Elise let out a huge breath and rubbed her hands up and down her arms. “Well, you’d get money from the book, of course. Part of the advance and royalties.”
He frowned, watching closely as she unwound the knot she’d made of her windbreaker’s sleeves, which were slung around her waist. She slid the jacket up and over her bare arms. When she zipped it up, he slowly replied, “I don’t need money.”
She cocked her head to one side. Her braid, only long enough to reach the tops of her shoulder blades and barely contained by the elastic band at the end, rustled against the reflective fabric of her windbreaker. “Everyone needs at least a little money. Surely—”
Cal waved her comment away, his skin prickling with a pleasant sort of impatience. His mind raced.
If he said no to the money, what could she offer him? The possibilities were at once beyond his comprehension and deeply tantalizing. “I have plenty of money I never use,” he answered, thinking of the citizen’s stipend he hadn’t put a dent in for over a hundred years. “What else can you tempt me with?”
Elise peered at him, her brows furrowed. He kept his focus on her face, afraid to breathe, but he didn’t need to look down to know her fingers moved absently through the fog caressing her hip. He felt it.
A shot of pure heat coursed through that simple connection. Her magic, unconscious and benign, meshed with his in an intoxicating blend. Electricity like he’d never felt leapt from her to him in a playful, erotic introduction.
It was with great surprise that Cal realized he was actually aroused. That had never happened before.
“What do you want?” she asked, completely unaware that her mere presence, the barest brush of her fingers, knocked his world off its axis.
Cal swallowed. It was as easy as a thought to bring the fog in thicker around him, hiding any evidence of his desire from her. He spent more than half his life in his skin, so it wasn’t that he was ashamed of his nudity. Rather, he wanted to sit with this eye-opening revelation for a while before he—
What? What will I do? Tell her about how she makes my cock hard?
Maybe. He wasn’t sure how something like this — his visceral attraction — was handled. Cal had never experienced its like before. His time in the Aerie and his subsequent imprisonment hadn’t exactly encouraged sexual exploration, and since he’d never felt desire before this surreal moment, he had always just assumed it was part of his nature to feel no procreative impulse.
But now…
Now he looked at Elise and felt like a whole world had opened up to him. A gnawing hunger grew in the pit of his stomach. He wanted her to smile at him again. He wanted to feel the rush of it, the weightlessness of it. He wanted to know what it felt like to feel more than the fleeting touch of her fingers on his skin. He wanted to ease the ache in his cock and know what her kiss felt like and breathe her in with every inhale.
He simply wanted.
That wanting disturbed him. More than the idea that she wanted to know him as no other being in the world did. More than her audacity. More than the thought of her digging up all the graves he carried in his pockmarked soul.
Cal wasn’t used to wanting. He didn’t care for it. Certainly, wanting and yearning had never helped him before. It only caused more pain. Better to accept the ache of loneliness than to make it worse with the never-ending hunger of hope.
And yet, he was a curious being by nature. If there was one benefit to his vigil, it was that he got to observe and satisfy his inquisitiveness whenever it suited him. Here, now, Elise was giving him a chance to chase this new interest in an unprecedented way. Would he ever get this chance again? Would he even want it if it came?
He didn’t know, and because he didn’t know, Cal chose not to answer her. Not yet, anyway. “I will think on what I want,” he promised her, “and give you my answer tomorrow.”
“Good! Fine. That’s— that’s great!” Elise balled her hands into fists by her thighs, her grin surging back onto her face like an electric bolt of pure joy. “I’ll be here.”
Cal tried not to look at her smile, fearing what he might say and do if he let it blind him. Nodding once, he began to make his escape by way of fading into the fog, but was stopped when she made a sound of distress.
“Wait, wait!”
He paused, eyeing her suspiciously. “Yes?”
“I…” She stepped closer, her movement sending eddies through the fog clinging like a lover to her legs, hips, and sides. He shuddered at the feeling. Did she know that he and the fog had a symbiotic link? That he could feel, in a secondhand sort of way, the shape of her? No, he didn’t think so, and he wasn’t about to tell her. For all that it unsettled him and made the ache in his cock worse, he liked feeling her.
Her eyes were soft, almost shy, when she said, “I didn’t get your name.”
His stomach knotted. There was a reason he didn’t give out his name. Even when the people he rescued begged, just so they knew who to thank, he refused. Only Kaz knew it, though it took a decade for the orc to earn the privilege. But for reasons he could not understand, he looked into those soft, keen eyes and felt compelled to be known.
He swallowed the lump in his throat to whisper, “Cal.”
Elise made the smallest gesture — barely a gasp, almost a jolt, all pleasure — and he felt something deep inside him give way. A staggering release of internal pressure nearly sent him reeling backward. Gods, he thought, I’d do anything to hear that noise again.
“Cal,” she breathed. Her eyes gleamed in the darkness, catching the glow of the boat house’s light through the fog. “Is that short for something? Calvin, maybe? Callum?”
Cal’s chest seized as the crack inside him expanded and filled with a desire he’d never known. Panic mingled with the overwhelming urge to step out of the fog and just touch her. Gods, but he wanted to know what it was like to feel the silk of her cheek or the ticklish brush of her lashes with his own tarnished hands.