For one moment they were suspended, like they were both bracing themselves for a cataclysmic shift in the ground beneath their feet, and then, in the space of a heartbeat, his mouth was on hers and her palms were flat on his chest and his thumb was on the wild flutter at the base of her throat. They were wild, ravenous, untethered.

She tasted like sea salt and sugar, and lightning, too, if lightning had a taste. The cold wind, the past and the future, the terrible secrets he had been guarding—none of it mattered. Christ, he was drowning, and he didn’t ever want to come back to the surface. She was pressed so hard against him that he could feel her heart racing right beside his.

When they broke the kiss, he dropped his head and leaned his forehead in the crook of her neck, breathing hard. One of her hands played with the hair at the back of his neck, sending electricity shuddering across his body with each stroke of her fingers.

“I refuse to have sex in the woods,” she said, startling a laugh out of him. “Even I’m not magical enough to keep dirt out of places dirt should never be.”

He felt something like awe. “How do you do that?”

“Do what?”

“Make me laugh.”

“I work very hard at it.”

“Well, as it happens, I wasn’t assuming we would have sex.”

“You should assume that,” she said firmly. “You should absolutely, definitely assume that.”

“Come here,” he said, and kissed her again. By the time he was done, she was trembling, her soft, impossibly warm body pressed right against the hard, aching ridge in his jeans. He was so dizzy with desire and longing that he could barely think straight.

And that, of course, was the moment it began to rain.

Mika looked up at the sky, her shoulders shaking with laughter. “Fucking typical.”

The sandpapery rasp of Jamie’s own laughter vibrated right through her body, which was frankly incandescent with desire and frustration. She glanced up at the gold dust dancing mischievously in the air around them, like a hundred unhelpful fireflies, and felt, unjustly, that the least it could have done was keep the storm at bay for a few more minutes.

“Let’s go.” His eyes silver with humour, Jamie took her hand. They were both soaked through already.

They had to watch their step on the wet, slippery path, so it was slow going getting back to the car, but Mika didn’t usually mind the rain and, in any case, the cold was helping to dampen her very earnest desire to jump Jamie’s bones. She did, however, cast her recently perfected keep-warm spell and let it seep from her fingers to his.

“I thought you didn’t want me,” she said, the end of the statement curling up like a question.