The chances of Miller having another being in there that he needed to care for were precisely zero. The usually unfriendly campus cat at Nordbrook had taken a liking to him, and she’d never seen anyone ignore something so fiercely in all her life. People had looked on in awe at this wizard who had received the blessing of that perfect creature, while he’d responded with nothing but fuming. Once she was sure she’d heard him hiss,Leave me alone, I will never love you.
And then there was the time the dean’s daughter had accidentally taken his hand, because he was older than most students and sort of shaped like her dad. He’d whipped that thing away so fast you’d have thought the kid was made of molten lava. She wouldn’t have been surprised to see him nudge her with his foot.
Nudging things away had been his favorite pastime, after all.
If one of the romance novels she loved to read in college had gotten too near to him: Nudge.
Her cardigan brushed his sleeve on the arm of a lecture hall chair: Nudge.
Someone looked at him too long, or spoke to him toomuch, or breathed in his direction, or broke the cone of silence he established around himself at parties she didn’t understand him attending: Nudge, nudge, nudge, nudge, nudge. Hell, she was fully expecting a nudge now, even if she did somehow manage to get to him.
You scale that fence and he’s going to shove you off it, she told herself.
But that core of determination inside her was, unfortunately, already forcing her to slip off her heels, climb up onto the bonnet of her car in her stockinged feet, and get ahold of the top of the fence. There was a sign with a sturdy edge that she could get her foot onto, and she did. She dragged herself toward it and up, muscles screaming, something goingprangin her shoulder as she went about it.
But she got one leg over.
She managed to hold there, half balanced on the inch-thick wood between coils of barbed wire, while she got her breath back. Then, after that, all she had to do was slide herself all the way over and down, no problems. Just a quick ten-foot drop into a probable snake pit. No big deal.Think of Caleb Miller winning this war against doing something he actually agreed to, she thought, and went to slide to the right.
And that was when she heard the throat clear.
Barely more than a sigh, soft as a slight breeze.
But enough to immediately raise her hackles. Of course it did—she would have known the sound of him anywhere. He had always looked like the kind of man who spoke with a deep roar of a voice. Only he didn’t really at all. Instead, every sound he made almost seemedto purr out of him and pour over whoever he was speaking to. It made her think of melted butter spread over something just ever so slightly rough.
Though she told herself that maybe the mismatch between the sound and the look of him wasn’t the same as before. Maybe he was different now. Maybe he had shrunk. Or shaved. Or started wearing soft jumpers. She’d turn her head and find somebody as unintimidating as a spoon. But then she dared to actually look at him, andoh god god god.
He wasexactlythe same.
Absurdlythe same. He even appeared to be wearing an identical uniform to the one he’d always adored when she’d known him back in college. Worn jeans, of the kind you might find on a cowboy who had time traveled here from 1975, a belt with a whole plated buckle on it, boots the size of bowling balls, a sad gray Henley underneath a denim shirt that looked as if it had been washed every day since the dawn of time.
It was honestly a miracle it was still blue.
Or that his enormous body wasn’t just bursting out of it.
Not that she wanted to see said body, all things considered. His shoulders still looked too broad to fit through the average doorframe; his chest was so burly it seemed like a miracle he could comfortably cross his arms over it. And of course said arms were testing that threadbare material.
His biceps bloomed against it, as rounded as some overripe fruit.
She remembered people saying that he had grownup on a farm, or hauled things around for a living, or chopped wood as some kind of hobby. And she could actually see a block with an axe in it by his front porch. But she didn’t think that was it, she never had. Helookedlike the type of man who came by his bulk through hard graft of some type. Yet she was sure it was something else.
Five thousand press-ups in the early-morning light to stave off having a single emotion. Or maybe a twenty-mile run in the middle of the night after nightmares that gave him a slight feeling. She knew for a fact that he loved to swim when no one was around, because of that time in the old Swanson building back on campus.
The cracked door.
The flicker of blue light through the water, and nothing else.
Four in the morning, everything silent and still except for the sound of him surging from one side to the other. The look on his face when he’d caught her standing there with her hand just barely holding the door open. She could still see it now, behind her eyes. Like she’d slapped him. Like she’d stolen something from him.
Though sometimes she thought she’d imagined that last part.
It had disappeared so quickly, after all. And it had been replaced by exactly what she saw on his face now. That smug smirk, near hidden amidst the grizzled beard now just touched with gray. Black-as-pitch eyes with a flicker of amused light in them, beneath that constantly heavy, lowering brow.
He had a slab of a face, slow and resistant to showing emotion of any kind.
But he always managed to achieve triumph at the sight of her failures. “Oh, what a shock, Daisy Emmett is clumsily risking her neck for some completely unnecessary and ludicrous cause. What happened, you hear a shitty opinion coming from my yard that you just couldn’t wait to shoot down?” he said, after a long moment of drinking her in.
It made her wish her ass weren’t quite so in the air.
