how to cook… nada.
    “Please, God, make me stop hurting,” I finally moaned.
    A long, slow chuckle seemed to shimmer through the air. “Close enough.”
    My eyes snapped open. The room had gone completely dark. Had I turned the lights off? I tried to recall, but my mind remained in a fog, my muscles as heavy as concrete. Every punch and jab from the Russian shot-putter was making itself known on my body, and not in a good way.
    The bed creaked. Alarm jolted through me, though I still couldn’t move. It took all my energy just to stifle a whimper. I did not have the stamina for hand-to-hand combat right now. I barely had the stamina to shiver. Which would be a problem if I had to fight.
    Was that someone breathing ? No—no. There was definitely no one breathing except for me, and I was an exceptionally quiet breather. But if no one else was breathing…
    “You did ask for help, Miss Wilde.”
    “I—what?” My nerves prickled as a long-fingered hand drifted over my shoulder, my reaction reminding me all too much of the amulet sending sparks along my skin.
    “Am I dreaming?” I didn’t think this was a dream, though. If it was a dream, there’d be sunshine and unicorns. And ideally scotch.
    “Would you prefer to dream?”
    The wall of blessed heat spooning up against my backside blew something against my ears, and I felt myself sucked beneath conscious awareness. Whether I liked it or not, I was going down.
    “You’ll like it.”
    Words to live by, I always say.

Chapter Nine
    There was no sound, no breeze. I floated on a soothing ocean, somehow not at all concerned with drowning, though my usual water wings were conspicuously not in evidence. Instead, I was buoyed up by waves that eased my battered body into unclenching its muscles and unkinking its knots.
    It took me a moment to realize I wasn’t alone, but the touch of lips against my neck seemed an almost disembodied experience, not something I needed to react to or necessarily understand. I groaned as the trail of kisses drew a line of fire down my back, curving in a graceful arc along my waist, until I somehow, through no effort of my own, managed to flip over onto my back, and those lips burned a brand against my hip bone. Energy sparked somewhere deep inside me, healing me with equal parts fire and brimstone.
    “I do not understand you,” the murmured voice came again. “I can only go so far into your mind. Why?”
    “Hummm?” I turned again into the water, reveling in the sensation of hands kneading my legs, my hips, my lower back. Everything that had been abused in the past twenty-four hours was devolving into blissed-out euphoria. When the touch moved around my belly and up to my breasts, however, I hissed with pain.
    The fingers froze, retreated. “There is no pain in this place.”
    “Well, there damn well is in that place.” I attempted to shift away, but the Magician held me fast, and—
    My eyes popped open. “ What? ”
    I scrambled off the bed, taking half the sheets with me, shaking my head like a stoner flushed out from beneath the stadium bleachers. I frantically scanned the bed, the