His gaze dropped to her bloody shirt. “Okay. Yeah. Whatever you want.”
Anna’s posture loosened, and she sat back on her heels. He approached the cot as he would a firing line, dread staying his feet. She scooted to the very edge, gaze locked on his.
Despite it all, his hands were steady as he took her face in a gentle hold, his thumbs swiping over soft, tear-stained cheeks. “Ready?”
She nodded.
David soaked the magic into his voice, but when he spoke, it emerged cold, like sugar ice crystals. “You—you don’t love me, do you?”
Her head tilted into his touch as she succumbed to his magic. “I do.”
He forced more power through his vocal cords. “No, you don’t.”
“I do,” she said, tone more certain.
He tried a different tack. “No, that’s not right. You’re a pixie. You wouldn’t fall for akeila, would you?”
She rose slowly to her knees, drawn by his magic. “I think I would. If he was a good man.”
An invisible blade jabbed straight through his ribs at that nuggetof truth, but he ignored it. “That doesn’t matter because you didn’t fall for me, did you?”
She stared into his eyes, unblinking. “I did.”
“When?”
“I—I don’t remember.” Her voice turned dreamy. “Why don’t I remember?”
He latched onto that. “If you don’t remember, then how can it be real? Maybe it was a dream.”
She fell into bewildered silence.
“You don’t even remember why you slept with me. Do you?”
Confusion knotted her brow. “I—don’t know.”
“You were just curious,” he said. “Remember?”
“I— Yeah. I do remember.”
“It wasn’t because you loved me.”
The tiniest smile lifted her lips. “It was,” she said as if she’d only just recalled. “Remember that kiss? It was its own kind of magic.”
Fucking hell.Her tenderness was a delicate sort of torture. “It was,” he said, brushing the sugar over every cadence. “But it wasn’t love, was it?”
The confusion on her face traveled a steady road into doubt.
“Your heart was never broken,” he said.
Anna’s lips parted and she blinked a handful of times. “I think…it was.”
His thumbs grazed her cheeks again, and he ignored the pain in his own chest as he soaked more magic into his voice, enough to make him dizzy. “No, it wasn’t. Because you never loved me.”
“I didn’t?” she asked as if she didn’t believe him.
“We had some fun, and then we stopped, right? I think it was your idea to stop.”
“It was,” she said, voice slurred as she filled in her own details. “I thought it was best. People would have talked about us.”
