Page 9 of Remmen

I looked down at her instead. Anne had mud on one boot and her hair coming loose. She was squinting up the street at my town like she meant to make it home whether it wanted her or not. Everything in me pulled toward her, heavy and slow. I made myself stand still. She was forbidden. For the sake of the town, she had to be.

But I did not want to hand her back to her empty office and go be the mayor.

So I didn’t.

“There are steads past the ridge,” I said. “The ranches. You said you wanted to know how we actually live.” I heard myself keep going and couldn’t stop it. “It’s an hour out. I have a truck.”

She blinked up at me.

For a moment I thought she’d have the sense to refuse, and I told myself I wanted her to.

But she smiled and it could have blotted out the sun. “Yes,” she said. “God, yes. Anything but that office.”

I couldn’t stop from answering her smile with my own. “Let’s go.”

CHAPTER 4

ANNE

The ruts in the road made it a bumpy ride out of town, and my tailbone was complaining after the first mile.

I was focusing on that because if I didn’t, I’d focus on the giant monster sitting next to me. And that would be bad. Disastrous, even. Heat suffused me and I tried to tamp it down, but there was no way to ignore all the space he took up, the scent of him.

No touching, I reminded myself.

Looking isn’t touching, a slightly evil part of my psyche reminded me.

Great, the sexiest minotaur I’d ever seen was making me dissociate.

The problem with looking was where it led. I’d start at his hands, one on the wheel and one on the gears, both big enough to make the controls look like a child’s toys, and then I’d picture them wrapped around my waist. Which was not a place a professional woman went at ten in the morning on a workday.

I went there anyway.

Then I got a grip. On myself, not on Remmen, though my imagination had a whole list of alternatives it was very eager to share.

The truck didn’t help. It had been built to a minotaur’s scale, which put the better part of a meter of cracked leather between us on the bench, and somehow I still felt crowded. Every time he shifted, his shoulder came into my space. His forearm was the size of my thigh. I was, once again, thinking about his forearm.

I looked out the window. Scrub, dirt, more scrub. It did nothing for me.

“You’re quiet,” Remmen said.

“I’m carsick.”

“I seriously doubt that.”

“I might be. The jury’s out.” The truck hit a rut that tried to rearrange my spine, and I grabbed the dash. “This road is a war crime. Somebody should tell the mayor.”

“The mayor knows.”

“Then the mayor should do something about it.”

“He’ll add it to his list.”

I laughed before I could stop it. He glanced over, and I turned back to the window, because the alternative was letting him watch me grin at him like an idiot.

We drove until the town was gone behind us and there was nothing out the windows but gold hills and a whole lot of sky. No pollution. No dome protecting us from the worst of it. Just weather doing whatever it wanted over land that ran on for miles.

It was beautiful. It also made me feel small and a long way from home.