Wild Magic (14 page)

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Authors: Ann Macela

Tags: #General, #Fiction, #Fantasy, #Paranormal, #Romance, #Suspense

BOOK: Wild Magic
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The walk to the elevator, the wait, and the ride down were quiet. Jim seemed lost in thought, and Irenee didn’t interrupt him except to hand him her card with her phone numbers.
Poor guy. What a lot to learn about yourself from strangers and totally unexpectedly. If she had been in his place, she would be stupefied and flat on the floor.
As they waited for his car, he turned to her. “I’ll give you a call when I find out what time I’ll be free to come out here.”
“Good. Listen, are you okay?” She stopped herself from putting a hand on his arm to offer support. From his previous attitude, he might not want it.
“Yeah.” He rubbed the back of his neck as if it was stiff and gave her a part-perplexed, part-uneasy smile. “I’m just—I don’t know what I am.”
“We threw a lot at you at one time. I remember being extremely confused when my levels shot up, and I knew what was happening.”
“Whipple was right—I need to sleep on all the ideas, come to terms with them. Do you really think he and your father are correct? What will these ‘exercises’ be?”
“Yes, I do think they’re right.” She wouldn’t tell him yet about the magic energy vibrating between them or the possibility of his being a Defender, however. That was an unnecessary complication right now. He needed to accept being a simple practitioner first. She smiled, she hoped, with encouragement. “You’re the first wild talent I’ve ever met. What he plans, I’d guess, has to do with learning and managing your skills.”
“Great.” The valet brought his car up. Before Jim got in, he nodded at her. “I’ll see you tomorrow, probably in the afternoon.”
On the way back upstairs, Irenee rubbed her temples. She’d get some aspirin from Bridget before they started talking. Jim Tylan wasn’t the only one who had to come to terms with a new situation, and it was giving her a headache. What was going on between them and causing her strange reactions? How could he see through her spells? What could Fergus want? Please, not anything major.
Her center quivered, and she patted it. She was looking forward to getting the discussion over with. She needed some rest.
CHAPTER TEN
 
“He’s my
WHAT?”
Irenee looked from her father to Fergus and back again.
“My soul mate?
Where did you get such a preposterous idea? Jim Tylan can’t be my soul mate! That’s impossible!”
“It’s the only explanation for his being able to see through your spells, honey,” Hugh said. “Since the spells of soul mates don’t work on each other except for healing and defense, your invisibility spell didn’t phase him. He saw right through it.”
“Through your panther illusion, also,” Fergus put in.
“Maybe it’s part of his quirky ability to see spell glows.”
“He didn’t see through Fergus’s dragon,” Hugh added.
“But ...
“The clincher is,” Fergus said with a grin, “the way you look at each other.”
“Oh, please.” Irenee waved her hand as though she could wipe away the comment—and the idea behind it.
“Think about it, Irenee,” Bridget said, her voice low and calm.
Irenee eyed her suspiciously. Bridget wasn’t going to suck her into their idiocy with her comforting pediatrician’s manner. She wasn’t an unruly child who didn’t want to get a shot.
Bridget, however, kept talking. “Remember when you poked him in the chest and he took your hand? How the two of you froze and forgot we were here? He was about to kiss you when Fergus said something. Again, especially again, when you were kneeling in front of him on the sofa? He raised your hands and put them on his magic center? I could almost see the energy flowing between you. You were definitely feeling a soul mate’s attraction.”
Irenee sat down with a plop and put her head in her hands. Yes, she remembered every single detail. And her reactions to him in Alton’s study and in her office.
She’d heard about practitioner soul mates all her life, of course. As a teenager, she’d even wondered about who hers would be, what he would look like, what kind of talents he’d have. When her levels had shot up and she became a Sword, all thoughts of soul mates had disappeared. She’d had more important problems to overcome.
Now, out of the blue, her father, her mentor, and his wife were telling her this man, this stranger, whom she’d known for only a few hours, was the soul mate with whom she would spend the rest of her life?
It was so damn hard to believe.
She looked up at her father, Fergus, and Bridget. She knew they were telling the truth as they saw it and had her best interests at heart, but she couldn’t help putting up some resistance. “Are you certain you’re not mistaken? I’m twenty-five. Maybe all my reactions are only my hormones telling me my biological clock is running.”
All three shook their heads like three bobble-head dolls.
“We’re sure,” Hugh said. “We discussed it while you were at dinner and again while you escorted him out. Are you feeling an itch in your magic center when you think about him? A warmth? That’s the soul-mate imperative at work.”
“What about him? When are you going to tell him?”
“We’re not. It’s up to you,” Bridget said. “We think it best, however, if you wait until he accepts what he is and learns to control it some. I also recommend the two of you get to know each other better.”
“Thanks so much.” Irenee sat back in her chair and crossed her arms in front of her.
“Telling him about soul mates really is your call,” her father said, “and I think you’ll figure out when the time is right.”
“What about Mom? What will she think of your idea?” Her mother had been twenty-seven when she married her father. Surely she would be on Irenee’s side for not rushing into telling Jim—to make absolutely, positively certain he was her mate first. A hot shiver ran up her back when the word
mate
crossed her mind, but she held herself rigid.
“I spoke with her while you were at dinner, since she’s flying to New York tonight. She’s delighted. Even began talking about when you’d have children.”
“Children! Isn’t she rushing things a little?” Irenee had barely met the man, and her mother had given them children? Oh, this was entirely too much.
Hugh chuckled. “She’s been wondering for a while about both you and your brother. I think some of her friends are teasing her about the lack of grandchildren.”
“Has she told Dietrich?”
“Of course not. We both know you and your brother will find your true mates, and there’s absolutely nothing we can do about the timing. Since you have, however ...”
“Dad”—Irenee pointed at her father—“you stay out of whatever’s going on here. I don’t know for a fact there’s any soul-mate connection between me and Jim Tylan, and the poor man has enough to worry about without complicating his life even more. I had a devil of a time coming to terms, not simply with a level increase, but with becoming a Sword, too. He probably feels like he’s been transported to another planet.”
“Okay, honey, I’ll call your mother off—if I can.”
She gave her father a squinty-eyed, you’d-better-succeed look before continuing, “I’ll tell you another, greater possibility besides his being an ordinary practitioner. When my hands were on his chest, magical energy was oscillating between us.”
“The exchange was probably the soul-mate connection,” Bridget said. “You’ll see what I mean after you’ve mated.”
Although Irenee felt her face grow heated, she persevered. “I don’t think so. It felt exactly like what happened when we were destroying Alton’s piece of the Stone and Dad stepped up behind me for support. He fed me power directly, through his touch. It also felt exactly like what happened when you, Fergus, taught me to use my sword. In each case, you had your hands on my waist and fed it directly into my center, and I sent it out to my sword. There may have been the phenomenon in the mix with Jim, I’ll concede, but it wasn’t all soul mate.”
“Hmmmmm. If you’re right, Irenee, and you may well be,” Fergus admitted, “it makes the situation even more complicated. Tylan’s going to have to accept many new ideas in addition to his new abilities.”
“What are you going to do tomorrow? He thinks he won’t be here until afternoon, by the way.”
“You and I are going to teach him to cast a spell or two.”
 
When Irenee finally made it to bed about an hour and a half later, she couldn’t fall asleep without replaying the detailed discussion about soul mates to which her father, Fergus, and Bridget had subjected her. They hadn’t told her anything she didn’t know—well, not about the woman’s perspective. Her mother had covered that already.
From her father and Fergus, Irenee did have a better idea how a man approached the situation—lust!—and how a man understood the reality—more lust! with growing love. The knowledge did not, however, lessen the embarrassment of having to talk about it with “older men,” one of whom was her father and the other her mentor, for pity’s sake.
She took to heart Fergus’s warning about the soulmate imperative. The whole phenomenon—practitioners
always
found their soul mates and true love—was like a fairy tale, but the imperative, which Fergus called the phenomenon’s enforcer, had to be reckoned with. If she or Jim tried to reject one another, or if they simply didn’t accept each other fast enough, the imperative would “nudge” them together. The nudges could be painful.
Meanwhile the attraction between her and her soul mate would become increasingly intense. Or, worse, totally overwhelming and out of her control.
Oh, great.
She could only hope the imperative would leave her alone when she had her sword in hand. The last thing she wanted to do was become distracted and slice her supposed soul mate—or anybody else—in half.
The possibility, however, was probably the least of her problems. More important was when and how she was to explain soul mates and what he would think of them in general—and of her in particular. He was so new to the concept of practitioners. Maybe, if they could convince him he was one of them, the rest would follow naturally. She could only hope.
What would it be like to have a soul mate? It was supposed to be wonderful. What would it be like to have Jim in particular as hers? Even without the impressions encouraged by the phenomenon, he was an attractive man. Tall, broad-shouldered, with great eyes, and curly hair—and once-broken nose.
Besides the physical person, she liked his intensity, his attention to his work. She didn’t know if she could have kept in mind a main objective—learning what had been taken from Alton’s safe—when bombarded with all the information about practitioners for the first time.
From what Bridget said, the physical attraction would come first for him. If that weren’t enough, he would probably act on it, whether or not she told him about the phenomenon.
What would it be like to kiss him? Her center definitely warmed at the thought. As she gave it a rub, other parts of her body tingled and some ached. She had to laugh. Lust was not confined to the males, it appeared.
She’d kissed a few boys in her time, purely in the spirit of experimentation, and she was sure none was her soul mate. Her attraction to them had been too mild. Truth be told, she’d expected more of an inner explosion when she met her mate-to-be.
On the other hand, “getting lost in his eyes” had taken on new meaning. His touch alerted every cell in her body. Feeling magic energy move between them had been exhilarating. She had a lot to look forward to when they came together.
When would they? Or, first,
would
they at all? Fergus, her father, and Bridget could still be wrong, and Jim might not be her mate. He might still reject her—from confusion, refusal to accept his new reality, or sheer cussedness, for all she knew.
She absolutely had to protect herself in this situation. Keep an open mind, be open to the process, while being prepared for anything and everything else.
She would explain the soul-mate phenomenon soon—but not until he got used to the idea of being a practitioner. Take it slow. There was no rush. Her center itched like crazy at that thought.
Hey imperative! Give the guy and me a break. The Cataclysm Stone is our first priority.

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