Morganna was one of the girls complaining most vociferously about needing her phone because she didn’t have a watch. But if she thought she was getting it back in the middle of Mr. Barron’s class she was sadly mistaken. Instead, the Biology teacher picked up a battered cardboard box and started handing out rusty, antique looking stopwatches to people with their hands up.
“You have a watch?” Bran asked me. His deep voice was still freaking me out.
I pulled back my sleeve and displayed the modestly pretty silver watch my mom had gotten me for my last birthday. It wasn’t an expensive brand but we didn’t believe in luxury items in my house—we couldn’t afford to since it was just Mom and me. The watch was pretty, though, and I wasn’t ashamed to let him see it.
“Good,” Bran said, showing me his own watch—a chunky leather and metal thing with a face that appeared to show about fifty time zones. It was totally the watch a science nerd would wear, which made me like him a little better. I was kind of a science nerd myself.
“Okay, now here’s how it works, people,” Mr. Barron intoned in a bored voice. “Using your first two fingers, find the pulse in the thumb-side of your partner’s wrist. Count the number of beats you feel in thirty seconds time. Then multiply that by two to get their resting heart rate. Do this three times each and take the average. Write it all down and then list some activities you think would lower or raise a person’s heart rate.”
“Any activities?” Morganna Starchild gave Elian Darkwing a flirtatious, side-long look and giggled.
“Keep it G rated, please Miss Starchild,” Mr. Barron said dryly. “A good rule of thumb is, if you wouldn’t want your parents to read it, then don’t write it. Okay? Everybody got it? Good—go to it.”
He went back to the front of the room and settled himself behind his desk with a newspaper and a cup of coffee, leaving the class to fend for itself.
Mr. Barron was not exactly what you’d call a morning person.
“Okay, well I guess we’d better get started,” I said. Getting out a piece of notebook paper and a pen, I got ready to go. “You want to go first or should I?” I asked Bran.
“You go.” He held out his wrist to me and I took it awkwardly between my thumb and my first two fingers, feeling for the pulse.
Touching him this way gave me a strange little tingle, though I didn’t know why. I tried to keep my head down and focus on my watch face but it took me several tries to get an accurate count.
“You okay?” he asked at last.
“Hmm?” I looked up at him and the strangest thing happened. For just an instant my eyes focused on his face and I saw…well, I don’t know what I saw but it wasn’t the Bran O’Connor I knew. The face I somehow glimpsed looked like an angel or a god—high cheekbones, blazing blue eyes, a sensuous mouth—
I gasped and ripped my hand away from his wrist. What the hell just happened?
“Are you all right?” Bran’s deep voice sounded concerned. He leaned closer to me and for the first time, I noticed his scent.
It was amazing. He smelled fresh and wild, like cedar wood and salt from the ocean, and some other, wild, dark spice I couldn’t classify.
Like his voice, his scent didn’t seem to match the rest of him. Of course, I didn’t know what I had expected him to smell like—maybe glue from putting together model airplanes or chemicals from playing with a chemistry set? I don’t know.
It sounds crazy but I couldn’t help thinking if I just closed my eyes and listened to his voice and smelled his scent, I could almost imagine him as someone else. Maybe the god-like being I’d somehow glimpsed for just an instant when I touched him.
Which was nuts.
“Are you okay?” Bran asked again.
I kept my eyes open and answered him as calmly as I could.
“Sorry, I just got a little, uh, shock. Like, static electricity—didn’t you feel it?”
“As a matter of fact, I did,” he murmured in that soft, deep voice of his. I didn’t want to think about how it made me feel so I stuck out my arm at him.
“Here. You’re turn,” I said.
He took my hand in both of his and I found that his touch was surprisingly warm and gentle. My body