He stops walking and faces me. His voice goes soft. “Excuse me?”

“You say a lot of words that mean nothing. Bullies are everywhere. Everyone needs safety. Your job is to put out fires. You speak in generalities because they make you feel… What? Wise? Better than everyone? Like some kind of sideshow prophet?”

“Is that what you want me to do? Tell you your future?”

Now he’s pissing me off. He has as many red flags as the tents in this circus, with his vague words and his evasive answers and his frustrating, beautiful, charming smile. “No, I want you to tell me something real. Something specific.”

“Fine.” He runs a hand through dark hair, making it spill over his forehead. I didn’t realize it was held in check by so little, by the tilt of his head, by the lack of his frustration. “You want something real? Something specific? Well, specifically, it pisses me off that the circus can’t have animals when they got sirloin steaks for walking in a few circles and better health care than most people get. Now we have people working through injuries to feed their kids, and that’s supposed to be more fucking humane? Is that what you want to hear?”

“Yes,” I breathe, because it’s horrifying, all of it, but it’s real. And I crave something real.

He steps close–close enough that I can see a starburst scar on his left cheek and the gold striations in his green eyes.

Before he’d been like a marble statue of handsomeness, Photoshopped by the sun into the abstract. Now he’s close enough that I can see dark stubble, close enough that I can smell a faint masculine musk.

“Specifically,” he says, his voice lower now, “the dark peach of your lips makes me want to kiss you. Even though that should be the last thing on my mind after seeing those fuckers hurt you.”

Shock holds my feet to the earth. If some guy at the coffee shop threatened to kiss me I’d probably slap him. But I have no idea how to react when this man speaks to me this way. My mouth suddenly feels awake, as if it wants his lips.

I asked for something real. Something specific. He’s giving it to me.

“Specifically,” he says, touching a hand to my sternum–above my breasts, below my neck, a place both innocuous and impossibly intimate. “The bruises on your neck make me want to track down those assholes, beat them to shit, and drown them in a fucking swamp. I’m sure you have swamps around here somewhere, right? Most small towns do.”

Now my hand goes to my throat, not to feel the pain or the filth, but to shield myself. How the hell am I going to hide this at the coffee shop? I’m fucked.

“I don’t get involved with townies, so why the fuck am I even talking to you?”

He sounds pissed off, which ironically I like best of all. It’s the realest of real, because I don’t want to be talking to him either. He’s going to be gone… When? Tomorrow? In a few days? Next week? Maisie didn’t tell me how long the circus would stay, but it won’t be forever.

And then I’ll know what it felt like, to talk to someone interesting. I wouldn’t be able to do it again. Not ever. Not fucking ever.

“I don’t get involved with anyone,” I say. “So why the fuck am I talking to you?”

He leans down and kisses me. It’s a soft kiss, questioning, exploring. I answer without meaning to, stretching onto my toes to meet him. He groans, a soft rumble that makes electric arousal arc through me. The swipe of his tongue across my lips makes me gasp.

Someone rounds the corner.

Logan pulls back, letting hot air rush between us.

A man stands in sharp clothes that contrast with the dust surrounding us. His shirt is crisp white, his slacks black and tailored with a red velvet stripe down the sides. It’s a costume of some sort, but on him it looks more like a bespoke tuxedo.

Handsome features are dark with consternation. Black hair falls over his forehead in perfect disarray. Faint scruff on his jaw lends the slightest air of disrepute to his formality. Dark eyes take us in with a flare of interest. Just as quickly, I’m dismissed.

“It’s Alessandra,” he says.

I don’t know who Alessandra is, but her name charges the energy in the air.

Logan frowns. “Where?”

“Her tent.”

He looks at me, but I’m already backing away. “Time to lose money on the ring toss,” I say. “Or who knows, maybe I’ll be getting a brand new phone tonight.”

This is goodbye, come in a matter of seconds. Though he lingers, unwilling. Unable?

“Logan,” the man says with a sharp tone. He doesn’t like him lingering for me, though he can’t even know the gossip about me. He doesn’t know my heritage. It’s just the existence of me that this stranger finds offensive.

Logan gives him a sharp look of reprimand. Then a resigned nod.

“Sienna.” My name pulses with regret, longing, and finality.

Then he’s gone.

I should have listened to those red flags. Then I wouldn’t know what it feels like to have him kiss me. I wouldn’t be haunted by the memory, destined never to find it again.