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“I did nothing of the sort.”

“You lost the angle. “

“It was a difficult angle.”

“You’re a liar.”

“Yes.” He squeezed my hand. “Come with me. After. I want to show you something.”

I looked up at him. His face was smooth and unreadable. But his hand shook, the very slightest fraction, and I felt something rise up the bond like a warm current: a nervous, hopeful, tender tingle.

“What is it?”

“You will see.”

“Is it another sex manual?”

“It is not a sex manual.”

“Is it a vampire thing?”

“It is a Maksim thing.” His mouth curved. “Trust me. Wait.”

I took a breath.

It’s a funny thing, trust. It never got easy. I had to choose it, every single day, like a muscle. But I looked at him, this tall pale impossible man, with his gray eyes and his faint smile and the ring on his finger that matched mine, and I remembered a rink at midnight and a hand on my face.

“Okay,” I said. “Where?”

It took us two hours to get there.

I was half asleep by the time he pulled off the highway. We’d been driving through the dark, on winding roads I didn’t know, past fields and farms and stands of dripping trees. Autumn had come in fast that year. The leaves were red and gold and blowing everywhere. The car smelled of leather and cold and coffee. I’d drifted off with my head on the window, and when I woke, it was dawn.

“Where are we?” I mumbled.

“Nearly there.”

“Where’s there? “

“Look.”

I looked.

The road had ended. We were parked at the edge of a wood, on a bed of pine needles, in a hush so complete it rang. Somewhere ahead, beyond the trees, I could hear a sound: a low, steady, distant roar, like the sea. The sky was pale pink at the horizon. The air smelled of rain.

Maksim got out. He came around the car, and opened my door, and held out his hand.

I took it.

He led me forward through the trees. The path was narrow and wet with dew, and the ground fell away steeply, and we went slowly, hand in hand, ducking under branches. The roar grew. It swelled and swelled until it filled my head. And then the trees parted, and we stepped out onto a ledge of black rock, and I stopped breathing.

It was a waterfall.

I had never seen anything like it. It fell from a cliff sixty feet above us, a great white curtain of water, tumbling down a face of dark stone into a green pool. Ferns hung from the rock. Moss carpeted every ledge. Mist rose in a soft veil and caught the early light, and the whole gorge glowed with rainbows. The pool below was clear as glass. The rocks were red and gold with fallen leaves.

“Wow,” I said. It was all I could manage. “What is this place? How did you find it?”

“I found it when I was alone,” said Maksim.