Burn for Me (Hidden Legacy #1)(58)

Mad Rogan was spooning me. The thought blazed through my head. I tried to scoot away. My chest met hard rock. My back met an equally hard surface, which had to be his chest. There was nowhere to scoot away to.

“What’s happened?”

“Well, they must’ve rigged an explosive device to cover their exit. It detonated.”

“I get that. Explain the not dying part.” And the spooning part. He was touching me. Oh my God, he was touching me.

“There was no time to escape, so I broke through the floor and pulled it on top of us.”

His voice was quiet, almost intimate. He sounded so reasonable, like it was just an ordinary thing. I broke through some solid marble and then built it into a shelter over us in a split second. No big. Do it every day. Just thinking about the amount of magic it would take to do this made me shiver.

“There was an explosion,” Mad Rogan said. “Some debris fell on top of us. I had to shift things around, but it’s relatively stable now.”

“Could you shift things around so we could escape?”

“I’m spent,” he said, his voice the same measured calm. “Shifting a few thousand pounds of rock drained me. I need time to recover.”

So there was a limit to his power. Good to know that occasionally he was mortal. “Thank you for saving me.”

“You’re welcome.”

My brain finally digested his words. “So we’re trapped underground with the building on top of us.” We were buried alive. Fear welled in me.

“Not all of the building. I’m reasonably certain it’s still standing. I activated the beacon, so my crew is en route. It’s just a matter of getting us out.”

“What if we run out of air?”

“That would be unfortunate.”

“Rogan!”

“We’ve been here for about fifteen minutes. There is probably about twenty cubic feet of air here, about what you would find in an average coffin.”

I would kill him if I ever got out of here.

“There are two of us and your breathing’s elevated, so I would estimate we’d have about half an hour. If we weren’t getting the air from somewhere, we would be feeling the CO2 buildup already.”

I clamped my mouth shut.

“Nevada?” he asked.

“I’m trying to conserve oxygen.”

He chuckled into my hair. My body decided this would be a fine moment to remember that his body was wrapped around mine and his body was muscular, hard, and hot, and my butt was pressed against his groin. Cuddled up by a dragon. No, thank you. Let me off this train.

“If you keep wiggling, things might get uncomfortable,” he said into my ear, his voice like a caress. “I’m doing my best, but thinking about baseball only takes you so far.”

I froze.

We lay still and quiet.

“What is that smell?” he asked.

“It’s my jeans. A bag of food court trash broke when I climbed through the Dumpster.”

A minute passed. Another.

“So,” he said. “You come here often?”

“Rogan, please stop talking.”

He chuckled again. “The air isn’t stale. We’re getting oxygen.”

He was right—the air wasn’t stale. At least we wouldn’t suffocate. Unfortunately that left all the other problems, like being buried alive and being wedged against him.

“Can you turn so you’re not pressed against me?”

“I could,” he said, his voice amused. “But then you would have to lie on top of me.”

My brain said, “NO.” My body went, “Wheee!”

I gave up and lay still.

And waited.

Buried.

With tons of debris on top of us.

If something gave, we’d be crushed. I strained, listening for the slightest noise of things shifting overhead.

Crushed.

With our bones cracking like eggshells under the weight of stone and concrete and . . .

“Why did you enlist in the Army?”

“Simple question, but a complicated answer,” he said. “When you’re a Prime, especially an heir Prime, your life stops being your own once you graduate from college. Certain things are expected. Your specialty is predetermined by your family’s needs. It’s understood that you will complete your education, work to further the family interests, select a mate whose genetic pedigree is most likely to produce gifted children, marry, and have said children, at least one but no more than three.”

“Why not more than three?”

“Because it tends to complicate the family tree and division of assets. It’s that same old version of go to the right school, marry the right person, land the right job. Except in our cases magic dictates everything.

“The system allows for certain leeway, but not much. Instead of working on advanced weapons systems like my father, I could’ve moved into the nuclear reactor business. Instead of marrying Rynda Charles, I could’ve married her sister, or I could’ve imported a bride the way my father did.”

When we got out of here, I’d have to look up Rynda Charles just to see what she looked like.

“My course was predetermined. I was the only child and a Prime. Somewhere around my eighteenth birthday, I realized that I was burning through my free time faster than my peers. If I ever hoped to break free of my extremely comfortable gilded cage, I needed to find someone strong enough to block my family’s influence. The military fit the bill.”