Free Breathless by Cole Gibsen Page A

jaw, afraid that if I kept staring at his eyes I might fal in and drown.
    “Yes.” He swept his gaze around the yard. “Are we safe here?”
    I wanted to laugh at the absurdity of his question. Had I ever been safe a second of my life? “Probably not,” I answered. “There’s a chance that Sir might find us.”
    He cocked his head. “Sir?”
    “My stepdad.” The words tasted sour on my tongue. “He’s a master sergeant and pretty strict.”
    He nodded. “Come with me?” He held his hand out and I marveled how the moon bathed his pale skin in a blue glow.
    I shook my head. “I can’t do that.”
    “Why not?”
    There had to be a good reason for not wandering off in the night with a strange boy, but for whatever reason, my mind refused to conjure one up.
    Absently, I began to pick at the gauze that stuck out from the edge of my nightshirt.
    His eyes swept along my injured shoulder and his face turned hard. The muscles along his jaw flexed. “I am sorry Luna injured you. I wouldn’t have al owed it, but her orders came directly from the king.”
    My head swam in a sea of confusion. “Luna?”
    “The one who hurt your shoulder.”
    Fear, like the rustling of scales, tickled along my skin as I remembered the girl who smiled as she watched me drown. Instinctively, I brought my hand to my throat. “She broke my necklace.”
    He frowned. “We have to hunt for the old power spheres. It’s a rare thing when a human brings them into our waters. It was too much for her to resist.”
    A dul ache pulsed inside my head and I pressed my fingers into my temples to keep the throbbing at bay. “Nothing you’ve said makes any sense.”
    “I know.” He held his hand out to me. “If you come with me—to a place where we can talk safely—then I can explain everything.
    I stared at his reaching fingers and hesitated. His skin was so pale that it seemed to glow in the moonlight. There were a mil ion reasons I shouldn’t go with him; he didn’t look like a normal teenager, he didn’t talk like a normal teenager, and his friend almost ripped my throat out. Not to mention, if I got caught, I’d be on the first bus to military school. And then it would be goodbye to col ege and the freedom I desperately craved.
    But there was something else. In front of me, the boy’s fingers wavered in the air, waiting to take hold of my own. A knot formed in my chest and I struggled to breathe around it. I’d never held hands with a boy before.
    Before my boating trip with Marty Sherwood, I’d never been on a date. It wasn’t that nobody had asked me out, it was just that the high school boys I’d met, with little more on their brains than sex and footbal , held little appeal to me.
    Until now.
    My hand trembled as I reached out. Remember what happened the last time you went out with a boy? a voice inside my head warned. The safe thing to do would be to run back inside, lock my door, and pretend this whole night never happened. Only, that was what I’d been doing every single day since my brother’s death—and look where that got me.
    The coolness of his skin startled me. My breath hitched in my throat when his fingers wove into mine. There was no backing out now.

Chapter 11
    “Thanks for coming with me.”
    I couldn’t answer, could only stare at our fingers knit together so tightly that they resembled a peony closed to the dark. It was strange that instead of clasping hands, he’d chosen to slip his fingers through mine. It was more intimate and—I realized when he pul ed me forward—a more difficult grip to slip out of.
    He smiled once before leading me to the back of the yard and down a thin animal path that twisted beyond the overgrown vegetation and led to the bayou.
    “It means a lot that you trust me,” he said over his shoulder.
    Did I trust him ? There had to be some reason I felt compel ed to fol ow him as he led me behind peeling privacy fences and over fal en trees.
    The path grew narrower. The long grass