Page 90 of Just One Little Bargain

“I got distracted.”

“By the fire?”

“Sure.”

“You’re impossible.” But she’s already sliding a fresh one onto a new skewer. This time, she handles the roasting herself, holding the marshmallow to the coals until the outside goes the exact color of the inside of a cinnamon roll. Then chocolate, a graham cracker broken along its seam, the s’more pressed together with steam rising between the layers.

Once it’s cooled enough, she holds it out to me. I lean in and take a bite.

The cracker gives first, dry and faintly sweet. Then the marshmallow, molten and impossible, clinging to the roof of my mouth. A warm smear catches on the pad of her thumb where she’s holding the s’more together. She starts to pull away, and I catch her wrist. I turn her palm to my mouth and lick the sweetness away, sugar and the salt of her skin hitting my tongue at once.

Neither of us moves. Her thumb is still resting against my lower lip, her eyes wide and dark. Then she makes a low, involuntary sound, and my grip on her wrist tightens.

She withdraws her hand and reaches for her cider with the other.

“Good?” she asks, sounding infuriatingly composed.

“Best thing I’ve ever tasted.” I sound wrecked.

She chokes on a laugh and looks very hard at the fire.

“The dessert,” I add.

“Right,” she says. “The dessert.”

“You made it wrong the first time. Let me do one for you.”

She raises an eyebrow, but lets me take the skewer. I load a fresh marshmallow and hold the skewer the way she showed me. This time, I watch what I’m doing, because I’ve decided—with the full and ridiculous gravity of a demon historically unsuited to small, careful tasks—that I’m going to get this right. I rotate the marshmallow slowly, keeping it off the flame. When the outside swells and turns gold at the edges, I pull back and build the rest against my knee.

“There,” I say, and lift the finished s’more to her.

She hesitates, then leans in and takes the bite. Her lower lip brushes the pad of my thumb. The low hum she makes when she tastes it makes my cock harden beneath her.

“Okay,” she admits, chewing. “That’s annoyingly good.”

“I had an excellent teacher.”

A thread of melted marshmallow catches at the corner of her mouth. I drag my thumb slowly across her lower lip, wiping it away.

She watches me bring my thumb to my mouth and lick the sweetness from my skin.

***

The guests peel off one by one as the night deepens, sated and sleepy, murmuring their thanks on the way inside. Then it’s only us, the fire settling into embers. We stretch out on the blanket Evie spread over the flattened grass. Above us, the sky has gone dark and thrown down more stars than either realm has any right to. Constellations I’ve only ever read about are laid out overhead like they’ve been waiting.

And I can’t stop looking at Evie instead.

She’s got her hands folded on her stomach, staring up. The extraordinary sky is doing its best above us, and she’s still, without contest, more interesting than all of it. I turn toward her and pretend it’s about conversation. Every few breaths, her shoulder settles a little closer to mine. I stay perfectly still and count them, wanting to close the last inch and stop pretending the distance matters.

And it makes no sense to me. I keep trying to blame the pull on the summoning bond, because that would be a mechanism I understand. But whatever’s happening in me is too specific to be magic and too stubborn to explain away. The part of me that’s spent thirty years afraid of wanting the wrong things is terrified.

“Can I tell you something stupid?” Evie asks.

“Always.”

“You have to promise not to turn this into a thing.”

“I promise to give this exactly the significance the situation deserves, no more.”