Page 99 of Legacy Ascended

“Your feet matter more than your wolf in this exercise. Remember that. Dismissed.”

Luke is waiting in the covered walk behind the hall, out of the wind, sitting on the low wall with his ankles crossed.

"Voss kept you," he says.

"I hate Voss."

He looks at me a moment longer than the answer needed. "Something's sitting wrong with you. It was there this morning too."

"It's nothing."

"Mmhmm."

I sit down next to him. The stone's cold through my clothes, and he's warm on my left side.

"Natasha says three Great Houses and a professor is a committee," I say. "That I'm gathering influence and calling it a love life."

Luke considers this with apparent seriousness. "Am I the influential one or the decorative one?"

"You're the one whose House would rather you weren't there at all."

"So decorative." He tips his head back against the post. "Jessica, my family would be thrilled if I stopped being seen with you."

"That's not funny."

"I'm not joking." His hand finds mine on the stone between us, and his thumb moves once across my knuckles, and my whole arm knows about it. "And you're giving her considerably more attention than she deserves."

I sigh, and then I turn and kiss him.

His hand comes up to the side of my neck, thumb under my jaw, and he kisses me back hard enough that I shift closer. When I make a sound against his mouth, his fingers tighten at my nape and he pulls me halfway into his lap.

The stone wall is cold and I stop noticing that quickly.

Somebody walks past the end of the covered walk, sees us, and reverses out with commendable speed.

Luke breaks off, forehead against mine, breathing like he's been running. "That," he says, "was very nearly a scandal."

"That was barely a kiss."

"Jessica." His hand is still at the back of my neck. "That was not barely a kiss, and you know exactly what you did."

"I've got nowhere to be tonight."

He makes a sound that is mostly agony. "I have a seminar at seven and it runs until it runs, and the man takes attendance twice — once at the start, and once when he suspects people of leaving."

"Then tomorrow."

"Tomorrow," Luke says, with feeling. "All of it. No archive, no Faris, no Council, nobody. My room, and I'm locking the door."

"That's a low bar."

"You'd be amazed."

By evening, everyone is in the suite. Sophia and Renzo are fighting over space at the table, Torres is working at the desk, and Ander is making dinner.

I look into the pan.

“What is that?”