CHAPTER14
Cate’sentire body felt warm from the slightest touch of Gunner’s fingers on her skin.
As if…
As if something inside her that lay dormant had also been awakened.
Something she had forgotten long ago.
Cate gazed upon the fine specimen in her backyard as she gently knelt down to her discarded robe to retrieve her ceremonial oil vial. She approached him, putting herself directly in the moonlight’s path, and her entire body felt alive with sparks, with magic that knew it was needed.
Alive with purpose.
She stepped one foot into the circle, then the other.
Gunner looked up at her with dark, mysterious eyes, and in them she could see he was nervous, too.
Cate suspected Gunner feared the ritual would not work because he’d accepted his fate as a failed shifter.
The anguish that acceptance brought, the never-ending internal fight he must have had to endure…
Cate felt a stirring in her being at that knowledge.
Sadness.
She wanted to free his spirit, but it had been far too long since she’d engaged insex magick, manifestations, and rituals such as this. Despite her concerns, her own inclinations, something about Gunner pulled at her, begged her to listen, to hear it.
Diviner or no Diviner, she had already strayed too far into the process, and there was truly no turning back now.
There was no way out, except through, and Cate only hoped she would make it out unscathed.
“Lie down,” she instructed him. “Arms out, like a cross.” She watched as the naked Gunner slid down onto the cool earth, as he spread his arms out like branches. She took in the sight of him, sprawled on the moist earth; the curve of his biceps, the definition of his form, the rather pleasing cut of his hip bones. Shadows fell across his skin, and he looked positively stunning against the darkness of the night.
She knelt beside him softly and poured the oil on his chest, down his abdomen in one, long steady stream.
He did not even flinch.
She took a deep breath before chanting the ancient words that came to her so easily now, like riding a bicycle.
Here goes nothing…
Cate slowly crawled over Gunner, straddling him as she closed her eyes.
She could feel the pull of the magic from the earth below, the shifting energy beneath the surface of his body, and her own sparks igniting in the beam of light that cast down upon them.
It was like hearing one solid voice in a crowded room, and it beckoned her to fall into the abyss.
She repeated the words, trying to focus on them, but all concentration was lost when she felt the twitching of Gunner’s cock against her entrance.
Focus, Cate!
She opened her eyes to see Gunner staring at her.
“You don’t have to close your eyes.” His voice was steady, and he looked at her as if…
As if she were the sun, the moon, and the stars.
The feeling was most…moving.