Page 12 of Rook
She moved, or maybe he did, and their mouths met. The kiss was tender at first, questioning, her lips parted against his. Then she angled closer, opening for him, and Rook swept his tongue inside. He tasted like spice and smoke, wild and unfamiliar. Her hand slid up his chest, fingers curling into his shirt, holding on as if she might float away.
Something clattered to the floor, but she didn’t care. All she knew was the way his lips moved against hers, hot and greedy and reverent. He kissed her like his life depended on it, and she felt exactly the same. Sasha had been kissed before, but never like that. She had never felt so seen, so saturated in a moment, so absolutely lifted out of her own skin.
Rook pulled back, his body as taut as a wire. The dim lantern light left his expression unreadable.
Sasha searched for something to say. So they kissed. So what? But her mouth couldn’t form the words, not with the taste of him branded on her tongue.
“This cannot happen,” Rook said. The words were so final they felt like blows. “I have a duty here. I cannot be … distracted.”
A distraction.
Sasha straightened and fought the scowl on her face. Was that all she was? A distraction? Some girl her ex could cheat on? Just no one.
She stood. “I don’t think you’re going to die. We should be safe here for tonight.”
And in the morning, she would send him on his way and find a way to escape this insanity.
She wouldn’t want to distract him any more than she already had.
7
Sasha woke in the old ranger’s cabin.
For a suspended second, she didn’t know where she was. The air inside the cracked little cabin was cool and thick with dust, faintly scented with old pine and whatever had lived in the walls. She could hear her own breath, uneven and shallow, caught somewhere between a gasp and a complaint.
It wasn’t a nightmare.
Her hands curled in the scratchy wool of the blanket she had rescued from the back of a closet, one with too many stains to name and a few suspect holes chewed straight through. It barely kept the chill away. Not that she was cold. No, she was burning hot all over again as everything came roaring back.
Oh god, Erik was dead.
The memory slammed into her, visceral and so much more real now that the adrenaline was gone. There had been flames. Screaming. Hers and his. The blue-hot burst that had erased him. No body, no anything, just that last, hideous shape caught mid-turn. Her stomach clenched, and her throat closed against a scream. She pressed a hand flat to the bare floorboards, grounding herself as her pulse thudded in her ears.
She tried to breathe, tried to be present, tried to move. When she finally sat up with a sharp, awkward motion that left a twinge in her lower back, she realized she wasn’t alone. The blanket slid off her shoulder in a slow, reluctant fall.
Rook was watching her.
He sat at the end of the table, the one with a gouged star carved into its edge. He wasn’t slouched or sprawled. There was nothing loose or relaxed about the way he held himself, not even in a place as bleak and battered as this. Rook sat like he belonged on a marble throne, like he had spent the night keeping guard because it was his duty. One arm draped across his thigh, the other resting on the table, fingers splayed as if to anchor himself in place.
He looked like something swept in from a myth, dropped into a scene that didn’t deserve him. A man out of time. If you stripped away the battered black shirt clinging to his frame and gave him a red cloak, he could have been a Roman general brooding over a war map. Or a medieval king, armored in chainmail and rage, waiting for news from the front.
Not someone in the middle of the California woods with sap on his boots, who kissed like he lived for it.
A faint band of sunrise squeezed through the greasy window, catching the rough edges of his jaw and the shadowed hollows under his eyes. He still looked powerful, still other, with an exhaustion so deep in his bones it gave her a strange ache in her chest.
But she was not going to think about the kiss. That way was madness.
Rook didn’t want to kiss her again.
He had made it clear. Duty, distraction, all the things that belonged in books about tragic kings. Not in her cabin, not in her life. Sasha did not do tragic, and she was definitely not going to get involved with a guy who said he was a dragon and hunting alien slavers in her woods.
She needed to get home, shower the dirt and trauma off her skin, and forget all of this.
But even as she told herself that, another part of her, a stubborn and traitorous echo of hope, lingered on that moment from last night. The heat of his mouth, the taste of him, the way his hand had felt on the back of her neck, both gentle and hungry.
She’d never been kissed like that. Not by Erik, or Andy before him, or any of the men she had tried to convince herself meant something. Not one of them had made her blood thrum the way Rook’s hand in her hair had.
It was everything she had read about but never believed, a current that rewrote the rules of her body. It made her ache, made her angry, made her want.
