Page 32 of Run Rabbit Run

Ezra Vane, in dark clothes and good boots, hands loose at his sides, and even from here his eyes are that pale flat blue that doesn't warm.

The sight of him goes straight through me, low and hot, before I can lock the door on it.

My pulse kicks hard under my jaw, once, the way it does before a shot when the animal's finally in range, except there's nothing to draw on and what my body wants is exactly what it has no right to want.

It's the traitor pulling my blood that goes around him, the one that has nothing to do with fear and everything to do with the part of me I've been pretending isn't there since a diner two weeks ago.

I hate it in the same breath. I hate that a man who came to my town to buy me can do this to me from thirty feet away with his hands at his sides.

"Wren." He says my name like he's setting down something he's carried a long way. "You came."

"You didn't leave me a lot of options."

"No." Not a scrap of apology in it. "I didn't."

He comes down the steps, unhurried, and I hold my ground because backing up is a language I won't speak to him.

He stops close enough that I have to tip my chin to hold his eyes, close enough that the warmth comes off him into the cold air between us and touches my face.

Heat blooms across my skin, up the back of my neck and low in my belly at once, fast and unwanted, my body leaning a half-degree toward him before I catch it and lock every muscle still.

I could be sick with how much I want to step into that warmth.

I could be sick with hating that I want it, and the two feelings live in the same square inch of me, and neither one will let go.

"You'll want to see the room," he says. "Rest. Eat something. The hunt begins at sundown, and I want you sharp for it. I meant what I told you. It's no pleasure if you don't believe you can win."

"I don't need to rest. I need this over with."

Something moves at the corner of his mouth, close to a smile and colder than one. "You'll rest. I've waited a long while for tonight. I won't have it spoiled because you were too proud to sit down for six hours."

He turns and goes up the steps, sure I'll follow, and the worst part is that I do, because there's nowhere else on this fucking mountain to go.

Inside, the cold deepens.

Stone floors, high ceilings that eat the light, a silence so complete I can hear my own boots and can't hear his at all.

That's the detail that crawls up my neck, that a man his size moves through his own house and makes no sound, like the place has taught him how to be a ghost in it.

He leads me up a staircase and down a long hall hung with portraits I don't let myself look at, and he opens a heavy door and stands aside.

"Yours," he says.

The room is beautiful. That's the first thing I realize is wrong.

Warm where the rest of the house is cold, south light pouring gold across a wide bed and a deep window seat and a fire already lit and drawing clean, and for one stupid second some animal part of me eases at the warmth of it before the trained part slams back online and starts reading the room the way I read the woods.

The window seat looks out over the trees.

I clock the window frame. Painted shut, or near it, the sash fitted too tight to work fast.

The fire's the only heat, which means the only warmth in this house is his to give or take.

And the door.

I turn back to the door I came through, and I see it now, what I was too busy reading the rest of the room to catch.

There's no lock on the inside. No latch, no bolt, no way for me to keep anyone out.