Free Something Witchy (Mystics & Mayhem) by AJ Myers Page A

actually can eat.”    He was laughing at me again.  “What else do you have?”
     “Holy water?” I asked, frowning as I tried to come up with something new.
    “Will get me wet,” he said, shrugging.  “It’s water, Ember, not battery acid.  Don’t believe everything you see at the movies. ”
    “I think I have a cross around here somewhere,” I told him, taking a mental inventory of my jewelry box.  No, on second thought, I probably didn’t.  He didn’t know that, though.  “What are you going to do if I go get it?”
    In answer, he reached beneath his sweater and brought out a beautiful gold Celtic cross on a leather cord.  The design of it was unique.  In the center was some kind of intricate knot that looked like a heart and a trinity symbol combined.  I stared at that symbol for a full minute, startled to feel like my chest was collapsing as a terrible feeling of sadness and longing hit me.  My eyes started stinging and my heart started to pound and I suddenly found it hard to breathe. 
    I wanted that necklace.  No, that doesn’t even describe the terrible need I felt.  I had to have it.  It sounds crazy, I know, but I was pissed that he was even wearing it.  That necklace belonged to me .  It took everything I had in that moment not to reach over and rip the damn thing from around his neck.
    Nathan gave me a sweet smile when I tore my eyes from the strange, three-part knot and glared at him.  Then, in a move that shocked me so much I just gaped at him like a fish out of water, he pulled the cross over his head and leaned across the counter and dropped it over mine, reaching back behind me to lift my hair so it could lie against my skin.  There was something so sweet and tender about the action that my mind went completely blank for a second.
    Until the necklace I had been so possessive about touched my bare skin, that is.
    The second that gold cross came to rest against my skin, I felt an odd tingling that swept through me from my head to my toes.  Though Nathan’s skin was cool to the touch, that little bit of gold was suddenly very warm, almost hot.  I smiled, feeling content and much more at ease now that I had it.  It was like…like the thing had finally made its way home. 
    “Why did you do that?” I whispered, hoping he wouldn’t try to take the necklace back.  Because, seriously, he would have to remove it from my cold, dead body to get it.
    “Because it looks much better on you,” he answered, looking very happy about something.  He reached out and arranged the cross just so, his fingers brushing the skin above the v-neck of my sweater and lighting my nerve endings on fire.
    I frowned again, trying to remember what I had been doing before I went crazy over a necklace.  I reached up to move his hand away from me before I started to hyperventilate and he sat back, his lips twitching up in a slight smile, and gave me another one of those warm looks.
    “Anything else?” he asked again, softly, “Or are you ready to give up so we can move on to something I think is much more important?”
    “Yeah, because that’s going to happen,” I told him, rolling my eyes.  “You might as well know, buddy, I don’t know how to give up.”
    “I’m counting on that,” he breathed, his voice so low I almost missed it.
    I didn’t even want to know what that might mean, so I didn’t bother to ask.  My fingers reached up automatically and wrapped around the cross as I frantically searched for my next argument against his insanity, and I felt an instant sense of calm flow through me.  Letting that peace center me, I went back to my mission of trying to deny Nathan was a vampire.
    “Wooden stakes?” I asked.  I already knew he was going to shoot that one down, but I felt a need to distract him from the cross resting above my more-than-ample cleavage before I turned into a puddle of goo and started sliding off my stool to pool on the floor at his feet.
    “If you stuck