Finn kissed my dirty knuckles, feather soft. He touched the back of my mud-caked hair and laughed. “There’s got to be a story about why you look like you were dragged through a bog.”
Telling him about my dad and my mom was one thing. Parent issues were universal, right? But I couldn’t bring myself to tell him I was an aura-seeing, New Age nut job who unburied a key in the woods that seared its twin on my arm. Besides, I never forgot Faye’s warning not to tell anyone about myself.
I wouldn’t put Finn in danger.
“I went to the redwoods.” He squinted curiously but didn’t push for more.
I bit my lip as he stroked my hair. Every once in a while, an unruly strand caught on his beaded bracelet and he’d gently slip it free. His eyes were so sincere, his aura clear of the sludge I’d come to associate with people’s ambivalence. Warmth and caring rolled off him and surrounded me. Like luxuriating in a patch of sun on a brisk day.
His fingers slipped from the top of my hair to weave through the curls at the nape of my neck. A conflicted look passed over his face. He was fighting the urge to pull my head to his. I got that. Even appreciated his restraint because it showed he cared about the state I was in. But I wanted him to kiss me. Desperately.
“It’s okay to kiss me, Finn.” I hooked my fingers on the pocket of his gray shirt and pulled. “You have to kiss me.”
“Good,” he said in a tight voice. “Because I need to.”
His fingers clutched tighter at my neck. He brought my lips to his, but he stopped short of a kiss. Our lips barely lit upon each other’s, so light it tickled. We stared hard into each other’s eyes. Our breathing swirled around our mouths, merging, our auras doing the same. We were trapped together in a bubble of pulsing energy.
Finn smiled against my mouth and teased his face away from mine, then gently tugged my head back and grazed my neck with his lips. He planted soft kisses down the slope of it. His spiked hair tickled my cheek, and I gasped when he sucked gently on my earlobe.
I tasted his neck, tasted the upper curve of the tattoo that had beckoned me since we first met, bit the firm pad of flesh where his neck and shoulder joined. Something about him made me feel primal and strong.
“Damn,” he groaned and pulled us face-to-face again. We still clutched the back of each other’s heads. “You are a force to be reckoned with.” As he leaned away from me, his bracelet caught in my hair and split apart. Crystalline orange drops rained down on us, slipping down my shoulders, into my shirt, onto the seat. Finn laughed.
I started to scoop them up, scavenge for them between the seats, but he waved me off. “It’s no big deal,” he said. “It’s just a bracelet.” I curled my fingers around a few beads. Their tiny facets dug into my palms as he started out of the parking lot.
“I don’t know how to pull off getting to Ireland to look for my mom. Saying it out loud makes it sound even more absurd. My father will be one hundred percent against it.” I clenched my hands together in my lap and sighed. “I want something impossible.”
Finn glanced at me with a wry smile. “So do I.”
I knew instinctively what he meant. Deep inside me, a girl twirled with happiness while tears flew from her cheeks. He lived in Ireland, yet he wanted…us. We drove a minute in silence while I tried to pull myself together. This day was too big. Too much of too much. I leaned my head back on the leather seat and closed my eyes.
“I hate to see you so low,” Finn said. He flicked the turn signal. “I know what you need.” The car pulled to a stop in a darkened parking lot.
I looked around, confused. “I need a fifteen-minute oil change?”
Finn flashed me a megawatt smile. He rummaged in the backseat for something, producing a bandanna from his guitar case. “I need to blindfold you.”
“Kinky much?”
A chuckle. “Do you trust me?”
The pause was, perhaps, extraordinarily long. “Okay. Not entirely. Um. Okay.” How strange that I’d come to rely on seeing auras so much that I was nervous about the ability being gone.
He folded the bandanna in a triangle and placed it gently over my eyes. “Hold this.” I pressed my fingers to my eyes while he tied the back. It smelled like him, like sun and leather and cloves.
We drove a bit more, turning this way and that, finally coming to a stop. I couldn’t see anything except that it seemed lighter than before. He got out and opened my door, then took my hand.
“I feel stupid.”
“Hush, vixen, and follow me.”
Finn led me through a chiming door. The luxurious scent of sugar assailed me. “Is that buttercream?”
“Sit here a moment. I’ll be right back.”
I swear my mouth actually watered. I tapped my fingers and smiled. It felt good to smile. I detected Finn’s approach before I heard him. His aura was unmistakable. There was always the familiar pull, the energy infused with warmth, sex appeal, and a sprinkling of trouble. He slid into the seat next to me. “Smell this.” Something delectable waved under my nose.
“Vanilla and…is it oranges?”
“You could work for search and rescue. Here, taste.”
His finger touched my lips. Rich vanilla frosting and tiny bits of candied orange peel swirled over my tongue. Heaven. He untied my blindfold. I blinked and looked around. We were in the biggest cupcake shop I had ever seen. I’d heard about the new place and really wanted to go but hadn’t made the time. My cupcake-loving soul was thrilled. In front of me sat six cute little miniature cupcakes lined up in a row. Each one different.
“I figured we should do a taste test to choose our favorite.”
I threw my arms around his neck and squeezed him. He couldn’t have picked a sweeter way to cheer me up, and obviously one can better formulate radical plans of running off to foreign countries when fueled by cupcakes.
I caught him looking at me strangely. “What?” I asked through a mouthful of chili-spiced chocolate.
“I don’t know,” he answered in a very non-answery way, studying me as if seeing me with new eyes.
“Okay. Let me have it.”
He cocked his head, blinked, and grinned. “You’re radiant, Cora. It’s the only word I can think of. You have a special light about you. People try so hard to shine. You do nothing, and you eclipse them all.”
I gasped. “You mean you see light—?”
“No. No. I can’t literally see it.” His brows pinched together. “I feel it. It’s something brilliant about you that draws me in. You gaze at me with those incredible eyes of yours, and it’s like a drug. I want another hit. And another.”
I kissed his sweet lips. I swear he gasped a little.
“Funny,” I said, peeling back the accordion paper of the pink-lemonade cupcake. “I’d say I’m the moth attracted to your light. I know at some point, I’ll get burned.”
“Burned?”
“I’ll fall for you. You’ll go home to Ireland, and even if I see you again when I go to look for my mother—because I will find a way to do that—I still have to come back to America. Fiery hole in my heart. Crash. Burn. That kind of thing.” I gulped. Geesh, I needed to put a restraining order on my mouth, or put another cupcake in it.
Finn blinked. “You could fall for me?” he asked in a reverent whisper.
The next words tumbled out in a cupcake-soaked garble that didn’t sound like the English language. “So hard.”
“I think I just swooned.”
“And look, you’re still manly.”
He took my hands in his. We sat that way for a few moments, marinating in affection and buttercream frosting. I watched our auras bleed into each other. Mine shooting off sparks of silver. His gold, brightening into a starlike glow. Together we became a comet, racing into the sun.