First Thirst (Craving 1)

We downed our lunch in silence when his phone rang again. When he was done listening, he turned to me and said, “I am sorry. I have to go. I can’t leave this client in the lurch. She is elderly and is having trouble with her nephew, who is trying to move her into a senior’s home. She wants to remain in her own home and has a nurse in attendance, so I see no reason why she shouldn’t. It can only mean her nephew is trying to get hold of her money. I can’t put this off.”

“Of course you must go,” I said with feeling.

“Right…” He got up and looked around, as though he was forgetting something.

“Jeremy…I am often direct—to the point of being nosy, so let me ask. You seem to be devoted to your work and to Devin. Do you not have anyone—anything else in your life?” I was curious about him.

“Ah, it is complicated,” he answered, and smiled. “And I prefer simple and easy.”

“Meaning no commitments and you have the immortal thing going on. Complicated,” I said, nodding. “I get it.”

He chuckled. “That and the fact that…well, I haven’t been lucky enough to be swept away by any one woman.”

“So, you are laying low. I know the feeling.” I sighed and pushed back from the table, got up and started to take the dishes to the kitchen.

He jumped up before me and said, “Here, let me.”

A twirl of his finger and magically they were gone. I raised a brow.

“All in the dishwasher,” he said, and laughed, then touched my shoulder. “Bobbie, I’ll be back as soon as I can…and we’ll install the wards.”

I was nodding when I felt Devin’s presence before I saw him and turned away from Jeremy.

Devin stood, his fists clasped at his back, as he regarded us with a frown and asked, “Having fun, are ye?”

Jeremy laughed and answered promptly, “More fun than you are, I’d wager. Have a good sulk, did you?”

“I wasnae sulking, lad. I was working off m’frustration. I went in and helped m’friends with the dam. I told ye, they have trouble cooming from the other side of the realm, and need to shore up their defenses,” Devin said sharply.

His deep Scottish accent always seemed to become pronounced when he was distressed. It occurred to me that there were people he cared about in the place he had called home for so very long.

I felt for him. He had almost made it back to his castle. How heartbreaking for him. He had watched me come and go and had been unable to follow.

No wonder he was in the throes of his angst. I couldn’t blame him. I had raised his hopes and then dashed them to the ground. I had to make it right. At all costs, I had to find a way to free him!

I walked up to the shield and looked into his blue eyes, blue and tinted with amber in their recesses, and something else was there—humanity. I told him quietly, earnestly, “I have been reading all afternoon, Devin. I will find a way to achieve your freedom.”

He ran his hand through his mass of black silky hair, even as his gaze never broke with mine. He put his hand on the invisible wall, and I felt a tentacle of who he was reaching through the border between us. It was as though he touched my face in a caress. What the hell? Was I imagining this?

No, I wasn’t. He felt it, too. I saw the expression flit across his face and then he said, “Did ye feel that?”

“Yes…yes, what is happening?” I answered.

“I dinnae know, we have a bond. I felt it from the start—when I first looked at yer face, I felt it. Mayhap because of yer blood…yer grandmother’s blood, and connection to her original spell.”

That was a slap across the brow.

That was a knife to my belief that we were connected by attraction. No, it was only because I was the one who could free him.

I was filled with a disappointment that stunned me in its intensity. He didn’t feel what I felt. He thought, and perhaps rightly so, that our connection was through my grandmother’s spell.

After a moment I managed, “I see…yes, of course.”

He said, “The answer won’t be in the old manuscripts, lass. It will be…” his finger touched his head, “in yer very fine head. The answer is there, in what ye call yer Shama. I know it, ye know it.”

He looked away from me and turned to Jeremy. “Any news on Allora?”

I turned to Jeremy as well and noted that he was studying us intensely. At Devin’s question, he threw his hands up in the air and said, “As I told Bobbie, she has called for a meeting of the