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Only to be slapped away by a tiny claw, because they were damned if I was going to mess up their handiwork. I looked up, going a little cross-eyed, and bit my lip. I wondered how, exactly, you got them out? I mean, I liked the style and all, but I was going to need to wash my hair sometime—
“Cassie.”
I looked down to see Mircea leaning over the desk to do something to my hair. Suddenly, my curls were falling around my face again, and the little golden creatures were on the move, trailing back down my neck and arm. And into a black case that I must have accidentally brushed with my hand at some point without realizing it.
I barely realized it now. Because Mircea hadn’t moved, putting him close enough that I could see that I’d been wrong. His eyes when his power wasn’t up weren’t brown. They were cappuccino and cinnamon and gold, with a few flecks of deep green, hedged by thick black lashes any girl would have envied.
/> And plenty probably had, I reminded myself harshly. Because my body was already responding to his nearness, his scent, his breath on my face. He hadn’t come any closer, but he hadn’t sat back down again, either, and for a moment we just stayed like that, unmoving.
And then his lips touched mine and I jerked back, furious with him, and even more so with myself. Damn it all, what did it take? I meant nothing to him—
“You mean everything to me.”
“Stop reading my mind!”
“You’re projecting—”
“I’m doing no such thing!” Or maybe I was; I didn’t care. “Cut it out!”
“I’ll try. It’s not easy to block someone with whom I share blood.”
“I am not your blood,” I snapped, even as the two little marks on my neck pulsed in time with my heart. Among other things.
Damn it, sometimes I could just—
“Cassie, please sit down. I brought you here to talk, not for . . . anything else.”
I didn’t sit down. I couldn’t. I just wanted to get out of there before I did something stupid, because my brain was mad at him—no, my brain was furious—but my body hadn’t gotten the memo. My body didn’t want the memo. My body was busy remembering the feel of those hands and the taste of those lips and the strength of him pressing me down into—
Goddamn it!
“Say what you have to say,” I told him shortly, hugging myself. “It’s been a long night.”
Mircea sat back, and dropped the hand he’d been holding out to me, I don’t know why. He looked like he didn’t, suddenly, either. He decided to use it to run through his hair instead.
His expression was that of a man who’d had a long day, too. Someone who had had too much put on him for too long, and who badly needed a break. Everybody went to Mircea, and everything somehow ended up being his responsibility. I didn’t know how he did it, honestly.
I went to the bar and got us both a drink.
Mircea looked at it ruefully as I carried it back over. “Do I look that bad?”
“We both look that bad.”
“You don’t,” he told me, his fingers brushing mine as he took the heavy glass.
“Mircea—”
“We have to do this sometime,” he said, referring to God knew what. We had about a million things we needed to talk about, because we couldn’t before. For so long, for months, we’d had so many secrets—his wife and Dorina’s existence on his side and Pritkin’s true identity on mine—that we hadn’t been able to say much of anything. We’d had to tiptoe around each other, like two people on a minefield, so scared of putting a foot wrong that we barely moved at all.
And relationships don’t work like that.
“They stagnate like that,” Mircea agreed, reading my mind.
“Stop it,” I told him, but there was no heat behind it this time.
“I’m trying, Cassie,” he told me. “As I tried with us. And I did try—just not enough. I should have told you everything earlier, much earlier. But I was too afraid you’d say no.”
“I haven’t said yes,” I reminded him.
