Page 10 of Angel's Smoke

It was her.Her. The woman who could potentially help them all get back to the Empyrean again. And she was . . .

Looking at him as though he’d give her a UTI from eye contact alone.

Iron’s mouth went dry, and a sharp recoil of magic began to pulse within his core. “I won’t hurt you,” he rushed out.

“Are you sure?” she challenged. “Because you just said you like mint M&Ms, and I’m pretty sure there are no fewer than several dozen varieties of chocolate mint candies that would reliably rank higher in double-blind taste tests. I’m not exactly certain you’re of sound mind at the moment.”

“Well, I also didn’t just get into a fender bender.”

“Almostgot into a fender bender. You verified that one yourself.”

“Yes, and as you so astutely pointed out, my judgment is under scrutiny at the moment.”

Watching ten kinds of thoughts shimmy behind her eyes was enough to keep him glued to the asphalt indefinitely. There was a fascination to it that had begun tugging at achingly tired parts of him, parts that hadn’t just rusted over long ago but had made headway in the ten-thousand-year fossilization process.

As if he needed yet another reminder that he was a war-torn relic of another time, and she was a modern-day woman by herself who was being cornered by a creep in a coat with an apparently brand-new dissociative complex.

Juuust fucking great.

Iron worked to free the frog in his throat and took a healthy step back from her door. Blocks ahead, a scratchy “Scene’s clear” worked its way through to his celestial senses from a police officer’s radio. Fast on those heels was the growling rumble of a tow truck pulling away. Another minute or two and the traffic would start to move again.

“What’s your?—”

“Anyway, thanks for checking?—”

Their collision of words was met with the same awkward half-laugh common among prepubescent boys asking out a girl for the first time. At least that was the case for him. For her? Nothing but that gracious smile again, which he was quickly coming to realize he’d commit no small number of murders to see.

Body counts had never bothered him.

A lock of hair that somehow hadn’t been secured well to begin with—impossible, given the perceived tensile strength of that thick-ass elastic band, but what did he know?—fell free and, like a falcon diving for its catch, was snatched up by her deft fingers that had so swiftly put both hair and him back into place.

“You’re sure I didn’t hit him?” she asked again, even though they both knew she hadn’t. But there was something there, something she clearly wasn’t willing to let go so easily either.

At least, that was what he hoped.

“Positive.”

She nodded and stared out through the windshield. With her hand on the steering wheel, she gestured a finger up ahead. “Looks like traffic’s moving.”

It sure is, goddammit.

“Yeah.” Then before she could get the genius idea to take her foot off the brake and drag herself farther away from him, he plopped his hand on her door, covering the pocket of her still-down window, and said, “Your brakes sound rough. Like, really rough.”

There were any number of things he expected her to do when faced with a large male pressing into her open window. She could scream, hit the gas, grab the butt end of her phone and slam it down on his fingers. At the very least, choice words with no shortage of expletives would have been a good place to start. Any of the above was fair game, really.

To his never-ending surprise and perhaps delight, she did none of those things. Instead, she just looked at him and nodded, nodded as if the weight of the world had left a few things off its grocery list and decided to add them to her shoulders before it, too, skedaddled back inside to take cover before the storm.

It broke his fucking heart.

“I’m painfully aware, thank you. They’re on the list.”

“That list really big?” he couldn’t help but ask.

She pursed her lips. “Big enough. But whose isn’t?”

Already, some of the cars in front of her had begun to move up inch by inch. “You live far?”

“Does anyone in this traffic jam live far?”

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