Hecate's Own: Heart's Desire, Book 2 Read Free

paying attention to what Zach had been putting in his cauldron
instead of his strong hands, one bound in a leather glove, one not, she might
have stopped him from whatever the hell he’d done. It stinks like a half-cooked
skunk in here. “Get the other windows, Zachary.”
    She felt more than heard his sigh. “Yes, ma’am.”
    She risked a quick peek at his strong shoulders outlined in
a white button-down shirt, dark jeans hugging an incredibly firm ass. That mop
of dark curls begged for her fingers. He reached over and pulled on the window,
opening it with another deep grunt that sent flutters through her stomach.
    She had to get this unholy lust under control before it did
her in. Zachary Beckett was her student , damn it. She had to teach him
how to control and hone his powers. If Ro caught her drooling over the man she
just knew Zach would be sent away. He was at the end of his patience with
Zachary Beckett. The complaints against him were piling up as he screwed up one
spell after another in spectacular fashion.
    But if he were sent away he’d never get what he so
desperately needed.
    So she growled and she grumbled and she kept him at arm’s
length. She prayed he never saw the way she looked for his bright smile, or the
way she watched him those rare times when he threw his head back and laughed. She
never let him closer than she had to. She was terrified he’d sense her
attraction.
    Still, if it wasn’t for his perpetual screw-ups, she wasn’t
certain she would have been able to stand by her decision. There was no way the
man could leave court without serious tutoring in the arcane arts. If he did,
someone, somewhere, was going to kill his ass just for the strange stuff he
tended to do without even thinking about it.
    “All the windows are open, Miss Yashodhar.”
    She watched him shake out the fingers of his gloved hand and
wondered at it. He never took it off, never allowed anyone to touch it. He held
out his left hand to anyone who wanted to shake, and she knew, knew it wasn’t
his primary hand. The awkward way he tried to do things with his left one let
her know the injury to his right was fairly recent too. The fact that he was in
her class at all made her think it was perhaps less than a year old but more
than six months. He’d been in court now for five weeks, and she’d never seen
his ungloved hand.
    What had he done to fuck his hand up? It had to be pretty
bad if the healers around here hadn’t fixed it yet. Maybe it wasn’t even human
anymore? She snorted. She wouldn’t put anything past him.
    The smoke was clearing, but the rotten skunk smell was
lingering like a bad headache, throbbing behind her sinuses. “Everyone, class
dismissed for the evening. Call your parents.”
    “Way to go, Zachary.”
    She hid her wince as best she could, but she knew everyone
had heard a child mock the very adult Zach. “Everyone, out. Now!” She sighed. “Zachary,
hold back for a moment.”
    She watched the children gather their things and head for
the door. More than one glared or shook their heads at Zach, blaming him for
the catastrophe her lesson had become. She found herself shaking her head at
him too.
    Someone needed to take this man-boy in hand before he killed
himself.
    “What exactly did you put in that spell?” It was
supposed to be relatively simple, a brew to relax and open up the third eye,
allowing the magical senses to be brought to the fore. Instead it wound up
closing off the sinuses. “Well?”
    He shrugged. “It should have worked.”
    “Tell me the ingredients you used.”
    He began chanting them, his voice almost sing-song. Her
horror grew as he listed out the herbs he’d placed in his cauldron. “Lord and
Lady, Beckett! Half those herbs are poisonous!” And how the fuck had
poisonous herbs wound up in a novice classroom?
    He shrugged. “They were what I needed.”
    “What you needed.”
    He nodded, giving her what she’d come to term his Bambi
eyes. “Uh-huh.”
    She