Page 30 of Angel's Smoke

“It’ll be quick, I promise. I want to show you something.”

Thatsomethinghad been a positive pregnancy test and the biggest irony bomb to ever hit her, for the destruction it wrought contained very little in the way of anything positive.

Turned out, Travis had had no interest in waiting nine months for the next chapter, but she would. So, yes, she could wait. She’d waited for Travis for six years, until his enthusiasm ran out. She was still waiting. She was the fucking queen when it came to waiting.

“Everything okay? Where’d you go?” Iron asked, assessing her with those bicolored eyes that spoke more of concern than condescension. To her surprise, she realized he wasn’t hurrying her along but genuinely wanted to know if she was all right.

So she answered him.

“When you were dreaming about me, what was it like?” Mortified and totally clueless as to why she asked, Anna held up her hands and started shaking her question away. “No, scratch that. I didn’t mean to?—”

“Waiting, mostly.”

Anna’s mind roared to a stop as she swallowed past a gathering of emotions and was beyond grateful her abrupt halt in speech didn’t do the same to his.

“I never knew when I was going to see you or how much of you I would see. I’d never heard you speak, not until recently, so I had no way of knowing if you ever would. I had no intel on what caused it all or what you were to me. All I knew was that every night I would fall asleep with an eagerness to just . . . wait. Waiting to see whether the dreams would still come or whether they would finally get pulled out from under me. And after many weeks when the dreamsdidn’tstop, I knew that, eventually, if I waited long enough, I’d see . . . something.”

Iron dangled the beer bottle from his forefingers and let his eyes haze over. “Usually, it all started off as a bunch of smoke and mirror bullshit. Just a lot of white mist and ether, with nothing to touch, nothing to orient myself toward. But then the mist would part, and I’d see a beacon of golden copper.” He gestured with his drink at her braided hair, his gaze lingering over the bound strands. “You would float over to me sometimes, and it almost seemed like your hair wanted to greet me, the way it would drift toward me. But every time I tried to reach for it, reach for you, the mist of your form just . . . darted away.”

“It was the same for me, mostly,” she said. “I only ever saw the suggestion of you. I knew you were there but didn’t know what was happening.”

A pointed silence seemed to sustain the conversation. Then he asked, “Were you afraid?”

“No,” she answered, and the truth of her words stunned her for a moment, until an unfamiliar courage found the rising nugget of her anxiety and, for some reason, sat on that shit like a high school linebacker squashing an eighth-grade bully. “I felt . . . safe. Alarmed and a bit uneasy, sure, but always safe. Like I knew you wouldn’t harm me but also that I was being shown something others normally weren’t. I remembered your”—she bit her lip—“form.”

Iron halted the beer traveling toward his mouth but said nothing.

“I couldn’t see anything, mind you. For months, you were just this suggestion. In the dream, the mist would kind of swirl around you, painting an abstract picture of a strong masculine frame. Muscled but also tense, like you were bracing for something. It always worried me.”

“Why?”

Anna shrugged. “I didn’t know whether you were expecting an enemy and whether that enemy was me.” As she slid her mug back onto the coffee table, it shifted the coaster beneath it, sending two tiles tumbling to the floor.

She bent forward to scoop up the tiles, but Iron’s hand was already there, covering the pieces. Their knuckles bumped each other, but when she went to pull her hand away, Iron lifted his thumb and lightly trapped the tip of her thumb against his index finger. Stuck, the rest of her fingers fell on top of his.

Iron was on one knee again, but this time, there wasn’t a living room’s worth of space between them or the foggy mist of a limitless dream world. There was just him and her and the pulsing waves of magnetism that beat off him like a drum’s rhythmic seduction. He dipped his head lower, closer to hers, until his light breath tickled the exposed column of her throat, pulling up sensations she had no framework for.

“Anna,” he whispered, letting the fingers that covered the tiles lift and cocoon hers in a soft embrace that was as overwhelming as it was subtle.

Subtle and terrifyingly exhilarating.

“Is this the soul bond thing? Is that why you’re still here? Because you can leave now, technically, right? Can’t you fly out of here or something?” she asked, filling the minute space between them with fractured words that had always ever been the only weapons she’d been expert in.

Iron didn’t say anything, nor did he pull away, and Anna had exactly no idea what to make of any of it other than the fiery flutter of hope that kept blazing within her chest.

She missed this, even though she had no idea whatthiseven was. It felt familiar on some level, like the ethereal warmth of her dreams whenever she’d drifted close to him through the fog. Had she really drifted, or had she been pulled closer by something?

“I’m not sure I believe any of this,” she confessed, desperate to fill the silence and search out answers she wasn’t sure he could give, but she’d try for them regardless. “I feel silly.” Then she dipped her head down, tearing her gaze away from his. “Sorry, it’s the hormones talking.”

She slipped her hand out of Iron’s grip, and he let her but only so he could grasp the side of her face, his fingers grazing over the underside of her jaw in comforting strokes.

“I got you, Anna. I got you.”

He sealed his lips firmly against hers, crowding out any remaining questions.

Chapter15

Whatever pain Iron thought he’d feel when he closed the distance between them was nothing compared to the wells of suffering packed into the pools of Anna’s eyes. Even among the light from the meager camping lanterns and her handful of battery-operated flameless candles, he could see the trembling effects of what happened when a woman had been forced to rely on her own strength for far too long.

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