Impulse: Southern Arcana, Book 5 by Moira Rogers

they’re useless?”
    “They’re not,” she protested at once, as if she couldn’t stand for him to think he’d failed. “A vacation is a good idea, I just need to make it work. After Josh is bored.”
    Dangerous thinking. “You think he’s going to get bored?”
    Silence. A sigh. “No.”
    Good. He might get scared or exasperated or a dozen other emotions that would result in him going away and leaving her alone, but bored didn’t make the list. “Do you need anything? More blankets or another pillow?”
    “A good night’s sleep.” She touched his cheek, her fingers soft and warm. “Thank you. I feel steadier now.”
    It was his job to protect her, and calming her down was part of it. What wasn’t part of it was the interest his body took in her touch, the way his skin heated and his brain started to run through the decidedly naked possibilities.
    So he rose and walked to the door before answering. “You’re welcome. Tomorrow, you can decide what to do.” By then, he should have heard something from Anna about Josh’s activities. Enough to keep Sera safe.
    Safe. The one thing Franklin had begged of him as Julio had dragged him out of his burning, destroyed clinic a year earlier. He’d been terrified of dying and leaving Sera in her suffocating marriage—or worse. Of Josh picking up and running, making them both disappear forever.
    Julio had promised, somewhere in the middle of all those ranting mutters, that he would take care of it, and he would. Because for all his other faults and weaknesses, he always kept his promises.
     
    Sera drifted to sleep wrapped in blankets that smelled of Julio, her mind full of plans to wake early enough to repay his kindness with a hearty, home-cooked breakfast.
    She woke to a rumbling stomach and bright midmorning sunlight spilling across her face.
    Sleep had never been easy for her. Her childhood had been plagued by vicious nightmares, her dreams stalked by monsters who sent her screaming into her father’s room, where he’d hold her and soothe her and promise the monsters couldn’t find her.
    Those were the good nights—the nights she jerked awake as a human girl able to express her fears instead of a terrified young coyote tangled in a nightgown, unsure when she’d shifted or where she was.
    Mahalia had been the one to cure her childhood terrors. After a particularly bad week after her eighth birthday, Franklin had packed her into his truck and driven into New Orleans, to Mahalia’s bar in the French Quarter, where the spell caster had taken Sera upstairs and let her watch as she carefully constructed a charm against dream monsters.
    Probably nothing more magical than a light soothing spell, but Sera had slept with the damn thing clutched in her hand for five years, and she’d believed so hard, so totally, that the dreams slowly disappeared. By then she’d had other dreams—dreams about boys, dreams about owning a restaurant, dreams of traveling, dreams of life .
    The nightmares hadn’t returned until after her twentieth birthday, when Josh had begun to make pointed comments about how long it was taking her to get pregnant. She drifted to sleep every night, fretting over where she’d hidden her birth control, and what she’d do if he found it.
    She was too old for magic charms, and her monsters were flesh and blood now. But twelve hours of interrupted, glorious sleep made her wonder if Julio was better than any magic Mahalia could twist. She almost didn’t want to slip into the bathroom and take a shower, loath to lose the lingering scent on her skin.
    Vanity won out, and she ventured into the living room with freshly washed hair and the cutest of her thrift-store T-shirts, one that almost made her eyes look more green than hazel.
    She found Julio pulling a covered bowl from the refrigerator. “I thought I heard you moving around in there. Hungry?”
    So much for making breakfast. “Starving. I didn’t mean to sleep all morning.”
    “I guess you