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Santiago moved to the back of the bar along with Zach. Together they pulled out a crowd of glasses. Zach opened the small fridge, and a bottle of Dom Perignon appeared. A pop followed.
“How nice,” Parisa said. She left his side without even looking at him, as though she’d forgotten he was here.
If he hadn’t been on guardian duty the f**k if he would have stayed in this room. All right, he would have drunk the toast with the boys then to hell with this female. Inaccessible. No f**king shit.
When the glasses were passed around, Luken held his aloft. “To Parisa, who kicked major butt today.”
All the voices joined together, except for Medichi’s. He drank and fumed. He ignored Marcus and Kerrick. He sure as hell didn’t look at Parisa, though she turned back at him and smiled.
Then she frowned. Good.
He drained his glass and slapped it on the bar. “We need to get back,” he stated.
She faced him now, her back to the warriors, a question in her eyes. One by one the men folded out of the Cave, heading to the Borderlands. Back to making war. Each time, a little breeze flowed in his direction, moving wisps of her hair forward around her face.
She glanced behind her and when the last of them left—Marcus offering her a salute—she turned back and said, “What’s wrong?”
“That you even have to ask should give you some kind of clue, Madame Warrior.”
Her pretty arched brows rose. “You’re angry that I want to train as a warrior?”
“You don’t even have the smallest clue what you’ll be up against.”
“You’re right. I don’t.”
Okay, he hadn’t expected that. “The Female Militia Training Camps are like Mortal Earth boot camp on crack. The women are hard-core. Simply put, you’re not.”
“You’re right, I’m not.”
He blinked and let out an exasperated sigh. “Then you shouldn’t be going. You shouldn’t even be thinking about a career in the military.”
“I would have agreed with you yesterday.”
He threw up his arms. “You saw a handful of seconds of military action and you think you can be a warrior? Look at you.” He gestured with a hand up and down her body, his gaze pausing more than once on the size of her chest.
“So women with big boobs can’t serve?” Now she scowled.
“I didn’t say that.”
“You were looking at my chest, though. Admit it.”
“You don’t look like a goddamn warrior.”
She nodded, her lips pursed. “What do I look like, Antony? A vampire? An ascender? A woman who has to mount her wings at least once every ten days or she goes insane? A woman who just spent the last three months in captivity? A woman who before her ascension was hiding in a library because life had kicked her around too much? And exactly how many of those things make it bad or wrong for me to decide making war in a world at war is the right thing for me to do?”
“You haven’t thought this through and not once did you ask, What do you think, Antony?”
At that, she released a small sigh. She even frowned a little. “What do you think, Antony?”
“Don’t f**king patronize me. You don’t give a good goddamn what I think. You already told Madame Endelle what you plan to do. That you didn’t give me a second’s thought summed it up for me.”
“I didn’t give you a second’s thought? All I thought was—I want to do what Antony does. I want to lay it on the line every day or night of my life so long as Rith lives, so long as Greaves lives. I want to battle beside my man. I want him to be proud of me. I was such a mouse when I arrived here, when Havily and Marcus found me in my courtyard, naked and in full-mount and Crace arrived? There wasn’t a damn thing I could do to stay alive in that situation. So, yeah, I did think of you, that I wanted to be just like you.”
Shit. By the end of this speech, her eyes had filled with tears and she put three fingers against her lips in true Parisa fashion.
He took a step toward her but she lifted her other hand, palm flat out in his direction. “Don’t.” She lifted that hand a little higher, then vanished. He still couldn’t believe she already had the ability to fold.
He traced her back to the villa. Thank God she’d had enough sense to go there and not anywhere else.
By the time his battle sandals touched down on the hardwood floor of his villa foyer, she was headed to the south rooms on a quick march. Now she was pissed. Fine.
He followed after her. By the time she’d passed through the formal living room and he was just about to catch up with her, she turned around and shook a finger at him. He stopped dead in his tracks.
“You don’t want a long-term relationship with me,” she cried. “You’ve told me you don’t. Just remember that.”
Had he said those words to her? “You don’t, either. You don’t want the breh-hedden. You’re inaccessible.”
“Not like I used to be but you’re right. I don’t want to be bonded to you. I don’t want to be this close to anyone. But what’s worse, what is killing me, is that I really, really don’t want to lose you.” Again, her fingers found her lips and her eyes filled with tears.
Ah, shit. “You don’t?”
She put her hand on her forehead. “No. I really don’t.”
Just how far down this road were they anyway?
Oh … God.
“I don’t want to lose you, either,” he said. And that was the truth, apparently for both of them.
“Great,” she said flapping her arms once up and down. “So what do we do? I didn’t want this.”
“Me, neither.”
“Oh, Antony, what are we going to do? Everything is happening so fast and I’m still so raw about Rith and being held captive. I’m exhilarated that we brought the women home but now I’m horrified that there are twenty-one other facilities like Fiona’s.”
He moved close to her and put his arms around her. “Hey,” he whispered against the top of her head. Even though they were fighting, that sweet scent of tangerines got to him all over again. “Ease down, Warrior.”
She chuckled. Her arms slipped around his waist, finding a place beneath the center back strap of the weapons harness.
“You smell so good,” she whispered against his chest.
Though desire rippled through him, he didn’t act on it. Was this their first fight? Probably wouldn’t be the last. Did he want to live without her? Could he bear her being gone day and night for weeks while she trained at the local camps?
