Page 81 of Stars and Smoke
Him, this boy who—only a couple of weeks ago—she’d wished would fall off the face of the planet.
Or maybe she’d never really believed that at all.
What is Winter Young like in bed?
The thought sprang to her mind and filled her with fire. She couldn’t believe herself. A week ago, she would have shaken her head in disgust at the thought.
Why did she want him?
Why did this feel so right?
Before she could find out, he pulled away. Sydney gasped at his sudden departure and the disappointment of cool air between them.
“Wait,” he breathed, his cheeks flushed. The collar of his shirt was disheveled from where she’d tugged at it, the buttons undone halfway down his chest, and she could see his body exposed underneath. He met her gaze, his pupils dilated, his eyes hazy with want. “Wait,” he repeated, shaking his head. “Stop. You’re—we’re, I mean—not in our right mind.”
Not in my right mind?
The buzz of heat and desire that had been raging through her cut short as if snipped in two. Vanished in an instant. She stared at him, bewildered for a moment.
“I know what I’m doing,” she retorted.
“Do you?” He looked skeptically at her. “You were just poisoned! Do you even remember what happened?”
“Of course!” she snapped, then frowned. Already the memories of what’d just happened were turning fuzzy. How had they gotten here into the pool? Had Winter carried her? Had he given her something? She’d thought she remembered it, but now it felt like a blanket had fallen back over her mind, clouding it in doubt.
At the sight of her confusion, Winter shook his head and pulled himself further away. He gave her a rueful smile. “Sorry,” he murmured. “Got carried away.”
Sydney knew he was right, but she still felt irritation pouring cold against her emotions. The one time she threw herself at a guy and let her heart go, he decided to be chivalrous?
Why couldn’t he just let her make this mistake?
A mistake. Right.
Her feelings had been thrown into a storm with the poison and antidote and sheer pressure of their mission, and she had lost her senses with it. A mistake. That was all this was.
Something else cleared a little in her head, and Sydney felt the first hint of her cold logic returning, her shield piecing itself back together. She blinked, suddenly exhausted.
Of course this was a mistake.
“Same,” she muttered, pulling herself straighter against the edge of the pool. She looked down and buttoned her shirt. The heat from their kiss still coursed through her, and to her embarrassment, she could still feel it burning against her cheeks.
His hand was still there, a hairsbreadth from hers. Everything in him looked like he wanted to touch her again, but he didn’t.
“We can’t do this,” he finally whispered.
Never had Sydney felt so annoyed with him. But she pushed thefeeling down, forcing herself to look like she didn’t care that Winter’s hands had been on her just seconds ago, that she had been fumbling all over him herself.
“Believe me, I don’t want to,” she heard herself agree. “Unprofessional.”
Winter shook his head. “No, I meant the rest of this mission.”
She frowned. The heat rose again, unbidden, in her cheeks, and for a moment, she wanted the poison coursing back through her system so she didn’t have the mind to be embarrassed. “And why not?” she said.
“You were just poisoned!”
She gave him an unbothered look. “I once stole the key to a locked cell to break out an informant scheduled for execution at a maximum-security prison while I had a hundred-and-four-degree fever.”
He stared wordlessly at her.
