Burn for Me

The men were discreetly checking out the women, while the women pretended not to notice. It was an old dance. Eventually the men would break the ice and the women would pretend to be surprised but receptive. They looked like they could reasonably belong together.

A dark-haired man walked out from one of the side trails into the plaza. He wore jeans and a plain black T-shirt and carried something that looked like a roll of fabric in his hand. His T-shirt stretched tight across his broad shoulders. Muscle corded his arms, the powerful, supple muscle of a fighter, built by practice to punch and rip through his opponents. He stepped lightly, his stride sure and unhurried, like a huge jungle cat, an apex predator out for a prowl in his domain. There was no hint of submission anywhere in his body. He walked like he didn’t know his spine could bend.

I leaned forward, trying to see his face.

The two illusion-smoothed men simultaneously moved out of his way.

I saw him. My heart skipped a beat.

He had a sturdy, chiseled jaw, a strong nose, and a square forehead. He looked rough around the edges, from the trace of stubble on his jaw to the short, tousled dark hair. Rough, masculine, and arrestingly sexual. His eyes, smart and clear under the thick, dark eyebrows, evaluated everything he saw with calm precision, but deep inside those blue irises, a cold fire glowed. The same kind of lethal fire you would see in the amber eyes of a tiger, predatory yet irresistible. It compelled you to stare, even though you knew that if you caught his gaze, that icy fire would swallow you whole. He pulled me like a magnet. Every female instinct I had went into overdrive.

Oh wow.

He didn’t simply walk into the plaza. Those eyes told me that the moment he stepped foot into it, he owned it. I knew I should’ve looked away, but I couldn’t. I just sat there, shocked, and stared.

The two women saw him and stopped talking. He cut right through the layers of civilization, politeness, and social snobbery to some preternatural female sense that said, “Dominant male. Danger. Power. Sex.”

Why couldn’t I find someone like that? Why couldn’t he be my guy? If he ever talked to me, I probably wouldn’t be able to string words together into a sentence.

The man was looking at me.

Wait. There were two other attractive women in his way, both brightly dressed, better styled, and telegraphing “available” with every cell in their bodies. They were roses, and in my current getup, I was a daisy. He should’ve looked right over me. I was pretty, but not that pretty.

He was looking at me like he knew who I was.

My brain took a quarter of a second to process that fact before spitting back a cold rush of alarm. Stay or go?

I wasted another precious second trying to listen to my instincts and my magic. My gut feelings were almost always right.

Stay or go?

I looked into his blue eyes. No, I was wrong. He wasn’t a tiger. He was a dragon, regal and deadly, and he was coming for me.

This was bad. Bad, bad, bad. I had to go. Now.

I jumped right off the bench and made a beeline for the trail leading out of the park. He made a slight adjustment to his course, heading for me.

I sprinted down the trail. The greenery flew by. People stared at me. The trail turned and I chanced a glance back.

He was running full speed toward me and gaining.

I dashed forward, squeezing every drop of effort out of my body. The air turned hot in my lungs. My side hurt. The path turned again and I shot out into the open plaza with the gift shop. The entrance was only a hundred yards away.

I felt the magic behind me. It swelled, furious and unstoppable, like a cataclysm.

I glanced back.

He was twenty-five yards behind me.

I wouldn’t make it to my car.

Too far for a Taser, and I didn’t want him any closer. I pulled my .22 Ruger Mark III out and flicked the safety off. I had practiced with this gun every other week. I would hit him.

“Stop. I will shoot you.” I didn’t want to shoot him. I had no idea who he was. I had no idea what he could do. I didn’t want to fire a gun in this crowded place. I didn’t want to kill him.

He kept walking. I felt him coming closer. I’ve never felt magic like that in my whole life. It was like trying to stand in the path of a tornado. Fear shot through me, turning the world crystal clear and sharp.

“Help me!” I yelled.

Nobody moved. There was a plaza full of people and nobody moved.

Damn it. I raised the gun, barrel up and to the left over the trees, and fired a warning shot.

He threw the roll of fabric at me. I saw a flash of blue silk and then my arms were pinned to my body by a crushing force, my gun flat against my leg. The fabric clamped me, like a straitjacket.

Strong arms grabbed me. Something pricked my neck. My legs went soft and I fell over. He caught me and picked me up as if I weighed nothing.

The world was turning fuzzy. I wanted to yell at the top of my lungs, but instead a weak whisper came out. “Help . . .”

“Hey!” A man in a cowboy hat moved toward us.

“I wouldn’t advise it,” the man told him, his voice like ice.

The cowboy froze.

The man shifted me in his arms and I saw his eyes up close, blue eyes, on fire with magic and tinted with self-awareness.

Oh my God. My lips were too puffy to speak. “Meh . . . ma . . . mad . . .”

“Mad Rogan,” he said.

Someone shut off the sun, and I fell asleep.

Chapter 5

I opened my eyes. A pale ceiling stretched above me. I sat up. Folds of blue silk slid off my body, slippery over my skin.

I was in the middle of the floor in a large rectangular room. No windows interrupted the dark walls. Two floor lamps placed in the corners spilled soft yellow light into the room, not so much banishing the darkness but gently diluting it. The floor was smooth polished concrete. Lines crossed it, circles, triangles, and arcane symbols drawn in chalk, charcoal, and pure intense blue, which could only come from grinding lapis lazuli into powder. The lines glowed with gentle radiance, some parts of the pattern flat on the surface of concrete, some floating a few inches above it. I followed its flow with my gaze to a circle ringed in symbols. Someone sat inside the circle. I looked up.

Mad Rogan stared at me with his blue eyes. They opened wide, like two windows into the depth of him, and magic glared back at me. Monstrous, shocking magic, a living darkness filled with flashes of intense light and power. I might as well have looked into the heart of a supernova. I forgot to breathe. My heart tried to run away without the rest of me. My hands shook.

I jerked back and fell. Something was holding me to the floor. I pulled the silk away. Two steel cuffs enclosed my ankles. Metal rods secured the cuffs, disappearing into the concrete. I strained. My feet didn’t move at all.