Chapter 13 Mira #2
His scent wrapped around me and my body responded before my brain could intervene. Skin flushed. A low, persistent ache building between my hips that had no business existing at this hour of the morning.
“Your heart is loud,” he murmured. His thumb traced a slow circle on my wrist, following the rhythm of my pulse, and every rotation sent a new wave of heat spreading down through my chest and pooling in my stomach.
“Whose fault is that?”
His mouth twitched. Solomon’s fingers tightened around my wrist, and my pulse hammered against his thumb, giving me away completely.
Those pale eyes tracked the flush climbing my neck, dropped to where the cardigan gaped at my collarbone, lingered there long enough that my nipples tightened under the fabric, and came back to my face.
My skin prickled everywhere his gaze touched.
I wanted to close the distance. To find out if his mouth felt the same as the dream, if the kiss we shared in a candlelit apartment during a storm I couldn’t remember tasted the way my body insisted it would.
I wanted to climb into his lap and press myself against all that warmth until every inch of cold disappeared.
My free hand curled into the couch cushion to keep from reaching for him.
A crash exploded from the kitchen.
We flinched apart. A plume of flour drifted into the hallway.
“Sorry!” Percy’s voice rang out. “Everything’s fine!”
I guess Percy wasn’t lying about them being brothers, even if not by blood.
Solomon exhaled through his nose and pinched the bridge of it with two fingers, jaw tight, eyes closed.
The exact expression of an older brother who’d spent centuries cleaning up after the same person and had accepted, with bone-deep weariness, that the next two centuries would be no different.
“Go check on him.” I tucked my legs tighter beneath me and grinned. “He can only make pancakes at best, but he believes he’s a chef. I don’t want my latest shelter burning down.”
Solomon chuckled.
The sound hit my chest before my ears processed it. Low, warm, rumbling through his frame. A real laugh from a man who communicated in sentence fragments and meaningful silences.
I filed it away alongside the blush and the stumble and the way he’d pressed my journal pages flat between books. Every piece of Solomon that broke through the walls went straight into the part of my brain labeled “reasons I’m in trouble.”
He stood and headed toward the kitchen, and I watched him go with a smile I couldn’t scrub off my face.
I was growing closer to him and it was nice to get to know him all over again.
I could want him. I was convincing myself a little more each day. And the terrifying part wasn’t the wanting. It was how natural it felt to want all three of them at once, how the guilt I expected to feel kept not showing up, replaced by a certainty I couldn’t explain.
Which pulled my thoughts toward the third corner of this impossible situation.
Lucian.
He’s missing all morning despite it being their day off. Percy was destroying the kitchen. Solomon was supervising the destruction. But Lucian had been absent since I came downstairs, and no one had mentioned him.
Unconsciously, I uncurled from the couch and went looking.
The hallway sat empty. His office door was closed. I knocked but there’s no answer. I checked the upstairs landing, the bathroom. Nothing.
Then I noticed the door to the study at the end of the hall standing ajar. The room was small, barely more than a reading nook tucked against the back of the cabin, with tall windows that overlooked the tree line. One of those windows was pushed open, letting rain-soaked air flood the space.
Lucian stood at the window with his back to me, one hand braced against the frame. A raven perched on the sill beside him, glossy feathers ruffled against the cold, its dark eyes tracking me with unsettling intelligence.
A crumpled piece of paper sat in his other hand.
“What’s that?”
He turned, and the surprise on his face stopped me. For a man with supernatural hearing, he hadn’t heard me coming. Whatever that paper contained had pulled him deep enough to drown out everything else.
He shoved the note into his pocket. The raven launched off the sill with a rough cry and disappeared into the gray sky.
“Just a message from our world.”
“Your world? You mean… Different dimension?”
“Yes.”
I stepped into the room and wrapped the cardigan tighter. The open window turned the study into a freezer, wind-driven rain misting across the floorboards and biting through my sleeves. Goosebumps erupted down my arms.
Lucian’s gaze tracked the shiver I failed to suppress. His eyes moved from my bare forearms to the thin cardigan to my face, and his jaw clenched with that specific brand of irritation I was starting to recognize as Lucian for “I’m concerned but I’d rather chew glass than say so.”
“It’s freezing in here,” I said.
“Then get inside.”
No warmth or invitation to stay. Just an order to get inside.
Still, he closed the window and reached for the curtain panel hanging beside it. A long, woven throw, draped over the rod as decoration. He yanked it down in one motion, crossed the distance between us, and dropped it over my shoulders.
“Wear warmer clothes when it’s raining.”
His hands pulled the fabric around me, tucking the edges together at my chest. His knuckles brushed my collarbone. The contact sent a jolt down my spine that I felt in my toes. He was close enough that I caught his scent, pine and frost, and the heat of his body cut through the cold fabric.
“Or if you’re cold. That solves it.”
I glared up at him. He met my glare, and buried beneath nine layers of stoicism, the faintest glint of amusement surfaced in his eyes. I wasn’t sure if he was messing around given the curtain or his reprimand.
Then he stepped back and walked past me toward the door.
He just leaves like that. Bastard.
I called out to him. “Lucian.”
He stopped. His shoulders rose a fraction.
“Were we close?” My voice came out quiet. “During that week…” He turned. The amusement was gone. What replaced it was raw. An expression I’d never seen on his face. Not anger, not control.
A wound.
I gulped and finished my question.
“Were you and I close?”
His expression fractured. There was a crack in his mask, gone so fast I would have missed it if I’d blinked. Lucian reset his jaw, straightened his shoulders, and buried whatever I’d just seen beneath five hundred years of practice.
“Does it matter?”
Two words. He held my gaze for one more second, then disappeared down the hall.
I stood in the study wrapped in his curtain, breathing in pine and frost, and the question echoed in the cold room.
There was more to Lucian Valdris than distance and his temper. More behind every wall he put up and every time he walked away.
And I was going to find out what it was.