White Hot

The ceiling didn’t look familiar. I wasn’t in my house. That meant I was . . .

I sat straight up. I was in Rogan’s command room, on one of his huge black leather couches. Someone had put a pillow under my head and a blanket over the rest of me. At the far end of the room, Rogan poured coffee into a large black mug. He wore a white T-shirt and black pants. The T-shirt molded to his biceps. He looked like he’d spent the last hour working out and had just taken a shower.

He saw me and grinned. It was an evil kind of grin and all of the alarms blared in my head.

“What time is it?”

“Ten past nine.”

Terror shot through me. “Morning?” Please don’t say morning.

“Yes.”

“Oh no. Did you tell my family where I was?”

“No.”

I exhaled.

“But I imagine Cornelius did when he went back to your warehouse.”

Ugh. I lay back on the couch and pulled the blanket over my head. I would never live it down. Grandma Frida and my sisters would be merciless. “So you spent the night with Mad Rogan? How was it? When is the wedding?”

The blanket moved down, revealing Mad Rogan standing over me, way too close for comfort. He looked even larger from this angle, which was a neat trick considering he was already huge. He had shaved, his jaw completely clean. I liked stubble better. It made him . . . more human. Now he looked every inch a Prime, except for a narrow red gash on his cheek.

I see a Prime . . . Prime or not, Rogan and I still weren’t equal. We probably would never be.

“Where is everybody?” I asked.

“We’re waiting on the dispensation from Cornelius’ sister. There was no point in waiting here, so everyone went home.” He smiled a wicked smile, as if I were a delicious lamb who’d somehow wandered into his wolf den. “Except you.”

I sighed. “You might not want to count on that dispensation.”

“I gathered they’re not close.”

“His sister hadn’t seen Matilda since she was a year old.”

“Are you afraid of what your family will think?” he asked, drinking his coffee.

“I’m not afraid. I’m mentally preparing myself for a vigorous defense. You should’ve woken me up.”

“You overextended yourself,” he said. “Your body needed rest.”

“I just closed my eyes for a moment.”

“You passed out,” he said, a grin tugging at his mouth. A man had no business being so handsome first thing in the morning.

“I did no such thing.”

“Did you know you snore?” he asked.

“I don’t.”

“You do. It’s adorable.” He winked at me.

I threw a pillow at him. It stopped a couple of inches from his face and streaked back to its spot on the couch. He crouched by me. The distance between us suddenly shrunk. His coffee mug moved to the side table.

“You know what I think?” he asked. His gaze snagged on my hair. He reached over and touched one blond strand. “I think your family will expect that you stayed over here and you and I had unforgettably dirty sex.”

My mind went straight to the gutter.

“Especially after they see your hair.”

I pulled my hair out of his fingers. “What’s wrong with my hair?”

“It’s the special style called the morning after.”

I touched my head. Last night’s hair spray, rain, and my pillow had clearly conspired to create a once-in-a-lifetime mess on my head. My hair felt like it was standing straight up.

Rogan was looking at me and in the depths of his blue eyes, I saw the same icy darkness. Not again.

“Did you call House Howling?”

“Not yet,” he said. “Why? Would you like to watch?”

“Maybe.”

“Kinky beast.”

“Rogan!”

He smiled at me. It was the kind of smile that blazed a trail from your heart to your mind and popped into your head the next time you wondered why you put up with a man who made you want to punch things.

“You look sexy in the morning, Nevada.” His voice caressed me, his magic dancing on my skin, setting off tiny explosions of desire.

“Stop,” I warned. The magic caress vanished.

“It would be a shame to disappoint your relatives.”

“I make it a habit to disappoint them on a regular basis.” I reached over and gently touched the skin under the gash. “How did this happen?”

“Got nicked yesterday in the crowd.” His voice deepened slightly.

I was still touching him, his skin warm under my fingertips. The faint scent of sandalwood swirled around me. He held completely still, as if worried I’d take my hand away.

“I thought Olivia might have clawed you. She isn’t your biggest fan.”

He smiled. “You noticed.”

“You seemed to like Rynda. Why didn’t you marry her?”

“Because I like her too much.”

That stung. I pulled my hand back slowly. I shouldn’t have started this conversation.

Rogan sat on the floor next to me and rested his arm on his bent knee. “When I was three, my father survived his sixth assassination attempt. He was attacked by a manipulator. My mother killed the assassin, but it fueled my father’s obsession to compensate for our weakness. You can’t kill what you can’t see. If only we were telepathic and telekinetic. Then we’d feel the killers coming. He’d tried to make a telekinetic-telepath hybrid with me and failed. He was determined to succeed with my children, so he started shopping for my bride.”

“You were three.”

“He was a long-term planner. Rynda is a powerful telekinetic and an empath. My father would’ve preferred a telepath, but to get telekinesis and mind manipulation in one Prime is very rare. They almost never occur together. He feared that if I married a telepathic Prime, our child would lose telekinesis. Rynda’s father is a telekinetic, her mother is a psionic, so her set of genes was perfect for his purposes. The tentative engagement agreement between our families was reached when I was three and she was two. That was the first time she attempted to levitate an object and succeeded.”

“What did she levitate?” I asked in spite of myself.

“Her parents were arguing and she tried to put a pacifier into her mother’s mouth to make her be quiet.”

I pictured Olivia’s face with a pacifier in her lips and snickered.

“Rynda was always a peacemaker. She likes when things are calm.”

“So you knew you would marry her your entire life?”

“Yes.” He nodded. “And for most of my childhood and adolescence I was okay with it. Marriage was something that would happen far away in the future and I liked Rynda. Especially after puberty.”

Jealousy stabbed at me with sharp little needles. “Rynda is beautiful.”

“Gorgeous,” he said. “Elegant, refined, exquisite, ravishing . . .”

Now he was just baiting me. I pretended to study my fingernails.

“I get it that you’re heartbroken that she had another man’s children. That’s okay, Rogan. Don’t feel bad. I’m sure you’ll find somebody who’ll take pity on you . . . eventually.”

He laughed quietly. “You’re prickly this morning. I could get used to this.”

“Don’t. Are you going to tell me the rest of this story or should I just go home now?”

“Alright. When I was sixteen, Rynda came to a party at our house. I don’t remember now what the occasion was, but I had caused my mother some grief and she was still recovering from it. I was a difficult teenager.”

“You don’t say.” I rolled my eyes.

“I was sixteen.” Rogan shrugged.

“What did you do to make your mom mad at you?”

He sighed. “Earlier that summer my father and I had gotten into an argument, and he told me that if I didn’t like the rules of the house, I should go live in a cardboard box on the street. I did. I walked out with the clothes on my back and nothing else. It took them almost three weeks to find me.”

“Where did you go?”