Page 1 of Mischief

PROLOGUE

Bodul

The phone goes off just past two-thirty in the morning, and I know before I touch it that the life I buried has climbed up out of the ground and is standing at the door.

Tindra's asleep on my chest.

One leg thrown over both of mine, her hand fisted loose in the cotton over my heart, her hair stuck to the sweat between us and caught at the corner of my mouth.

She sleeps the way she does everything, like she owns the ground under her and dares it to shift.

Her weight holds me down to a bed I have no right to be in, in a room in the back of a clubhouse where the president's granddaughter isn’t supposed to be, wrapped around a prospect who isn’t supposed to look at her, much less touch her.

I've spent nine months learning what makes her tick.

The exact weight of her thigh slung over mine.

The heat that pours off the back of her neck when she's deep enough down that nothing in the world can reach her, and the little catch she makes on the inhale to go with it.

Nothing except a phone buzzing face-down on the nightstand.

I don't reach for it.

I lie there and stare at the ceiling and tell myself it's a wrong number.

Maybe a drunk with the wrong contact, anything at all, and the buzzing stops.

I let out a breath I didn't know I was holding, and Tindra murmurs something into my chest that isn't a word.

Then it starts again.

Same rhythm. Same patience.

The demon of my past knows I'm awake now.

And he’ll keep doing this until I answer, because he’s never stopped doing anything until it was done.

I ease her off me by inches.

I've gotten good at this over nine months, sliding out from under a sleeping woman without waking her.

I hate that I'm good at it, hate every skill this thing between us has forced me to build.

I lift her thigh with two fingers under the knee and set it down on the mattress.

I peel her hand off my chest one finger at a time.

She makes a low sound and turns her face into the pillow, reaching into the warm dent where I was.

I do the only thing I can, which is put the pillow in my place so she has something to hold.

She takes it.

She pulls it in against her body and goes still, and I stand there in the dark for one second too long, hating a pillow with my whole chest for getting to stay when I have to go.

I take the phone into the bathroom.

The door shuts softly behind me. The fan goes on so its noise covers whatever's coming, and I look at the screen in the white light off the mirror.