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“You shouldn’t test me,” I growled. “I don’t have time for your fucking games.”
Henrietta shot me a sidelong look as she crouched behind her desk at the safe.
“I’m a fae,” she reminded me. “It’s kind of in my nature.”
Briar pursed her lips and stared at the ground, shamed by the incident, but she wisely said nothing until I had collected my money in full.
“Don’t even think about coming back to me for another loan,” I warned Henrietta. “You and I have no more business.”
“Ash!”
I took Briar by the arm and guided her out of the brothel, back toward the street to look for Royce.
“I’m sorry!” she breathed, turning to look at me in the light of the double moon. “I had no idea the tea was laced.”
“That’s why I sent you in there,” I chuckled, unperturbed. “I had a suspicion she was either putting a spell on the others or poisoning them in some way. It’s the only way she could have gotten away with what she was doing.”
Briar stopped and looked at me. “Why didn’t you warn me?” she asked.
“I wasn’t going to let anything happen to you, Briar,” I sighed. “Haven’t you figured that out already?”
A slow smile formed on her lips, and she reached up to cup my cheeks with her hands.
“We make a pretty good team, don’t we?” she breathed.
My own grin faded, and I pushed her arms away. “No. We don’t,” I snapped, spinning to march down the street in search of the SUV. “I wish you’d get that through your head that we are not going to be together.”
“That’s not how you make it seem when we’re together at night,” she protested, rushing to keep up with me, her hand slipping into mine.
I stopped abruptly and glowered at her.
“That’s all it is, Briar! Sex. And if you can’t accept that, then we should stop doing what we’re doing.”
She threw her head back defiantly and peered at me. “So if I decided to work for Henrietta Lane, you wouldn’t care?” she snapped. “I could come here and sell myself, and that wouldn’t matter to you?”
“Go ahead,” I hissed, furious that she would suggest such a thing. “I don’t own you.”
She recoiled as if I’d struck her, and a stab of guilt pierced through me, but I didn’t recant my sentiment. I wished she would stop looking at me like that, with that longing that made me want to forget about the curse hanging over my head and weighing me down, preventing me from ever entertaining a “normal” life—at least not for another twenty years.
But the thought of anyone else touching Briar made me sick to my stomach. I just couldn’t do anything about it if that was the life she chose. How could I tell her what to do with her life when I couldn’t possibly claim her in the way I wanted?
“Come on,” I growled, marching onward again, trying to outrace her forlorn expression. “Royce is waiting for us.”
She didn’t respond as she followed me, but I could feel her disappointment.
I needed to contact Avalon and see how his research was coming along. It was a long shot, but if Briar was going to hang around, I was going to need all the help I could get.
Chapter18
Briar
The following day, I made myself as scarce as I could. I didn’t spend the night in Ash’s suite as I had been, and I slept poorly, tossing and turning until dawn, his words echoing in my mind.
Why does he keep pushing me away? Am I that undesirable to him that he just wants me for sex?
I knew I had told him that it didn’t have to be more than that, but I couldn’t deny that I had real feelings for him now, ones that I would never have believed I could have felt three weeks earlier. He was a part of me, growing inside me minute by minute.
A cold sweat broke out over my forehead in the morning, and I sat up, dizzy and shaking. Stumbling to the bathroom, I barely made it before I retched violently into the toilet.
