I was going to need to go to a chiropractor. Maybe get an X-ray.
After a moment, when my chest was still rising and falling like crazy but I could actually breathe through my nose almost steadily, I lifted my head and planted my palms against my thighs. Then I shuffled around.
In front of him.
The Defender’s head was drooped, but his frame wasn’t shaking as badly as it had been.
Maybe that wasn’t a good thing though.
Setting my hand over his wrist, I snuck it under and pressed my fingertips to where his pulse would be and waited.
A thump.
One second, two seconds, three… one too many before another.
One, two, three, four, more and more, and then anotherthump.
“Are you kidding me right now?” I choked. I hoped that was normal. I mean, he wasn’t human-human, so his heart shouldn’t beat the same way, right? Easing my fingertips away, I sat back on my heels and finally got a good look at him.
The familiar suit was mostly torn away from his body. A lot of tan chest was exposed; his bottoms clung to his legs for dear life. The entire right side of his cape was gone, like someone had ripped it right down the middle out of anger.
That wasn’t terrifying.
Okay. No reason to worry about that. Lifting my gaze—
Oh.
It suddenly made a lot of sense why his face was so blurry in pictures and videos. It almost didn’t seem possible to me either to be seeing what I was seeing, and I was looking at him, face-to-face. I had to blink twice for my eyes to absorb him. Maybe camera lenses couldn’t handle what they focused on. What he really looked like.
It shouldn’t have been a surprise. The Primordial was beautiful, and The Centurion looked like he could have been some kind of sun god to an ancient civilization. He was unbelievably handsome.
But The Defender…
He was the most beautiful person I’d ever seen.
Gorgeous wasn’t the right word to describe the smudged, dirty face. Thick, dark eyebrows highlighted a smooth forehead and sharp, lean cheekbones. His hair was so dark I wasn’t sure whether it was brown, black, or a shade in between. His perfect nose, rectangular jaw, and the fullness of his mouth tied all the pieces of him together into a package that was almost too fucking much. He was rugged and elegant at the same time.
He was big. Not hulking. Not bodybuilder sized, just… muscular but proportionate. Like a light heavyweight boxer that wasn’t actually light weight.
The most surprising part about him though was his bright red, almost sunburnt cheeks.
His eyes opened, and I stopped breathing.
The Defender’s irises glowed purple like stained glass held up against the sun.
Not blue, not gray, purple-purple. Violet maybe. Intense and bright, and 100 percent not human.
I felt like a deer in the headlights as that intense focus settled on me.
“Are you okay?” I asked like an idiot once I’d snapped out of it, like I hadn’t just seen him struggle to simply move. “Should I call an ambulance? I don’t know if I can get you into my car, but I could probably drive you to the hospital, even though I’m sure the military or someone would come pick you up in a helicopter. Or… or The Primordial would come get you. Or The Centurion.”
I was rambling. I was fucking rambling, but I couldn’t stop. It was a curse; it always had been. There was a reason I didn’t initiate talking to strangers. I had no self-control.
I had a big mouth.
Once you got me going, it was almost impossible to stop me. Everything just started coming out. What I’d watched on TV, what I liked eating for dinner, how bad the flies were. And then under pressure? I was scared and fascinated, and my body didn’t know how to handle either. It wasn’t just my brain in shock; it was every part of me.
The Defender—ThefuckingDefender—stared at me with glowing purple eyes, and I was pretty sure they were watering from pain. His chest rose and fell in small gasps that were terrifying. Those eyes moved to a spot just behind my head, locked there for a moment, before they fluttered closed. His mouth moved, but nothing came out.
