Levitating Las Vegas(66)
Author: Jennifer Echols

“We already have.” He tilted her head forward, kissed her forehead, and looked into her eyes again. “I shouldn’t have done that to you, Holly. When you’re close to me like this, I know everything you think. I wish I could turn it off. I can’t. But I promise you I won’t make you feel that way again.”

She gave a small nod, her wide eyes never leaving his. She still wasn’t sure she should trust him, and she wasn’t sure she cared. He could betray her and use her, as long as he would touch her.

He pulled her by the hand through the open door, into the house.

A buzzer split the silence. Elijah dropped Holly’s hand and jogged through the living room. When she rounded the corner, she saw him pulling something out of the oven, and she smelled food. She skipped forward and ooohed her approval at the two places set at the kitchen table, the plates heaped with chicken casserole and roasted vegetables. As she watched, Elijah plucked rolls from the baking sheet he held with a towel and tossed a couple onto each plate.

“Dude.” She slid into a chair in front of one of the plates. Five minutes and one serving later, she came up for breath long enough to ask, “Do you have powers I don’t know about? Instant gourmet food? Oh, God.”

He rose, reached to the counter for the casserole dish, and spooned second helpings of chicken and vegetables onto her plate. “It’s been cooking for an hour. I couldn’t find you at the casino, and I hoped you might stop by here.”

Five minutes and the second serving later, she wiped the corners of her mouth daintily with her napkin, as if the whole meal had been a polite enterprise. Not. “I was hungry.”

He offered her a basket with the few remaining rolls. “Sitting at the casino talking to my mom, it came over me all of a sudden, this terrible hunger. I thought I was going to pass out.”

“Really!” Holly said through a mouthful of bread.

“On the way here, I stopped at that café, the one where I kidnapped you?” he said casually.

“Uh-huh?” she said in the same tone.

“I ate two of those muffins you were lusting after.”

“Mmmmmmuffin,” she said. “I’ve never had one. Were they good?”

He looked apologetic, as if they had been very good and he was afraid to tell her.

She stuck out her bottom lip.

He reached behind him to the cabinet, brought out a bakery box, and solemnly slid it across the table to her.

She peeked inside. Two chocolate muffins. She grinned her gratitude at him. He smiled back. She peeled back the glittering paper and took a big bite of muffin. Mmmmm.

“We can’t know what the future holds for us,” he said. “But I hope yours is full of muffins.”

Holly held up one finger until she’d chewed and swallowed. “Kaylee warned me about mind readers. You know exactly what to say to make a girl fall in love with you.”

Almost as soon as it was out of her mouth, she realized what she’d said. She glanced up at him guiltily. He frowned at her.

They’d had a huge fight just that morning. Now their relationship was too good and too tentative to mess up with a clumsy statement like that. It was true—if he did tell her he loved her, how would she ever know whether he was sincere?—but she hadn’t meant to bring this up.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“I know,” he responded with no expression in his voice.

Nervously she pulled at the muffin paper. Most girls probably would be put off their food by an awkward silence like this, or would pretend to be. Holly was not most girls. She was still hungry. She finished the first muffin and half-heartedly offered the second to Elijah. He shook his head no. She ate it in silence, then put the papers back in the bakery box and nipped up the crumbs with her fingers.

“Full?” he asked.

“I’m not sure I can ever be full,” she admitted. “Satisfied, for now.”

He raised his eyebrows. “That’s too bad.”

Was this innuendo? She didn’t have enough experience to know for certain, but she hoped for the best. She scraped back her chair, rounded the table to him, and slipped onto his lap. She ran her fingers back through his hair and—

“Oh God, how did you get this huge knot on the back of your head?” She touched it gingerly.

He winced. “That? My best friend pistol-whipped me.”

Holly nodded. “Your talk with Shane didn’t go well? And when you accused him of having magical powers, he thought you were crazy?”

“Basically,” Elijah said.

“Poor baby,” she cooed.

“It’s stopped bleeding,” he said. “The show must go on. Where were we?”

She gently kissed his hair. “Are we going to make out at the kitchen table, or is there a bedroom?”

The serious look he gave her sent chills along her arms.

He moved under her. She slipped off his lap and let him stand, then looked way up at him. It wasn’t often that he stood so close to her and she realized how tall he was.

He chuckled. “You make me feel like a million bucks, you know that?”

She let loose an embarrassed giggle. “Why? You knew you were tall.”

“Yeah, but I didn’t know it was glorious.”

She snorted.

Shaking his head, he pulled her by the hand across the living room, into the hall, past the fateful bathroom. In his bedroom he closed the blinds against the midafternoon desert sun, plunging the room into shadow. The sunlight squeezing through at the edges of the windows backlit his wavy brown hair. He sat on the bed and kicked off his shoes. Then he patted the covers beside him.

She sat down and bent to take off her shoes.

“Could you leave those on?”

She paused. This request was kinky, like a fourteen-year-old boy’s wet dream.

“I plead the fifth.” But his voice was so kind that the kinky request began to seem almost sweet.

She let him ease her back onto the bed. Her eyes still hadn’t adjusted to the darkness and she couldn’t make out his expression at all as he leaned over and kissed her.

She cleared her mind. Because she didn’t want him to see the turmoil in it. And because she needed to enjoy this moment with him, which was all she knew she had.

He rubbed the tip of his nose against hers and rested his forehead on hers. “Don’t be scared, Holly,” he whispered. “The world is more open now, not more closed.”

She choked on her words as she whispered back, “I can’t believe what they put us through for so long.”