Free Her Lucky Love by Carrie Ann Ryan

touched the coin around his neck, closed his eyes, focusing on the magic within, then opened his palm.
    Lacy gasped, and Brayden smiled. He opened his eyes to see the rainbow he’d made parting through the clouds and ending at his palm.
    “It’s so pretty,” Lacy breathed. She held out her hand then stopped.
    “It won’t hurt. You can hold my hand, and the rainbow will stay.” As long as he concentrated, that is.
    She worried her lip then pressed her palm against his. Lace let out a giggle as the end of the rainbow wrapped its way around their joined hands like a bow.
    “Wow!” Cameron yelled from the doorway then ran to their side, Aiden on his trail.
    Brayden looked up to see Allison standing behind them, a look of slight fear in her eyes before she blinked it away.
    Damn it. He hadn’t meant to show her that he had magic like Greg, though he didn’t, not really if what Rina said was true. He’d just have to push harder to show her that magic could be good.
    Aiden and Cameron put their hands on top of Lacy’s, and the rainbow wrapped around their hands as well.
    “Cool,” Aiden said under his breath.
    “It’s beautiful,” Lacy said.
    Brayden looked at the three of them, smiling, happy as though there wasn’t a care in the world, and then he met Allison’s gaze.
    “Yeah, it’s very beautiful,” he said, though he wasn’t talking to the kids anymore.
    Ally stared at him, uncertainty and heat warring in her eyes.
    He’d fix this somehow. He’d waited too long for everything to fall through his fingertips.
    Brayden wanted the family in front of him, and he’d do anything to make it a reality. He just needed to make sure his luck didn’t run out because, for some reason, he knew the danger lurking around their lives was only beginning.

Chapter 6
     
    Allison held her breath as Brayden showed her children the rainbow coming out of his palm. If she hadn’t been through so much with the Coopers, she wouldn’t have believed it.
    Even though the colors were amazingly beautiful, she didn’t know if she could trust the effects of magic. After all, she’d been an unknowing victim of magic for twelve years…at least.
    She’d also almost lost her children during the Christmas holidays when Jack Frost had attacked Justin and Rina while they were ice-skating with her children.
    If she hadn’t cared so much for the Coopers, she would have cut herself off from them trying to protect her babies.
    But it wouldn’t have done any good. No matter how hard she tried to push, magic and the Coopers seemed to surround her life.
    Now the man she thought she could see herself with held magic in any way. Even though he’d told her it was good magic, nothing like Greg’s, she couldn’t be sure. She thought she’d trusted Brayden with everything but her heart, but she could’ve been wrong.
    Her babies were in his hands, and he had the power to make anything come true with luck.
    Or at least that’s what she thought his magic did. She’d been too stunned when he’d revealed what he was to question what exactly his magic did.
    Allison didn’t know if she had it in her to be with a man who held that kind of power in his hands. Not that she’d decided to succumb to her own desires. She might want Brayden, not just physically, but in every way irrevocably possible, but that didn’t mean she’d give in.
    She had more to lose than just her heart, and Brayden was currently holding those things now.
    Everything was moving too fast for her and not fast enough. Her arm ached like a bitch, and she just wanted to curl into a ball with some chocolate and wait for everything to get better.
    Yeah, like she’d ever done that in her life.
    No, she didn’t run away from things. She just kept going with the grain, sometimes against it, until she couldn’t move anymore. She lived for her kids, not herself. And right now, since she wasn’t working and her kids weren’t in school because of a man—no, gnome—she was