Lustfully Ever After by Kristina Wright Read Free Book Online

The green darkened, and the last ice inside me shattered. He still looked kind, but not chaste. I still had the glisten of snowflakes on my skin, but there was no winter inside me.
    When he came, it spread through me like hot amber, melting the part of me that still fought what his hands were doing to me. “Roman,” I said, calling for him like we were in darkness. I finished, and he held onto me tighter, like he was catching me. Coming down from the feeling of his touch made me dizzy, like falling into grass after spinning under the night sky, and I slept.
    His arm was around my waist when I woke up. It wasn’t yet dawn, and snowflakes still spun outside the window. The glow of my abuela ’s candle let me see the spice jars and potted plants along the wall of his bedroom. Agave and moonflower. Cayenne and blue lavender. The same plants that skilled women used to heal children with nightmares or fevers and men and women with susto . Roman went to the hillsides in the dark for las malvarrosas because he wanted them for his remedios .
    “You are a brujo, ” I said.
    He slowly ran his fingers through my hair. “Sort of,” he said. “Apprentice brujo . For now I pay the bills with carpentry work.”
    “Who do you apprentice to?” I asked. I didn’t know a curandero in town, man or woman.
    “Nobody,” he said. “It was my bisabuela, but she died last year, so I’m figuring it out as I go.”
    “That’s why you knew the twelve truths.”
    “Since I was six,” he said. “I fought it for a while. Then I gave up. The gringos were calling me warlock, and the rest were saying brujo . I figured I’d better take it.”
    I stroked my fingers along the side of his face. The constellations of freckles on his temple and the bridge of his nose seemed
as unlikely as the life flickering in my blood. “Last night,” I said. “How’d you know?”
    “Something didn’t seem right,” he said. “So I came back.”
    “You live here alone?” I asked.
    “My bisabuela lived here.”
    “You’re young,” I said. “To be a curandero .”
    “She said I was ready, before she died. Sometimes I don’t know though.”
    I kissed the bruising on his temple and on the side of his mouth.
    “What were you doing out there?” he asked. It wasn’t a question I was meant to answer with my lips. He put his hand to my forehead, not so much reading my thoughts as feeling the shape of what I was willing to let him know. I’d heard of curanderos doing the same, but never one so young.
    “Oh,” he said.
    I didn’t meet his eyes.
    “You could stay here,” he said.
    “You don’t know me,” I said.
    “You got those guys off me. That’s as much as I need to know. Los corazónes solitarios gotta stick together.” He got up from the bed and, one by one, lit my abuela ’s candles by sliding each wick between his fingers. The whole room glowed rose-gold.
    He lit the last of my abuela ’s candles. I caught his hand and pulled him toward me, the heat of a falling star between us. He covered my body with his, so close I could watch the muscles in his back as I stroked that bluish bruise on his shoulder blade. I shivered when he took the most sensitive part of me between his thumb and his forefinger, nervous that it might turn to fire at his touch. He stroked it like a candle’s wick, and the pleasure spread so quickly it felt like embers on his fingertips.

    I could have gone back to la plaza and waited for the cold to take me to my abuela . I could have gone to my mother’s and waited on her front porch. But I didn’t want any of it. I wanted nothing more than this man with the fire on his fingertips.

THE BEAST WITHIN
    Emerald
     
     
     
     
    I n the headquarters of Castle Jewelers, the young CEO sat, as usual, locked away from everyone in his high tower office. He glared at the email from the board of directors open on his computer and the corresponding appointment notice on his calendar and snarled out loud to himself as he