Wild Magic (Wilding Pack Wolves 6) - New Adult Paranormal Romance (5 page)

She wasn’t flirting with him, but that green-eyed stare wasn’t helping with his concentration. So he closed his eyes and tried to forget about that electric touch of hers. But focusing on his wolf only had it surging closer to the surface, panting after Skylar.

“Okay, now what?” Daniel asked. He hoped Zoe was watching this ridiculousness—maybe seeing him bumble and fail to do a damn thing, magically speaking, would help her with this coming out that Troy had obviously talked her into. And Daniel really did want her as part of the team…

“Now tap into that inner stronghold of your magic,” Skylar said. She’d moved closer—he could tell by the nearness of her voice and the soft scent of soap-scrubbed skin floating over the air. His wolf was growling lustful grunts with every whiff. 
His inner magic wanted to make some
outer
magic with her…

Jesus. Focus, Wilding.
“Okay,” he said out loud.

“Now let that energy flow up and out,” Skylar said.

“Up and out?” Daniel replied. “Like this?” He kept his eyes closed but circled his hands in the air like he had seen the other white wolves do… and, he felt ridiculous.

A long stretch of seconds passed. Daniel could swear he heard some kind of snort-laugh, not from Skylar, but from the other jokers in the field. He dropped his hands and opened his eyes, shooting a glare at the others. Kaden had his arms crossed, but Daniel could tell it was just to keep the laugh inside. Owen was struggling mightily to keep a straight face, but Noah was banging his head on Owen’s shoulder, silently laughing up a storm.

“You guys are assholes, you know that?” Daniel said.

Noah choked back the laugh. “Sorry, bro, I just can’t even with that…” He flailed his hands around in a mockery of Daniel’s admittedly pathetic attempt.

He glanced at Zoe—she had been huddled with Troy, but now she was stepping away from him and striding across the field.

“Don’t let them bully you, Daniel,” she called out. Then she raised her hand, palm out, towards him.

Skylar stepped back.

Holy crap, what was she doing? He put up both hands to hold her off. “Hey, now, don’t start ganging up on me.”

His cousin smiled. “You’re right, I shouldn’t use you as a guinea pig.” She pointed her palm at a tree stump instead—it was one of the trees they had destroyed earlier, cut clean off from two feet on up. There was a small pine cone resting on top. Zoe closed her eyes and a moment later a blue ball of fire shot from her hand… only it didn’t blast the stump. Instead, it wrapped around the pinecone, encasing it in a blue shield, and lifted it into the air.

“Holy shit.” Daniel hadn’t seen any of the other wolves do anything like it. The others were amazed as well. Skylar danced across the grass to Zoe.

“What else can you do, girl?” Skylar was even shorter than Zoe was. “Witching is such an inherently feminine power. I’ll be you’ve got all kinds of things going on under that cute new haircut.”

Zoe laughed. “I’m really not doing anything special. Just manipulating the field a little bit.”

Skylar looked impressed, sliding a nod to Daniel. “You see? Just manipulating the field a little bit.” She turned back to Zoe. “These burly masculine men are hotter than sin, but they’re more wolf than witch. Even with those white wolf powers expressing like crazy, it’s hard for them to harness their witchy side. Tough for them, but you…
you,
my girl, could do amazing things.”

Daniel mostly heard the
hotter than sin
part—did that mean Skylar was feeling this magic touch thing, too?

“So you’re saying that because I’m a
female
white wolf that I have more access to my witchy side?” Zoe asked.

“Absolutely!” Skylar beckoned her further into the field. “It’s a fact that we—witches and wolves—used to be much more intimately entwined.” She threw a quick smirk to him, and he’d be damned if that didn’t bring heat up to his face. The woman really needed to stop throwing every sexual innuendo in the book at him. Then she licked her lips in a way that had him clamping his teeth down and glaring at her—she
had
to know what this was doing to him.

She turned back to Zoe. “It may be ancient history to you wolves, but several of my sisters are long-lived enough to remember when stories about the ancient unification of wolves and witches were not stories at all. But the white wolf you guys are expressing is the closest I’ve seen in modern times to combining both sides. My sisters in the coven are all jealous of me—not only do I get to spend my time with some hunkalicious men, but the white wolf could be the start of something special for wolves and witches both. Something we haven’t seen for hundreds of years.”

“What do you mean?” Troy asked from behind her, where he had edged up closer.

“I mean,” Skylar said with another lingering-too-long glance at Daniel, “that the reunification of our species could be a possibility.” The way she said it sounded a whole lot more like
unification of his body with hers.
An idea that he was starting to think had serious merit, if only to cool off some of this raging sexual tension between them.

“Right now,” Zoe said, “I’m really just interested in knowing how to blast a certain Wolf Hunter to hell if he happens to come to my lab again.”

That doused some cold water on his fantasy. At least someone was keeping their eyes on the prize.

Skylar sobered a little too. “That’s something I would like to see as well.” She narrowed her eyes at Zoe. “Show me what you’ve really got, sister.”

Zoe seemed to take that as a challenge. She closed her eyes again, held out both hands toward the tree stump, and her body seemed to tremble from deep inside. Then a tremendous surge of blue magic gushed from her hands and blasted in every direction. It knocked him flat down to the ground and went on to crackle and sear across the field, scorching everything about three feet off the ground, including leveling a dozen trees at the edge of the clearing.

Holy shit. He dashed a look to Skylar and the others—they were all smacked down by the same energy field, but they were moving. No one seemed hurt.

“You okay?” Daniel asked Skylar, still reeling from the crackling magic that was jumping from tree to tree, burning itself out.

She nodded but seemed stunned.

Zoe gasped… then she ran. She nearly tripped over Troy’s body in her haste to haul ass away from the magical destruction she had unleashed. She was sprinting toward the house—Daniel would have gone after her, but Troy was already up and headed her way. And besides, he understood exactly what Zoe was feeling—completely freaked out about the magic power of her white wolf. If he was honest, that was part of what kept him from really trying to summon his own inner witch. This level of magic was flat dangerous, and this witch-wolf hybrid thing—the white wolf—was unpredictable and, as Zoe just demonstrated, dangerous. The others seemed to have a handle on it, but clearly Zoe didn’t—and she was more powerful than all of them combined.

If Daniel did manage to summon his inner witch, who was to say he wouldn’t be just the same?

He dusted himself off and visually checked the others. Everyone, including the petite witch with the pretty green eyes, seemed unharmed.

“I think we’re done for the day,” Daniel said.

Skylar seemed to want to say something to him, but she held back. Daniel turned and strode away. He wanted nothing to do with magic for a while.

Skylar was going nuts cooped up at the estate.

Not that the company was terrible—she was surrounded by gorgeous shifter men all day long, coming and going on whatever business they had, tending to the horses, keeping watch over Mama River, or just cycling through, checking in. But magic practice had been put on hold for two days now while Daniel took care of some business with the Army. That seemed highly suspicious to her—she suspected he was unnerved by Zoe’s overpowering display of magic, not that he had any real “business” to take care of—but she was just grateful he hadn’t kicked her out altogether. And while the hunkalicious men at the estate sent her witchy heart pitter-pattering, there was only one man her secret inner wolf was pining for—Daniel Wilding.

Until he decided to come back, Skylar spent most of her down time in the forest.

On this fine afternoon, it was alive with sounds and smells that soothed her secret wolfy-needs. As she hiked through the ferns and around the fallen logs, she was amazed how much a simple stroll through the woods could bring that part of her to the surface. It was a bittersweet feeling of
home
with a missing chunk called
mate.
But this freedom to just commune with nature was something she could only do here, so she’d spent hours wandering the deer paths and charting out hidden streams.

She’d already been in the forest for several hours today and was just now winding back. The peak blaze of the sun had passed, but it was still hot as it started to sink lower in the sky. When she reached the edge of the forest, which was still charred from Zoe’s outburst, Skylar was surprised to see a figure marching across the field toward her. She shaded her eyes—
it was Daniel.
Her heart lurched a little, and her wolf perked up immediately. She hadn’t quite broken out of the forest yet, so he couldn’t see her… but he was headed straight for her.

She stepped out into the sun. “Hey, hot stuff. You’re back.”

He stumbled to a stop, squinting at her. She kept her smile bright but hoped she hadn’t just scared him off. After a long hesitation, he continued tromping through the tall grass of the field.

“Hey,” he said. “I didn’t know you were out here. Going for another naked run?” The edge of his smile quirked a little, and it flushed an unexpected heat through her. He stopped in front of her, his blue eyes twinkling with humor.

She put on her full flirtation mode. “Is that an invitation?”

The smile dropped from his face, and her heart lurched again. But the aura that shimmered around his body wasn’t pulsing red with anger or offense, but a purplish kind of heat.
Lust.
Auras didn’t always make their presence known, only when she was making an effort to read them or when the emotion was particularly strong. He stepped closer with an intense look that she could read even without an aura… and suddenly, it was difficult to breathe normally.

“I was just planning on a walk,” he said, quietly, blue eyes blazing. “But I could be talked into other things.”

“Is that right?” Did she
want
to talk him into something? Her wolf was whimpering
yes, yes, yes.
But that was precisely why she shouldn’t—the insanely masculine scent of him wafting over her was already making her wolf want to burst forth, not to mention those broad shoulders and barely concealed muscles under his tight-fitting t-shirt.

She swallowed.

He eased even closer. “Definitely yes,” he breathed. Then he blinked and pulled back a little. “But that would be… unprofessional.”

She nodded, a little too fast. “Given that we’re working together.”

“Exactly.” But there was still a shine in his eyes, and he wasn’t backing away anymore.

The sinking feeling trickling through her was either disappointment or relief—maybe both. “I should probably thank you for that,” she said.

He frowned. “For what, exactly?”

“For still letting me work with your wolves. And not sending me packing after what happened the other day.” Jumping Daniel’s crazy-hot body was probably a terrible idea, but staying on his good side definitely wasn’t—she would take all the time she could get here in the forest and among the wolves. Being close to Daniel was just an added bonus. At least, that’s how she explained it to her secret wolf… after telling her to stop whining.

He looked at her quizzically. “That wasn’t your fault.”

“Well, I did encourage her.” Then she rushed out, “But I’m fairly sure it was an accident. She just needs to learn a bit more control.”

“Control. Right.” He nodded like this made sense to him, but he backed off a little more, putting space between them.

She cocked her head. “Are you sure you wouldn’t like to try?”

He was back to frowning. “Try what?”

“To bring out your inner witch.” She gave him a small smile. “We could go in the forest, where no one will see. The others don’t have to know.”

He hesitated a long time before answering, flicking looks to the shadowed trees behind her. “I don’t know…”

“C’mon,” she said, peering up into his scrunched-up face. Why was it troubling him so much? “Let me practice on
you.
That way, when Zoe is ready to try again, I’ll be ready for her. You want her on the team, right?”

He seemed even more conflicted. “Yes.”

“Then show her you’re not afraid of your own white wolf,” she said, tilting her head toward the forest.

He visibly swallowed. He really was afraid. She didn’t understand that at all. Daniel Wilding was strong, in command, an alpha wolf if she’d ever seen one—that was part of why her wolf was whimpering, even now, for her to leap up into his muscular arms and ride him like she would never let go. What could possibly make this man who oozed confidence and masculinity afraid?