Page 18 of Heart of the Race

“No, Graham,” I promised with a sigh. “There’s nothing.”

“There’s something.” He stepped closer, lifted his hand under my chin to tilt my head back.

“We’ll always be friends; we grew up together. If it wasn’t for Varro and his family, I would have gone from foster home to foster home, bouncing around the system, and who knows what would have happened to me. I owe them a lot.”

“Yes,” he said, his eyes on my mouth.

“It’s what I was thinking of when I started Chameleon, the debt I owed and that I should give back. The whole pay-it-forward thing, right?”

“Sure.”

“But really, me and Varro, we’re not close anymore. We’ve barely spoken since I left a year ago. Our lives are so drastically different. I mean, like, polar opposites. It’s crazy that we could even know each other, really.”

“You’re rambling.”

I was talking too much about something that was supposedly no longer the most important part of my life.

“Brian.”

But so many things had changed in a twelve-month period, and Varro had no idea. “I just don’t want you to think that he’d ever be anyone⁠—”

“Okay.”

“I probably won’t ever see Varro Dacien again.”

He nodded.

“It’s true, you know, even though you’re looking at me very dubiously.”

He appraised me. “You wanted him.”

“Of course I wanted him, he was my first love.”

“But?”

“But he couldn’t love me back, and you can’t be an idiot forever.”

“No,” he agreed before he sighed. “You can’t.”

“What?”

“It’s lucky that you two never got together.”

“Why’s that?” I teased, beaming as he bent toward me.

“Because he’s stunning and so are you. Not fair to the rest of us mere mortals.”

But I knew what I looked like, and even though blond hair and green eyes were appealing on other men, I had never been able to stop traffic, myself. I was more of the plain brown-wrapper variety, nothing like Varro, who turned heads wherever he went. I had often wondered when I was growing up what it was like for him to be that beautiful, what it was like to see the world through Varro’s eyes. It was nice to finally be in a place where it didn’t matter.