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“Um…would you like me to?”
“I’d like for us to be able to have a conversation without risking a neck sprain. So, yes.”
I pull the chair out and sit down next to her. There’s still a fair amount of distance between us, both literal and metaphorical, but it’s closer than I thought I would ever get.
“I’ve been doing a lot of thinking,” she admits. “I had to stop, actually. My head was starting to hurt.” She drums her fingers against the tabletop. “Where is the coffee?”
“Semyon just put on a fresh pot,” I say. “I’ll get you some.” I leap to my feet to fill a mug and bring it back to her on a tray with a pot of cream and sugar.
She looks at the cream and the sugar. “You remembered.”
“Of course. ‘The sweeter, the better.’”
Just when I think she’s on the cusp of a smile, she sighs. “I had this headache that I couldn’t get rid of. So I decided to go for a walk. Of course, that’s not exactly easy when you have four gigantic bodyguards trailing you.”
“Four? Since when?”
She rolls her eyes. “Ilarion can be excessive sometimes.”
“He wants you to be safe.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know. Good intentions and all that. It makes it so much harder to hate him.”
“If it’s hard to hate him, maybe you just, um, don’t want to hate him at all?”
She shoots me an annoyed glance. “That would make things easier for you, wouldn’t it?”
“Celine—”
She sighs and shakes her head. “No, no. Please don’t apologize again. I didn’t come here to give you a hard time.”
“You could. Maybe you should. I deserve it.”
She pulls the mug of coffee toward her and adds the creamer and one teaspoon of sugar. It’s the same way that Mom used to drink hers.The sweeter, the better. Life is bitter enough as it is.
“‘Deserve,’” Celine echoes in a melancholy murmur. “Who’s to say who deserves what anymore?” She sips her coffee and glances at me out of the corner of her eyes. “I asked Ashton to meet me at the park, you know.”
My eyebrows leap up on my forehead. “Y-you did?”
She nods. “I didn’t really think about it. I was lonely, I wanted to talk to someone, and he was the only one I could think of to call.”
“I’m glad you did.”
She abandons her mug and folds her hands over her chest. “We sat under the trees and talked for hours. Right up until the sun went down. Then we went for dinner.”
“With all four bodyguards in tow?”
She laughs, the tiniest hint of a smile creeping onto her face. “Just a happy little six-some, yeah. He didn’t so much as touch me, but still, I felt, it felt like… I’m not sure how to describe it.”
I hazard an easy guess. “Like electricity all over your body. Like you’re baking in a sun that only you can feel.”
Celine’s eyes go wide. “Yes, exactly like that.” Then her face falls and she shakes her head slowly from side to side. “I wanted to stay away from love for a while,” she admits. “But as it turns out, I don’t think I have the power to fight this.”
“No,” I say in a small voice. “I understand completely.”
“You’re trying to say that this is how you feel with Ilarion?”
“No, I’m not saying anything at all,” I tell her quickly. “I’m not justifying what I did or how I chose to deal with it. You have every right to be angry with me. You have every right to hate me.”
