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How many weapons does he carry? The answer, apparently, is more than I can count, because each one he removes reveals another, and each removal involves his hands moving across his body in ways that make my heat sensing do things it was never designed to do.

Soon, the nightstand is a pile of blades on top of my folded clothes, and Kieran Cross is standing beside the bed, breathing in controlled intervals that his thermal signature is flatly contradicting.

His blood is running hot. 111.6 degrees, concentrated in his hands, his throat, and his chest. His heart rate is eighty-one beats per minute, which is twenty above his resting baseline. And the heat pooling low in his abdomen, right where those twin dagger tattoos point down toward the bulge in his pants that he’s apparently given up on hiding, is at 114 degrees and rising.

Then he sits on the edge of the bed, and every number in my head turns to dust.

16

EVIE

The mattress dips under Kieran’s weight, and he lies down on top of the covers, on his back, with his arms at his sides. His posture is perfect—his spine straight, hands flat against the mattress, every limb arranged with deliberate precision. Other than the weapons, he’s still fully dressed, and the only thing separating us is a single layer of cotton sheet that I’m clutching against my collarbone with both hands.

Without a word or a glance in my direction, he reaches over and turns off the lamp.

The dark settles over us, and his heat is right here. Only ten inches of unoccupied mattress sits between us, and ten inches is the width of a textbook.

Stop comparing him to a textbook, Evie.

I stare at the dark ceiling and regulate my breathing again, trying to focus on anything that isn’t the thermal signature of the man lying next to me.

I latch onto ambient sounds instead. The wards are humming in the walls. The old wood is creaking as the house settles. A saxophone is drifting from a street I can’t see.

Kieran’s breathing is slow and deliberate—the rhythm of a man who’s regulating himself. I know this because I’ve catalogued his unregulated breathing on the ship when a wave threw us together, and in the spring when his mouth was on mine. What I’m hearing right now isn’t it.

Shifting onto my side, I face the wall and put my back to him. Without visual data, the proximity should feel more abstract.

It doesn’t.

Heat radiates off his chest and presses against my spine. He’s not touching me, but the thermal differential between his body and the ambient air creates a zone of warmth along my back that my magic reads as contact even though it isn’t. The warmth sinks through the sheet and my tank top, settling into the bare skin beneath. In seconds, heat pools low in my belly—the slow, heavy kind that has nothing to do with ambient temperature and everything to do with the memory of his hands on me when we were in the spring on Lotus Island.

My body remembers everything my brain has tried to archive. The grip of his fingers on my thighs. The way he lifted me like I weighed nothing. The exact pressure of him inside me before he pulled away, and the sound he made when I⁠—

I press my face into the pillow and start counting to thirty.

At twelve, his arm moves. It’s just a repositioning, his forearm settling along his side, but the motion sends a wave of heat across the mattress that hits the bare skin on the backs of my thighs and travels upward, and my entire body tenses. My hips press into the mattress on instinct, and the cotton sheet against my bare legs makes it worse, not better.

At nineteen, he turns his head on the pillow toward me. I know because the thermal output on the back of my neck intensifies. He inhales, slow and deliberate, and I’d classify it as a calming technique if his temperature didn’t climb half a degree on the exhale.

This needs to stop. I need to control myself.

So, I adjust my position, pulling my knee up and resettling my hip against the mattress. It’s the kind of movement a sleeping person would make without thinking.

My calf brushes his.

It’s the lightest contact imaginable, bare skin against the fabric of his pants. But every muscle in his body goes rigid, his heat spiking so fast that my thermal sensing whites out for a full second before recalibrating.

Neither of us moves. Neither of us breathes. My calf is pressed against his, bare skin against fabric, and the contact point is burning at a temperature I can’t accurately read because the numbers keep climbing.

One second. Two. Three. The room is silent except for the wards and the saxophone, and the entire universe has contracted to four square inches of skin against fabric.

I could pull my leg back. I could pretend it was sleep. Every social protocol on the planet offers me an exit, and I lie perfectly still and take none of them.

His breathing stops being regulated. The rhythm fractures, one ragged inhale breaking the pattern he’s held all night⁠—

Then his hand finds my hip, and he pulls me into him with one hard motion that eliminates every remaining inch of the gap between us.

His chest hits my back. His thighs press against mine. He’s hard against me, every inch of him pressed into the curve of my body through the fabric, and the sound that comes out of me is torn from the base of my throat. Then he’s turning me onto my back with one hand still on my hip, and he’s over me, his mouth on mine, and this is nothing like the spring.