Page 48 of No Charm Done

Goddamn it. He’d been careful, keeping his cards close, never showing his hand. And now I’ve blown it. “We’ll have to see. Plans change.”

“Do they?”

“Complications arise.”

“What kind of complications?”

He looked at her then—really looked—and found her looking right back with an expression that suggested she knew exactly what kind of complications he meant. “The blond kind,” he said quietly. “Stubborn. Prone to rescues.”

“Sounds exhausting.”

“Yeah.” His hand lifted almost of its own accord, fingers brushing a strand of hair away from her face. “It really is.”

Her breath caught. Just a little hitch, barely noticeable, but he heard it. Felt it in the millimeters between them.

“Elias—”

“LUNA!” Kelly’s voice boomed down the stairwell. “Where are you?” Somewhere upstairs, chairs scraped across floorboards, teacups clinked in saucers. The ordinary world, clearing its throat.

Luna jumped back like she’d been shocked. The spell, if that’s what it was, broke clean in half.

Elias exhaled slowly, trying to get his pulse back under some semblance of control. “We’re not done with this conversation.”

“What conversation? I don’t know what you mean.” But her cheeks were pink and her voice had gone breathy. “You coming?”

He stared at her for a beat too long. “Luna Melrose, we’re going to stop Ashton Vex.”

“Okay. But how?”

“Let’s break something he loves.”

She looked up at him, smiling mischievously. “And what would that be, Mr. Shaw?”

“His ego, of course.”

Chapter 16

The Monkey’s Paw

Luna tried to focus on the conversation happening around the inn’s cramped corner table. But her attention kept drifting to Elias. His fingers drumming against his teacup, the clean line of his jaw, the exact shade of his eyes when he looked her way. Everything else blurred into insignificance.

Stop it, she told herself firmly. There are three magicians trapped at this table and a tech bro upstairs about to destroy magic. This is not the time to think about any of that. The kiss in New York. Or her fear for his safety, right before the magicians attacked. Or how she’d felt in the basement just now, her heart thudding as if something inevitable was about to happen.

The three magicians sat with their backs against the wall. A beautiful bit of Kelly Melrose stagecraft, making the scene look casual while giving the men no easy route to the door. The square-shouldered one who’d done most of the talking in the basement looked deeply uncomfortable wedged between his two companions. The nervous one with wire-rimmed glasses kept pushing them up his nose. The third one, the smirker, was enjoying the whole mess slightly too much.

“So this CastR,” the square-shouldered one was saying. “It’s an application? For phones?”

“And it enables anyone to use magic?” Glasses sounded more curious than alarmed, which was definitely worse.

“That’s the idea,” Luna said. “Anyone with a phone and $2.99 can point, click, and cast a spell.”

“Sounds very democratic,” said the boxy one.

“Sounds like a disaster,” Delilah said. “It’s removing all the safeguards. The training. The understanding of consequences.”

“But surely people would use it responsibly,” the smug one said.

Scarlett let out a bark of laughter. “Oh, honey. No.”