Page 20

Here there was a desk, a candle, and nothing else.

And distance, I discovered, had been doing both of us a kindness.

There had been no accounting for how small my office became with her inside it. How the firelight caught the brown of her skin and warmed it. How one loose loc had fallen forward over her shoulder. How easily my eyes could follow it down before sense reminded me that Robin of Locksley had broken into Nottingham Castle, not my bedroom.

I dragged my attention back to her face and she caught me doing it.

Of course she did.

One dark brow lifted. "Something interesting, Sheriff?"

"Several things."

Her mouth twitched. "Careful."

"You've said that before."

"And yet you continue requiring the warning."

I leaned back in my chair, deliberately putting another inch between us when every instinct in me suggested the opposite.

"Perhaps I enjoy hearing you say it."

That earned me a look.

A very different one.

Her lips parted just slightly before she seemed to remember herself. I found myself cataloguing her the way I catalogued everything, the callus pattern on her draw fingers, the white line through her left eyebrow. And the exhaustion she was hiding under all that insolence, and a faint sheen of heat along her collarbone that the cold night had no business putting there.

And then I understood what had changed in her scent.

Not all at once.

The knowledge arrived slowly, almost politely, before striking straight through whatever discipline I had left.

Arousal.

Hers.

The lavender and pine remained, but something warmer had unfurled beneath them. Sweet and rich and unmistakably Omega, gathering in the close air between us.

My Alpha recognized it before the civilized part of me had decided what to do with the information.

Every muscle in my body tightened.

Robin's gaze sharpened.

She knows…

Or worse, she knew that I knew. Her thighs pressed together almost imperceptibly where she sat on the edge of my desk. That tiny movement nearly undid me.

I breathed through my nose once.

A mistake.

Her scent deepened in my lungs.

Robin watched my jaw tighten.