Divine Rivals (Letters of Enchantment, #1)(56)

No.

She set down the binoculars. Her mind whirled as she turned and ran from her room, passing Attie on the stairs.

“Iris? Iris!” Attie cried, reaching out to snag her arm. “Where are you going?”

There was no time to explain; Iris evaded her friend and bolted down the hallway, out the back doors and through the garden they had just been kneeling and planting in mere minutes ago. She leapt over the low stone wall and dashed across the street, winding through the neighbor’s yard. Her lungs felt as if they had caught fire, and her heart was thrumming at the base of her throat.

She finally reached the field.

Iris sprinted, feeling the jolt in her knees, the wind dragging through her loose hair. She could see him now; he was no longer an unfamiliar shadow in a sea of gold. She could see his face, and the scowl lifted from his brow as he saw her. Recognized her.

He finally sensed her terror. He set down his typewriter case and leather bag and broke into a run to meet her.

Iris had lost count in her mind. Over the hammering of her pulse and the roar of her adrenaline, she realized the siren had gone silent. The temptation to look at the sky was nearly overwhelming, but she resisted. She kept her eyes on Roman as the distance began to wane between them, and she pushed herself to run faster, faster, until it felt like her bones might melt from the exertion.

“Kitt!” she tried to shout, but her voice was nothing more than a wisp.

Kitt, get down! she thought, but of course he didn’t understand what was happening. He didn’t know the cause of the siren, and he continued to run to her.

In the moment before they collided, Iris clearly saw his face, as if time had frozen. The fear that lit his eyes, the confused furrow in his expression, the way his lips parted to either heave air or say her name. His hands reached for her as she reached for him, and the stillness broke when they touched, as if they had cracked the world.

She took hold of his jumpsuit and used all of her momentum to push him to the ground. He wasn’t expecting it and she easily unbalanced him. The impact was jarring; Iris bit her tongue as they tangled together in the long grass, his body warm and firm beneath hers. His hands splayed against her back, holding her to him.

“Winnow?” he gasped, his face only a fraction of a centimeter away from hers. He was staring at her as if she had just fallen from the clouds and attacked him. “Winnow, what is hap—?”

“Don’t move, Kitt!” she whispered, her chest pumping like a bellows against his. “Don’t speak, don’t move.”

For once in his life, he listened to her without arguing. He froze against her, and she closed her eyes and fought to quiet her breaths, waiting.

It didn’t take long for the temperature to drop, for the wind to die. Shadows spilled over her and Roman as the eithrals circled high overhead, their wings blocking the sun. Iris knew the moment Roman saw them; she felt the tension coil in his body, felt his sharp inhale as if terror had pierced his chest.

Please … please don’t move, Kitt.

She kept her eyes clenched shut, tasting blood in her mouth. Tendrils of hair dangled against her face, and she suddenly had the fierce urge to scratch her nose, to wipe the perspiration that began to drip from her jaw. The adrenaline that had fueled her across the field was ebbing, leaving behind a tremor in her bones. She wondered if Roman could feel it, how she was quaking against him, and when his hand pressed harder into her back, she knew he could.

Wings flapped steadily above them. Shadows and cold air continued to trickle over their bodies. A chorus of screeches split the clouds, reminiscent of nails on a chalkboard.

Iris chose to focus on the musty scent of the grass around her, broken from their fall. The way Roman breathed as a counterpoint to her—when his chest rose, hers was collapsing, as if they were sharing the same breath, passing it back and forth. How his warmth seeped into her, greater than the sun.

She could smell his cologne. Spice and evergreen. It ushered her back in time to moments they had spent together in the lift and in the office. And now her body was draped across his and she couldn’t deny how good it felt, as if the two of them fit together. A flicker of desire warmed her blood, but the sparks swiftly dimmed when she thought of Carver.

Carver.

The guilt nearly crushed her. She kept him at the forefront of her mind until a shiver spun through her, and she felt a strange prompting to open her eyes.

She dared to do so, only to discover Roman was intently studying her face. Her hair lay tangled across his mouth, and her sweat was dripping onto his neck, and yet he didn’t move, just as she had ordered. He stared at her and she stared back, and they waited for the end to come.

It felt as if spring had blossomed into midsummer by the time the eithrals retreated. The shadows fled, the air warmed, the light brightened, the wind returned, and the grass sighed against Iris’s shoulders and legs. Somewhere in the distance, she could hear shouting as life slowly returned to Avalon Bluff. It took her a few more moments to quell her fear, to be confident enough to move again, to trust that the threat was gone.

She winced as she pushed upward, her wrists and shoulders numb from holding herself frozen. A slight groan escaped her as she sat back on Roman’s waist, her hands tingling with pins and needles. The pain was good; it reminded her of how furious she was at him, for arriving unannounced in the middle of a siren. How his utter foolishness had nearly killed them both.