“I didn’t bring my bathing suit.”
“Too bad.” Quinn couldn’t have sounded less upset if he tried. He swung his legs over the side and lowered himself into the water. My mouth dried as his taut buttocks disappeared beneath the surface.
Oh, fuck it.
Before I could change my mind, I slipped out of my jeans, tank top and jacket and balled them up inside Quinn’s clothes. I left my room key and locker key on the chain around my neck. Luckily, I’d chosen a black bra and underwear that, while not exactly Victoria’s Secret, at least wasn’t sagging or riddled with holes. I was more covered up than most of the other girls in string bikinis.
Cold ocean air caressed my arms, raising rows of goose pimples across my skin. I scrambled up the edge of the rocks and sank into the hot water beside Quinn. I gasped as heat pooled in my body, partly from the hot water and steam, partly from Quinn’s fingers trailing along my arm.
Only water separated us. Only a few flimsy molecules between his completely naked body and my nearly naked one. I was grateful for the cloak of darkness that hid the heat flooding my cheeks. I crossed my arms over my chest, anxious to pretend everything was cool, that I wasn’t falling apart because I was sitting in a hot spring with Quinn Delacorte.
I settled onto a shelf of rock that acted as a seat and looked around, trying to recognize the other faces in the candlelight. Ayaz sat opposite us across the pool, with a girl under each of his arms. He talked to them in his low, sexy voice, and even across the water, the sound of it vibrated through my body. Something about the Kings of Derleth was impossible to resist.
Quinn’s arm went around my shoulders. A thread of panic rose up inside me, and I pushed myself off from the edge to give myself space. I needed to breathe. I needed to figure out what I was doing here, how I’d let myself be tempted into this grotto, in myunderwear.
I blamed Quinn Delacorte’s fuckingsmile.
The rocks were slippery, and the middle of the pool was deeper and hotter than I’d expected. I couldn’t see or feel the bottom, just a black hole of water stretching down into infinity. I tried not to think about eels and other things that might lurk down there.
Quinn swam up beside me. “I’ll beat you to the other side,” he said, dog-paddling toward a crag of rocks near Ayaz.
I followed him, hauling myself on the rocks. Here, I could see over the edge of the pool. Surprisingly, the garden carried on beyond, the terraces stepping down through an avenue of trees to a heavily wooded area at the bottom enclosed in a high metal fence.
“What’s that?” I asked, pointing at the metal gate.
“Oh, that’s the cemetery.”
“What?”Why would a school need a cemetery?
“It started off as the Parris family plot. Once the school took over the land, some of the early alumni wanted to be buried there, and the school allowed it provided they were sufficient benefactors. Mine and Trey’s grandfathers are both buried there. That was an accident here a few years back, and some kids died. They’re buried there, too.”
“What kind of accident?” In all the internet searches I’d done about the school, I never saw anything about a fatal accident.
Quinn avoided my eyes. “I don’t really know. It was ages ago.”
I shuddered. “I can’t imagine being buried at aschool. That seems really sick to me. Will you be buried there?”
“Nope. I intend to go out in a blaze of glory crashing my father’s plane into a mountain,” Quinn grinned. “There’s isn’t going to be anything left to bury.”
“That’s gross. Can we go down and look?” Something about those metal gates tugged me forward. I don’t know why. It wasn’t as if I hadn’t already seen too much of cemeteries. My mom and Dante had been cremated, both their bodies and their spirits consumed by flames. They each had a tiny plot in an inner-city cemetery – it was all I could afford. But being buried on the edge of a cliff facing the rolling surf, it seemed different somehow. I wanted to see, to understand.
“What are you, morbid or something? We’re not going down there.” Quinn wrapped his arm around my shoulders again, his fingers hanging dangerously close to my breast. My body gave in to the heat of his touch, sinking back into the water, forgetting all about the cemetery in the haze of his emerald eyes.
“Why not?” The words came out in a whisper.
“Because I had something different in mind.” Quinn trailed a finger along my cheek, stopping for just a moment over my lips. His touch left a trail of fire against my skin.
I gulped. “Quinn, maybe we should—”
Quinn’s lips were on mine, hot and needy, tearing my next words and tossing them to the breeze. His heat melted something in me, something that had been cold and frozen for too long. I melted against him, skin on skin. My hands gripped his shoulders, relying on his taut muscles to hold me upright because my whole body had turned to jelly. Quinn parted my lips, and his tongue glanced over mine, and the fire within me ate away at my insides until I was nothing but warm lips and tongue and electric pulses and singed flesh.
Is this really happening?I pressed my hand to Quinn’s chest and there was his heart, beating a steady, languid rhythm.
My first kiss.
Was this what kissing felt like? Like jumping off a cliff without a parachute, like falling and never reaching the ground, like standing up really fast and feeling all the blood rush from my head? Or was that just Quinn, the King of the school who took the outcast to a party because he could, who kissed her under the stars because he felt like it?
Hot skin pressed against skin. Steam from the pools twirled around us, like fingers drawing me deeper. My whole body roared with fire.Why is it always fire?
