Page 24 of Honeyfires

"Of course." She looked back at me, the picture of innocence.

"Vera."

"Petra."

"I should be very clear. I am taking you home today."

Her smile widened. "I was counting on it, Miss June Edition."

My stomach clenched, and I groaned. "You found the calendar."

"I found the calendar. The sexy calendar. You're very photogenic, by the way. The axe really—"

"We're never speaking of this again." I pressed a hand over my face.

"I'll let it go on one condition. Will literally never bring it up again."

"What do you want?"

She looked at me across the small table, both our untouched meal between us, the afternoon light warm on her hair, her eyes steady and blue and entirely sure of herself.

"You're taking me home today," she said.

I smiled through a wince. "Yes."

She held out her hand across the table.

I looked at it, then at her.

"What's this?" I said.

"A handshake. To seal the terms."

"We're shaking hands. On me taking you to bed."

"It's professional." Her chin tilted up slightly. "Unless you're planning to renege."

I reached across and took her hand.

She had a librarian's hands—slim, delicate, warm. She shook once, formal and brief, and started to pull back, and I held on for one extra second, just long enough to make her breath catch again, just long enough for my thumb to graze the inside of her wrist where her pulse was running considerably faster than a handshake warranted.

Then I let go.

"Four-thirty," I said.

"Four-thirty," she agreed, and went back to her sandwich with the composure of someone who was not, in fact, composed at all.

I took Vera's suggestion and killed time in the desert, taking the long way around San Jacinto's outskirts where the scrubland opened up and the red rock formations jutted toward the sky. The wind helped. It usually did.

This was moving fast. Possibly too fast. One date, one kiss in a library against the Le Guin section, which I had already decided I was going to tell absolutely no one about and also think about for the rest of my life, and now I was taking her home to dominate her and—

My hands tightened on the handlebars.

I'd been to war. I'd fought fires that wanted to eat everything they touched. I'd rappelled out of helicopters into smoke so thick I couldn't see the rope below my own hands.

None of that had made my pulse do what it was currently doing.

Vera Montgomery was genuinely going to be the end of me, and we hadn't even made it upstairs yet.