“Do I look cold?”
That sounded like an invitation to look. So she did. Not that she’d really… stopped looking… at any point, but this was deliberate looking. More… looky.
Wow,she thought, internally rolling her eyes.This IS just like a first date. But who needs to drink too much to feel loopy when you can just be sleep-deprived and overwhelmed instead?
“Well?” Moss sounded smug. Shoot. How long had she been staring at him? “Do I look cold?”
God dammit, helookedsmug, too.
“I can’t tell from here,” she said. The words melted off her tongue like chocolate. “I’ll have to come closer.”
The fire crackled softly as she walked around it.
Moss tipped his head up invitingly. “Is that close enough?”
“Almost.” She sat down, her legs melting beneath her. She’d never been this graceful in her life.
“Now?” Moss’s voice was low, the murmur of waves on the shore.
She leaned closer. “Maybe.”
He smelled like something she had no name for; something distant and mysterious, masculine and tantalizing. His breathing was slow, but the thunder of his heartbeat—he was pretending. His body was responding to her closeness the same way hers was to his. Quickened pulse. Heat coursing over his skin.
But what about his mind? His heart? Not the heart she could sense thumping away, his life like a silver ghost to her extrasensory powers, but his feelings.
She searched his eyes. Every time she looked at them, she found something new. The way the firelight reflected gold, like trapped rays of sunlight. The flashes of shadow that deepened the rich brown. And—
Tiny glimmers of light, green and blue and purple, like the bioluminescence she’d heard about but never actually seen in person.
“What…” she murmured.
Moss’s expression softened. “I am sorry,” he said. “About the lack of ravishing.”
Fireworks went off in Carol’s mind and body, but she was too hypnotized by his eyes to notice. Which wasn’t ideal, she had to admit, once her body prodded her enough to pay attention.
Oh.
Ohhhh.
Heat flooded through her. The embarrassing, betraying glow of her blush—and something deeper. A glow no one could see, suffusing her entire body.
She licked her lips. Right now wasn’t a good time, was it? That was why they were talking about it. Because now was a bad time.Because they needed to wait for snowy mountaintops, or a date at the fairground, because… because… reasons.
So if her body could justcalm downfor oooone moment…
“D-don’t worry about it,” she managed to say, only stumbling slightly over the words. “We’ve got the rest of our lives for all that, don’t we?”
“What if we don’t?” He hesitated, shadows pooling in his eyes. “Or what if the rest of our lives isn’t a long time?”
Her breath caught in her throat. The strange metal bird shifters, the attack on the plane, the half-dream, half-nightmare tentacles that had boiled out of the ocean and grabbed her as she fell—and everything that had happened before that. At work. With Briers, and years earlier…
A memory surfaced, cold and clinging. The ocean wrapping itself around her, sapping the strength from her body, crushing the air from her lungs. Her desperate plea for someone, anyone to help her, as the water that had been her playground since childhood became the enemy.
She’d had so many escapes already. What if the next time, she didn’t make it?
Moss touched her face gently. “Don’t mind me. I’m just gloomy because I couldn’t cook you a feast on a mountaintop—”
She didn’t let him finish.
