“Daphne. What are you getting at?” Emma shook.
“Nothing, I suppose. It’s just he’s in denial about being a witch.”
Nothing wasn’t the answer Daphne wanted to give. Emma understood her poignant friend. “And—”
“He’s a wolf shifter, and they have that whole fated mate thing. Don’t mess around with him, Em. You’re going to get hurt.”
There was more. Emma could feel it. “Daphne, what did you do?”
“Do?”
“Yeah, what did you do?”
“You said you wanted to learn how to go it on your own.”
“I did . . .” Emma remembered vividly the days after the cruise when her whole life fell apart again.
“I put a blocking spell on you.” Daphne paused. “I’m sorry. I think I—”
“Flint.” Emma’s world flipped on her. Was he her fated mate? When she thought of him, butterflies didn’t scamper in her stomach. No, Flint didn’t make her feel nervous—he made her confident, even when she was angry with him. When she focused on him, her skin heated and she wanted to dance. All the signs were there. Their magic bonding, the floating, his erratic behavior . . . they all made a lot more sense.
“He might be . . .”
Emma slowly blinked, thinking about how infuriating the male was. One minute he was “you’re all mine,” and then the next he was spouting off the opposite. Not special, she got it. Check. He’d said that himself, if not directly.
Actually, until a few minutes ago, he’d taken actions that had contradicted his words. He’d come to her. He’d invited her into his space. He’d trusted her with his secret. A greedy levitation witch would kill for his closet of power. Was Flint Larsen her mate?
Emma took a deep breath. She loved Daphne, loved her like a sister, which also meant right now she wanted to knock her into next week. She clenched her phone.
“Don’t get mad at me, Em, and don’t deny it. You said you wanted a clean start, moving away from our childhood coven, away from your parents. That’s only a start. You have to change your actions if you expect to get a different result. I’m sure the sex was off the charts if you floated. Hell, I married the first man who made me float.”
Emma humphed. Daphne and Peter were over the moon about each other, with two adorable children. He was a human and a billionaire. She owned a styling business. They were perfect. So yeah, Emma had given up on comparing herself to Daphne or Shiori a long time ago.
“I’m not mad, Daphne.” Emma’s voice was strained. She was most certainly mad.
“Yes, you are.”
“Goddess, just stop, okay? Maybe I’m mad. But don’t I have a little right to have some fun?”
“Of course you do. But it didn’t look like fun in the hospital.”
“That’s not Flint’s fault.”
“No, of course not. But it is his fault his magic is going all haywire. He needs to accept who he is.”
Emma wanted to let out one of Flint’s growls at her best friend. “You might be right, but if we are mates? Your fiddling didn’t help, me or him.”
“You need to focus on you, not changing everyone around you.”
“He’s not Sean.”
“I never said he was. What I said was he’s got a truckload of issues, and you don’t need that.”
“Where was all this concern when I was with Sean?”
“That’s why it’s coming out now, Emma. You told us not to let this happen to you again. When you started dating Sean, you told both Shiori and I to back off.”
“Right.” Emma remembered the vodka-soaked night, crying on Daphne’s sofa and making Shiori and Daphne promise to stop her from making a big mistake again. Now it felt like the promise had been more of a mistake than the vodka. “Well, message heard. You think Flint is trash. You can back off now.”
Daphne paused. “It’s just—”
“It’s just nothing. I got it. Stay away from the wolf shifter. But you need to remove that spell from me, on the off chance that everything that’s happened is because I’m his fated mate and you jammed up the whole system with it.”
“Emma, stop. I had a dream.”
“Well, if it was about me, then it wasn’t anything but that. You know visions about those you are close to don’t have a heck of a lot of accuracy.”
“Not unless they are super important.”
“Like the time you had the vision Shiori was going to choke to death on pistachio ice cream?”
“Yeah, well.”
“Daphne, you’re not a seer.”
“Shiori spilled pea soup on her blouse at that big lawyer luncheon and she wanted to die.”
Emma let it lie there. She took a breath. “What is it, then?”
