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“Baz,” I manage to say. “I…”
“You what? Are you going to pretend that you didn’t see something? Are all my fears unfounded?”
“I think you fear too much.”
“And what would you do,” he says, nearly growling, “if I told you I fear you the most?”
He steps the last half-step and his hand comes up to the side of my face. His palm is warm against my jaw, his thumb along the line of my cheekbone, his fingers sliding back into the hair at the nape of my neck. The touch is so deliberate that my knees start to weaken. He stares at my mouth, eyes heavy-lidded with the kind of heat that makes something inside me want to lie down right here on the cold stone and give him anything he asks for.
My god, this is dangerous.
My thoughts are incoherent.
He’s going to kiss me.
He’s going to kiss me.
He’s going to kiss me and I don’t know what I’ll do with it and I don’t care, I don’t care, I would stand on this terrace and let him take whatever he wanted to take, the wild in him is calling to the wild in me and both of them want to be let in.
He leans down.
But his mouth comes to my ear instead of my mouth. His breath is warm against the shell of it. His hand tightens at the nape of my neck.
He says, “Witch.”
The word goes down the whole length of me like a struck bell.
He has said it. The truth. Against my ear, with his hand on my neck, and the sky going red overhead.
He knows what I am. He wants me anyway. And I can’t move. Wouldn’t even if I could. I want him to take me in his arms and ruin me wild.
“Oh for god’s sake.”
Nelle’s contemptuous voice rings out from the open doorway and I freeze, breath caught in my chest.
“Dessert is served,” she says. “Unless you’ve already had your fill.”
Baz does not jump. He’s too controlled for that. His hand leaves my neck and the warmth of him leaves the inches between us, and when he steps back he is already most of the way to being only my professor again, and the only thing left of what was happening between us a moment ago is the look he gives me. A single longing look that tugs at me before he nods to Nelle without a word and goes past her through the open doors and back into the hall.
The door swings shut behind him.
I don’t move. The place at the base of my neck where his hand was is still hot. My breath is uneven. My knees are close to giving up.
Nelle walks to the rail beside me. She doesn’t look at me. She looks out over the water the way he had, and her profile is a different line than his, straighter and sharper and younger. She is holding her own glass of champagne, which she sips.
“I don’t know what that was or wasn’t,” she says quietly. “But you need to be careful, Saturna. For your own sake, you need to stay away from that man.”
“Nelle, I…” I don’t even know what I’m going to say.
“He is not what he seems.”
She says it as if it’s some hard fact that’s been weighing her down for some time. I study her but, as usual, her face gives me nothing.
“Dessert is actually served,” she says, after a moment. “I wasn’t making that up to get him off you.”
“Then thank you for the timing.”
She lets out something close to a laugh. “Come inside. You’ve gone pale.”
