Page 49 of Wings of Ashes
Something about that pissed Nix off.
It wasn’t his words or even his you-are-delicate tone. Maybe it was the reminder of how helpless everyone thought she was. How weak and fragile her captor kept her.
Maybe it was the last straw of what her brain could take for the night. Her limbs screamed for their nightly rest; yet, still, she pushed.
With a murderous expression, Nix eliminated the space between them. She had neverglidedthrough the air, but she was just suddenly only an inch from his face.
He flinched back. Did he think she might throttle him?
She bit out a reply, spouting out each word like they were darts aimed for his face. “I am not some fragile object. And even if I am, who are you to care if I break?”
“As a professor, I am legally obligated to care.”
“Yet, you have been nothing but rude to me since I first started your class.”
Damn it. His sweet, sophisticated scent infiltrated her. How was it possible to be so attracted to someone and be so disappointed and enraged by how he treated you?
“Rude?” he echoed. His breath puffed onto her face like an airborne aphrodisiac.
“Real assholery behavior.” She inhaled another wave of his warm, smoky, and spicy, sweet chocolate pheromones.
She hoped her hardening nipples, rising under her thin nightgown, were not noticeable in the dark.
“No one has ever accused me of ‘assholery,’” he said.
“Glad I could be your first honest acquaintance.”
He chuckled sinisterly. “Honest? You think I don’t know why you are really in these woods? Did you know I come out here every night? Did you wear the silk to ensure I would follow you?”
She scoffed. “Professor, let me teach you something: just because some female students only take your class to try to seduce you, not every woman wants you.”
With flaring eyes, he asked in a daring and accusatory tone, “Oh, you don’t want me?”
20
CHAPTER
Étienne Thierry was known for being firm and unwavering like stone. Known for seeming heartless.
Lose enough family members to an ancestral curse, and it was bound to happen. Loss and sleepless nights could turn any ray of sunshine personality into eroded, scratched stone. Not that he had ever been sunshine.
Who can sleep when he knows his future is to die, all alone?Étienne knew exactly what Miss Oadess meant when she said she wanted to walk around to tire herself out enough for her brain to sleep.
He had a hard time remembering what it was like to really, trulysleep.
Tonight, however, his inability to turn his brain off was…different.
Because he had been thinking abouther. Standing atop the roof and gazing out at the moonlit landscape, Étienne had chastised himself for thinking about a student so much. Then, she had appeared.
She was just…a mystery. Étienne prided himself on knowing everything about every creature. Yet, she kept surprising him. Kept proving his assumptions wrong.
She read my whole textbook.
He had never burned with the desire to kiss someone more than when she said she read his assigned reading—something few students accomplished by the end of the year.
He had assumed she would never catch up on the material and yet… Did that make her his best student?
His visceral desire for her pissed him off. She had called his behavior “assholery,” yet it was worse than that.
