“Caleb?” Jesse prompted, pulling my gaze back to him. “You said you were hungry. I know a great noodle place in Midtown.”
“Yeah,” I said. My voice emerged raspy, and I cleared my throat. “I could eat.”
He smiled.
The scene shifted.
We walked side by side through a marketplace. The sun was hotter now, but it was the good kind of hot, like stepping froman air-conditioned movie theater into the steam of July. Scents swirled around me: smoke and cooking meat and olive oil. Spanish drifted from every direction.
Jesse pulled ahead, his eyes on a painting propped against the side of a wooden cart. His black tank top clung to his ribs. He bent, and his shorts rode up.
Jesus.Since when did he go with a two-inch inseam?
Still in a crouch, he looked at me over his shoulder. One side of his mouth lifted. “Take a picture, it’ll last longer.”
I snorted. “Do you write these down so you don’t forget?”
“You’re the one staring.”
“Yeah, because you bought those shorts at Baby Gap.”
His laugh cut through the noise of the market.
The scene shifted again.
Waves crashed against a beach. Sand shifted under my feet, and the taste of salt lingered on my tongue. Seagulls dipped over the water. I carried a football, the laces hard under my fingertips.
Jesse walked beside me with his hands in his pockets. The wind tugged a piece of dark hair across his forehead.
I reached over and shoved it back into place. “There.”
He smiled. “Happy?”
“Yeah.”
His smile spread, crinkling his eyes at the corners. “What do you want to do next?”
“Everything,” I said, and we were suddenly in the backseat of his SUV with the steam of our sweat fogging the windows. He’d looked at me and said he was all in, wolf and man.
Colors swirled. The scent of damp stone and ancient wood intruded, but it couldn’t touch us.
“Everything,” I repeated, my voice overlapping his. The echo continued as I took his face in my hands. “I want everything with you.”
Chapter
Twenty-Nine
JESSE
Icouldn’t make sense of what I was seeing.
Caleb sat in the wooden chair with his eyes closed. He was relaxed now, the tension gone from his shoulders. A little smile touched his lips. His eyes moved rapidly under his lids.
Beside him, Nin had gone pale. But she didn’t look at Caleb anymore. Like everyone else in the chamber, she stared at the scene playing out in front of him.
A vision hung in the air as if someone projected it from the rear of the chamber. Shimmering and faint at the edges, it showed me in the back of my SUV with Caleb in my lap.
We stared at each other, faces flushed and emotion thick between us. He gripped my bare shoulders. I held his hips. Sunlight played over his freckles.
