“You know, most people buy me dinner before they wrap their legs around me a thousand feet in the air.”

Serena gave him a flat look. “Most people don’t jump off volcanoes with me.”

“Most people have survival instincts, Frostborne. Those are optional for you.”

“You said yes before I finished the question, Gav.”

“I said yes before you started the question. There’s a difference, and it’s worse.”

“And yet.”

“And yet here I am. I have myself to blame. But, Serena, there’s something I need to tell you.”

She stiffened in his arms. “What is it?”

“Your heart rate is extremely elevated.”

“I—I—we just jumped off a cliff, Gav.”

“Your heart rate was elevated before we jumped.”

He looked at her. She looked at him then shook her head.

“You are impossible.”

He would remember this later. But it wasn’t the fall or impossible green magic that would stick with him. He would remember the way she laughed against his shoulder, and the way it made him forget, completely, that she wasn’t his.

They drifted the last hundred feet, the green light dimming as they descended, the crater floor rising to meet them with the patient inevitability of a surface that had been waiting.

Gavriel’s boots hit volcanic stone without a stumble, which was a miracle given that he was holding a woman who was straddling him and his legs had been in freefall for the better part of a minute.

He landed clean, one arm locked around her waist, the other braced beneath her, his body absorbing the impact with a steadiness that came from the same place his new speed came from: the place he hadn’t known existed until today and was choosing to examine later.

The parachute dissolved above them in a cascade of green motes that drifted down like luminescent snow.

Serena watched them fall. She couldn’t help it. The motes caught the light and fractured it into a hundred shades of emerald, swirling around them both in lazy spirals, and she stared the way she stared at every new manifestation of magic she encountered: with the wide-eyed, unguarded wonder of a woman who had studied magic and still couldn’t believe it was real when it was beautiful.

Then she realized three things in rapid succession.

One: Gavriel was watching her watch the motes, and the expression on his face was the one he wore when he thought she couldn’t see him looking, the one that was too soft and too warm and too honest for the word friendship to carry.

Two: he was still holding her.

Three: he was extremely, unmistakably, impressively hard against her, and the thin thermal-weave between them was doing absolutely nothing to obscure that fact.

Her face went scarlet so fast it could’ve triggered a medical alert.

Gavriel’s eyes locked onto hers and for a second, neither of them could move.

She could feel an echo of every nerve in his body being lit, his desire flooding into her like it was her own. The problem was that it made her lungs stop working and her pulse hammer between her legs in a way that had absolutely nothing to do with the fall.

His nostrils flared once. The heartbeat between her legs was also in her ears. A result of him wanting her or her wanting him or a combination feedback loop that was not appropriate for the time or place.

She waited for the feeling to fade the way borrowed emotions always did, the matebond giving her a hit of someone else’s experience before it dissolved back into background noise. Just a matebond between two friends.

It didn’t fade.

It got worse. Because underneath his want, tangled into it so tightly she couldn’t separate the threads anymore, was her own. Hers. Not mirrored, not absorbed, not the matebond playing telephone with his body and hers. This was native. Built locally. Her own blood running hot, her own skin remembering everywhere he’d touched her, her own mind replaying the friction of his body beneath hers and wanting more of it with a specificity that left no room for plausible deniability.

She wasn’t feeling this because he was feeling it. She was feeling it because she wanted him, and she had been wanting him, and the matebond had just ripped the door off the room she’d been locking it in.

He wanted to kiss her. Did she want to kiss him?

Oh gods, she wanted to kiss him.

She leaned in, her lips a breath from his, and every cell in her body pulled toward him like he was magnetic north and she was done pretending she had any other direction to go.

She kissed him. Or started to. Her mouth found his in the space between one heartbeat and the next, her lips barely making contact, just the ghost of pressure, just enough to learn that he tasted like smoke and adrenaline and something underneath both that she would never be able to describe or forget.

His whole body responded. His arm crushed her against him, his hand fisted in her hair, and for one second, one fraction of a second that would live rent-free in her memory until she was dust, he kissed her back. His mouth moved against hers, hungry, desperate, months of discipline collapsing into a single point of contact that sent lightning down her spine.

Then he said her name into her mouth. “Serena.” And pulled back.

The loss of contact was so abrupt it felt like being dropped from a second cliff. His hand slid out of her hair. His arm loosened. His forehead dropped against hers, and he breathed there, ragged and uneven, the matebond roaring between them with everything neither of them was going to say.

She blinked a few times, coming out of the daze.

He was choosing Dexmon for her because Gavriel Sterling would burn alive before he let her carry the guilt of anything more than this. And he also hated himself for stopping it.

The matebond delivered his agony so clearly she tasted it.