Page 10 of Burned

I step around him and head toward the porch.

He does not let go of my wrist.

Of course he doesn’t.

He walks beside me like a guard. A captor. A lover. A man holding on too tightly.

At the porch steps, I pause.

“Lucian?”

He looks down at me.

I hate how beautiful he is in the cold. I hate how badly I want his mouth. I hate how much I want to crawl inside his coat and hide there from a woman who may not even arrive.

“If Isobel is alive,” I ask, my voice barely steady, “what does that make me?”

For the first time since I’ve known him, Lucian Bachman has no answer.

And that silence hurts more than anything he could have said.

CHAPTER TWO

LUCIAN

I have killedmen for less than the look on Erin’s face.

Open defiance and challenge.

But the one that hurts is the little flinch she tries to hide when I fail to answer quickly enough.

The way her eyes, usually too bright and too defiant for her own good, go flat with the kind of pain that does not scream because it has survived worse.

If Isobel is alive, what does that make me?

The answer should be simple.

Mine.

Erin is mine.

My woman. My problem. My obsession. My softest weakness and my most dangerous mistake.

But the name Isobel hits the air between us like smoke from a fire I never escaped.

And for one ruined second, I do not speak.

One second.

That is all it takes to wound her.

I feel it happen.

The cabin door closes behind us, cutting off the cold and the men outside. The entryway smells of cedar, smoke, and the faint vanilla sweetness of whatever Cass baked last night while pretending she was not worried about all of us.

Erin pulls her wrist from my hand.

I let her.