Apparently, to him, if we weren’t actually seen together we had plausible deniability. Not that my live-in grandmother—Nana—would ever believe that we’d visited his apartment in the middle of the night just so he could give me the nickel tour.

Nana and my nine-year-old foster daughter, Beverley, were asleep in their bedrooms—each just a hall’s width from mine. The old saltbox farmhouse had paper-thin walls. Even the layers between the second-floor ceiling and attic floor lacked the ability to dampen noise. I’d heard Johnny playing his guitar up there when his little amplifier wasn’t even cranked up to “1”.

Still, there were things he didn’t know. “The lucusi is coming here at dawn, Johnny.”

He pulled me closer. He’d gotten a shower after the show, washing off the smell of sweaty leather stage clothes and leaving only the cedar and sage that was his unique scent. “Had to try.”

His breath on my neck was warm, his voice just rough enough to catch in my ear and send a tingle down to my toes. Parts of me were suddenly insisting they didn’t qualify as weary. It made me reconsider the definition of tired. “It’s just so far to drive. All the way to town, only to turn around and come back here by dawn.”

But people in the throes of new love did crazy things like that.

Did I just think the L-word?

“You could fly.”

He was right, I could. Due to my performance a few days earlier in the Eximium, a high-priestess competition, I’d been inducted into the powerful lucusiled by the Eldrenne Xerxadrea that was due at dawn. A real witch’s broom was one of the membership perks. “But . . .”

“You don’t want to fly?” He nuzzled my neck.