Happy Valentine's Day!
Chapter 3
My eyes had to be deceiving me, like some kind of twisted-off-its-ass wish fulfillment or something. The hair was the wrong color. Hell, I wasn’t even sure what color hair this girl had. Light brown? Blonde? Pale blonde? All the shades rolled into one? And her nose was too small, but this girl, she looked…
I couldn’t even bring myself to finish that train-wreck of a thought.
Her eyes, a shade of deep denim that was familiar in a nagging sort of way, were fixed on mine. When she didn’t answer my question, I decided to take a more touchy-feely kind of approach. My hand shot out, wrapping around her wrist.
I waited for something—a zap, a fissure of power signaling what she was.
Nothing.
Her eyes widened, almost consuming her face, and there was a quality of innocence to her suddenly wary gaze that I hadn’t seen in a long time.
“W-what are you doing?” She pulled on her arm, but she didn’t get very far.
Her question fell to the side. I was focused on trying to puzzle out what the hell she was and why in the hell I was here.
There’d been no awareness of her when I'd entered the stairwell—late, according to the schedule I had. I hadn’t even expected to find the mysterious J.B. after this class. Shit, I hadn’t even felt her until I’d zipped up the stairs, too fast for any human to track, and startled her. She was definitely not a pure or a half, because I would’ve sensed that. So she wasn’t hiding out in the mortal world, like some of them had managed to do in the past. But when I’d straightened and had seen her face, I knew—I just knew this had to be the person Apollo had sent me to find, and her initials had confirmed it.
There was nothing special that jumped from her skin to mine—no awareness of anything that would make her unique. She felt mortal, but she couldn’t be, because there’d be no reason Apollo would want me to guard a mortal college chick. Unless this was another warped form of punishment, and hell, that actually wouldn’t surprise me.
“You’re hurting me,” she whispered.
Her voice broke through my thoughts. My gaze dropped to where my fingers curled around her slender wrist. The skin around my hand was turning white. Shit—I was hurting her. I dropped my hold as if her skin had scalded mine. Surprise flitted through me, but I had no idea if it was real or just wishful thinking that I hadn’t truly intended to harm her.
Sometimes I wasn’t quite sure what my intentions were anymore.
“What are you?” she asked, her nose scrunching as she spoke. “Other than a heart-stopping hot guy with obvious boundary issues and problems with anger management?”
