Page 39 of Beneath the Desert Bloom
But the world was too bright.
Nora’s lashes fluttered against the glare of the sun, her vision strobing with colorless light. She kept trying to swallow, but her mouth was dust. The pain in her ankle had settled into a cruel rhythm — throb, throb, throb — and every time she moved, the heat surged up through her leg and pulsed behind her eyes.
She might’ve passed out for a minute. Or more.
The desert stretched around her in waves of white and gold, the sky pinned in place like a backdrop.
Then the shadows shifted.
Nora didn’t need to open her eyes to know it was him.
But she did anyway.
He stood at the edge of the slope, partially backlit by the sun, his body outlined in a sheen of heat and shadow. Tall. Broader than she remembered. Bark-rough skin catching light like polished wood in some places, like dark stone in others. His hair hung in thick waves past his shoulders, wind-touched, tangled. Wild.
But it was his eyes that arrested her.
They glowed like embers that never went out.
Her breath caught.
“Asher,” she whispered. She didn’t mean to say it. It just slipped loose.
His head tilted.
“I come… when it pulls,” he said, his voice like stone cracking. Rough. As if he hadn’t used it in years.
“When the feeling roots deep.”
Nora’s breath caught, but not because of the pain. Because he’d spoken.
The silence she’d been chasing for days, dreaming of, dreading, had a voice now.
He stepped toward her, slow and deliberate. The way someone moves toward a wounded animal. Or something sacred.
Her pulse fluttered as he crouched beside her, the ground barely crunching beneath his weight. His body radiated heat. It felt magnetic. A warmth that reached out before his fingers did.
His hand hovered just above her ankle.
She flinched out of reflex, not fear.
His eyes met hers.
And then, he touched her.
Just his fingertips. Just the outer edge of her skin.
But it was enough to short-circuit her lungs.
She gasped. Heat bloomed from the point of contact, flaring up through her leg, curling low in her belly, pooling between her thighs like a second injury. One she wanted.
She wasn’t ready.
But she wanted.
He dragged his hand gently up her calf, checking the joint, the swelling. His thumb brushed her skin with the kind of pressure that made her body confuse relief with arousal.
Her head lolled back.
