Cian was back in the mirror now, and being downright pissy about it.
She wasn’t. She was relieved that it had sucked him back in so soon after he’d used Voice to escape the airport and commandeered their “rental” vehicle.
Twice now, she’d nearly given him her virginity. In fact, had they not been interrupted, she would have either time.
She didn’t understand it. She was a woman who did nothing without a solid, well-thought-out reason. She knew the largest part of why she hadn’t slept with a man yet was because she’d watched her mother go through four husbands. She had three sisters, fourteen stepsiblings (some of them step-steps from the man’s earlier marriage), a bad case of cynicism, and an intense need for commitment as a result.
She adored her mother, and if anyone dared criticize Lilly St. James, Jessi would slice and dice ’em. Nobody put down her mom.
She even liked all of her stepsiblings.
But she hated having such a complicated family; it was one of the reasons she’d left Maine for Chicago and stayed there, preferring long talks on the phone every Sunday with Lilly to being fully consumed by the chaos that was the St. James household. Though not currently married, her mom was dating again, and sometimes that was worse than suddenly getting a few extra brothers and sisters who borrowed clothing and car keys with teenage impunity.
Birthday dinners and graduations inevitably turned into scheduling disasters. Holidays were a nightmare. Jessi would never be able to fathom her mom’s idea of marital commitment. A commercial realtor, Lilly treated the sacred vows of matrimony like any of her other “deals”: a short-term contract with an option to renew—that she rarely exercised.
Jessi was getting married once. Having babies with one man. Three or four kids would be just fine; maybe a boy and two girls who would never suffer any confusion about who they were related to, and how, not to mention the often-baffling whys. Her mom had picked a few strange ones from the parade of boyfriends.
Jessi wanted a small, insular, well-tended world. The fewer people one tried to love, Jessi believed, the better one could love them. She was a quality girl, not a quantity one.
Yet, with Cian MacKeltar, all her well-thought-out prequalifiers for relationships went sailing right out the window.
He looked at her—she got wet.
He touched her—she melted.
He kissed her—her clothing started coming off.
She couldn’t come up with a single reason for it. Yes, he was sexy. Yes, he was pure male and—so what if it wasn’t in keeping with the current feminist movement that seemed to prefer emasculated men—she liked manliness in a man. Liked them a little rough around the edges, a little untamed. Yes, he was fascinating, and she really couldn’t wait to get him somewhere that she could pick his brain about the ninth century, and find out just what had happened to him eleven centuries ago.
But he was also a logistic impossibility.
He was currently living in a mirror. He was a sorcerer with a blood-grudge against another sorcerer. And he was way older than she was.
He wasn’t the marrying kind. Not even the keeping kind. And she knew it.
But despite all that, whenever he touched her, she instantly began de-evolving into one of her primitive ancestors, driven by the three basic prime directives: eat, sleep, have sex. Though if she were going to line those directives up in the order she would enjoy them, it would be sex first, while she felt skinny and her tummy was at its flattest, then food with lots of decadently sedating carbs, then sleep. Then wake up and have sex again, with the added benefit of working off some carbs. So she could eat again.
But that was neither here nor there.
Here was a man she couldn’t seem to keep her hands off of.
And no doubt when he came out of that mirror, they were going to fall on each other again. And she wasn’t going to be able to count on an interruption way up in the desolate hills where he was taking her, unless a meteor were to serendipitously plummet from the sky, or they were overrun by marauding sheep.
“I’m sliding again, lass,” came the disgruntled growl from the seat beside her. “Naught but a view of the ceiling over here.”
Jessi slowed and pulled over to the side of the road. When they’d gotten into the SUV, Cian had originally positioned the mirror across the two back rows of seats, then slid into the front passenger’s seat. But when the Dark Glass had reclaimed him less than an hour outside of Edinburgh, en route to Inverness, he’d instructed her to push the front seat back as far as it would go—which was pretty far in the roomy SUV—tug the looking glass forward, prop it at an angle, and strap it in with the seat belt so he could see where they were going. I’m uncertain of the terrain, lass, he’d told her. I know where I want to go, but I doona ken how it will look after the passage of so much time. There will be roads and buildings and such that weren’t there before; however, I should be able to identify the mountains if I can get a good-enough view.