I nodded, examining his profile.
He really was handsome, built from a wet dream. Once again, he appeared more mortal, more vulnerable. It might have been the fluffy messiness of his usually slick hair, or the dressing gown, but yeah. I wanted to give him a hug.
Damn. Guilt jabbed at me again. “Silvanus, I?—”
“If you’re about to apologize, don’t. What’s done is done. I have no reason to be angry with you.”
“But you do. I’m your enemy, remember?”
His lips twitched, hinting at a smile. “Do enemies always behave like this?”
Good point. “I guess not.”
“Then we aren’t enemies,” he added. “Although I’m unsure what that means.”
“Agreed.” I sipped more tea.
He folded his arms, keeping those scarlet peepers on the window. “I behaved irrationally. You owe me nothing. We’ve lived our lives on either side of the divide, steeped in hate, having our own senses of right and wrong. When you learned of the attack, you wanted me dead. You still might.”
There went the twinge in my heart again. “I don’t want you dead.”
He offered up a ghost of a smile before continuing. “Aidan has broken everything.” He shook his head. “Let’s not go over that again. All I want to say is I think we should define what we are. It would be better for us moving forward.”
I took my feet off the coffee table, sitting forward. “Absolutely. We can’t keep going off on each other and then getting off with each other, right?”
Slowly, he turned to face me and dropped his hands, revealing a wider gap in the top of his dressing gown. It’d crept open, a decent exposure of his flesh on display.
“It doesn’t serve us well.” Why did he have to make his sentence sound so sexual?
I averted my hungry eyes, focusing on my tea. “We have to ignore it.”
Straight away, I knew it wouldn’t be healthy. But what did it mean that I was attracted to the vampire king? That I wanted some sort of fuckbuddy relationship with him to replace the one I’d had with Hal?
And why was I starting to care about his safety?
Thinking of Hal got me shaking, every hair on my body stirring.
“I don’t get it,” I seethed, putting my mug on the table. “He came to get me but left me to die?” I hunched forward, head between my legs. “What bullshit. He doesn’t care about me. He’s using me as an excuse and…and…”
Oh, man. I couldn’t handle this.
Numbness time was officially over, the real world was crashing down on my head.
I got to my feet, hopping from foot to foot, shaking my hands. “Fuck.”
“Breathe, Paris.”
“I’m breathing. I’m breathing. I’m breathing.”
Hal as Aidan, or Aidan as Hal. Whatever. The moment Silvanus told me, confirming what I’d already guessed, dread formed an iron ball in my belly. But I’d been ignoring it with tea, afterglow, and stupidity. That dread finally swelled, taking up more space now.
As it should. Because we were facing a lot of hell in our futures, and we had to be ready.
Fortifying myself with steel, I folded my arms. “We have to remember who we’re up against. Focus on him, focus on the truth. Clear our minds of bullshit.” I straightened my spine. “Whatever we’ve been feeling, we snuff it out. Distractions will get us killed.”
He watched me, staying silent.
Don’t look at me like you want to fuck on this coffee table!“Don’t you think?”
