I was on fire.
I groaned. She bit my lower lip and tugged until I growled.
She released my lip, then licked across it, soft nips and kisses soothing the pleasurable bruising she’d marked me with.
I wanted more. So much more. I wanted to carry every touch and bruise and nip. To remind me I was alive. To remind me she was mine, I was hers. Even if only for one spare minute.
“The truck,” I said, unable to stop kissing her, fitting my words between each taste.
“You like it. It’s silver,” she said.
“It’s a piece of junk.”
She pulled back, eyes wide. Her pupils were completely blown, the honey gold nearly eclipsed by the center of black. Her lips, wet and red and a little puffy, would carry the mark of our kiss, and I felt a deep satisfaction at that settle heavy in my stomach.
She was beautiful, wild, alive, and it took everything I had not to pick her up and lay her on this cool, moonlit ground and make her never forget she was mine.
“It’s silver—your favorite color—has almost no miles on it, and as soon as Calvin is done fixing it, it’s going to be amazing.”
“You can’t help but fall in love with lost causes, can you?”
“There’s only one thing I love in my life, and he’s not a lost cause. Not even close.”
“That thing better not be the truck,” I growled.
I shifted my hold and dragged my hand up her back, burying my fingers in her long, silky hair. I tugged gently, urging her to tip her head. She shivered.
“You like the truck,” she repeated, chin raised.
“Maybe I just like the woman who likes the truck.”
“That works too.”
“The hunter checked into the Super 8,” I said. “He has a gun. And explosives.”
“If he wanted to kill me, he has had his chance.”
“He wants something here,” I said.
“Dot?” she suggested.
It was a reasonable guess, since he’d tried to check into the B&B.
“There’s a journal under the junk pile in the backyard of the B&B. Stella led me to it, in exchange for a favor.”
“Stella?” She scowled and anger triggered flare-gun flashes in her eyes.
I tucked away that look of jealousy for later, when I could savor it, chuckle about it, add it to the ever-thinning lifeline of moments we shared. Still, my chest puffed up, even as I rubbed my thumbs gently below her eyes and bent so our gazes met.
“The ghost from the bedroom. Dot’s sister. Sits in the corner chair and knits. She wants to talk to Dot. Personally. Price for the journal. They used to dare each other to go in the shed. She was afraid of the spiders. Man at a fair tried to sell her the book. Oh, and she died in a car accident.”
The emotions raced across her face almost faster than I could catch. We’d gotten good at this, at saying so much more, at saying everything in seconds. Because that was all we had left to us, seconds of time on a watch wound with magic we could not understand nor tame.
“Fifteen seconds,” she said. She didn’t have to look at the watch to know. We could feel it, the darkness closing in at the corners of our vision, eating all light, eating the reality of the world around us.
And with it came pain. It began, even now, with cold shocks, like hailstones falling on every inch of our skin, hitting hard enough to leave welts. They’d turn to icicles soon, then knives, swords, until the pain was so harsh, so cruel, we’d both be left bleeding and broken.
We’d tried to wait it out the first time. Had held hands for exactly a minute and ten seconds. When I woke a day later, Lu was still unconscious, and it had taken her a week to walk. A month for all the bruises and swelling to fade.
