Free Must Be Magic (Spellbound) by Sydney Somers

to them, and Darby crossed her arms as if silently daring him to do something else.
    “Patrick,” his father snapped before following Tiffany, who had disappeared from view, leaving his son to catch up with them.
    With one last furious look thrown over his shoulder, one that seemed to catch on Darby’s amulet, Patrick left.
    Damn it.
    Bryce waited until they were alone, before lowering his voice. “You couldn’t help yourself, could you?”
    “I think I restrained myself pretty well, actually. He deserved worse for treating her like that. Don’t tell me you weren’t thinking the same thing.”
    “That’s not the point.” Not when it left her open to being exposed.
    “And what is the point?” In a blink all traces of the warm, friendly woman he’d been seconds from pinning against the rail vanished, replaced with the cold, distant woman he passed in the halls at the courthouse.
    “The point is that just because we can do it, doesn’t mean we should.”
    She scoffed. “There’s a good chance he would have done worse if we hadn’t been here.”
    “That doesn’t give us the right to manipulate people with magic. There have to be boundaries.”
    “Whose boundaries? Your father’s?” she challenged, a familiar resentment surfacing in her eyes.
    His stomach knotted. “This is not about my father.”
    “It’s always about your father. You don’t think anyone overheard him last night, reminding you that my family isn’t good enough for him?”
    “I am not my father.”
    “No? Then why did you lie to me years ago? Why not tell me you were a Lancaster? You knew what I was the second you laid eyes on my amulet and you never said a word to me.”
    “Don’t turn this around. We’re not talking about what happened in the past, unless you really want to go there.” He’d been through it once before and wasn’t in the mood to poke at old wounds. He’d done his best to ignore them back then and he’d be damned if he shoved them under a microscope now.
    She shook her head, a flash of sadness blinking across her face before she turned away from him. “No. I really don’t. But none of this changes the fact that we are not like other people, Bryce.”
    “Magic doesn’t make us any more special than everyone else.”
    “And abstaining from using it doesn’t make you better than the rest of us.”
    “I never said it did.”
    She glanced back at him. “You’ve never needed to say it. The judgmental look on your face gets your point across every time.”
    “Don’t assume you know what I’m thinking, Darby.”
    His earlier irritation at being interrupted by Patrick and Tiffany flared into anger. The same kind of frustrated anger he’d felt when she had shut him out of her life. No matter how many times he’d tried apologizing or what he’d been willing to give up to be with her, it hadn’t been enough.
    Only when he’d given up and moved on, forced to accept that it wouldn’t work between them, had she suddenly been willing to talk to him again. By then it had been too late as far as he was concerned.
    He was done explaining himself to her or any other Calder.
    “Fine,” she snapped. “I assume you don’t need an answer to your question about renegotiating our truce?”
    His chest felt empty despite the heavy pounding of his heart. “What truce?”
    She flinched, then pivoted around and continued farther up the trail.
    Fuck.
    Alone, he spun and faced the railing, tightening his fingers around it until the rough wood bit into his palms. Fuck!
    He sure as hell wouldn’t be trailing after her in search of everyone else. Aside from being too pissed off to talk to anyone right now, he sure as hell didn’t trust himself not to pick a fight with one of her brothers if either of them so much as glanced at him the wrong way.
    Bree didn’t need that. Better for her to be annoyed at him for heading back to his bungalow than put herself in a position where she might have to step between him and his