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“Too late for that.”
She snorts through her tears. “Asshole.”
I laugh for just a moment before I catch myself and kill it dead. Truth be told, I should get the fuck out of here immediately. Alarm bells are going off at the back of my head.
But they’re easier to ignore in the face of those tear-stained hazel eyes.
“Tell me about her,” I murmur.
“Mom.” She sighs, smiling through her grief. “Where to start? I have so many things to choose from.”
“Tell me the first one that pops into your head.”
She starts talking immediately, as though the reservoir of memories stored in her head has just been waiting for an excuse to erupt. “When I was about eight, I got pneumonia. It was pretty bad, and I had to be hospitalized for a week. After I was released, I was so weak that I had to stay on bed rest, mostly. So Mom decided that she would start a wall mural for me.” She smiles a bit wider. “She’d bring in new paint cans every morning, and by nightfall, there was a new story sprawled across one part of my wall. She used to sing when she painted. Badly, but it made me laugh. She used to make up stories, too. Some of them even got up there on the mural. I came to love those bed-ridden days. After Dad went off to work and Celine went off to school, it was just Mom and me—making up stories she could paint, singing out of tune together, living off junk food and laughter.” Her eyes connect with mine. “I have this…feeling,” she says, her voice suddenly soft as her face falls. “This feeling like there’s nothing holding me together anymore. That if I fall—there’ll be nothing left to catch me.”
Words leap out of my throat before I can consider just how fucking stupid they are.
“I’ll catch you,tigrionok.”
Fuck.Did I just say that—to my future sister-in-law?
Her eyes waver, but she doesn’t look away. She doesn’t look like she wants to. Her breath tickles the end of my nose. Hazelnuts and vanilla. She’s close enough for me to trace every contour in her lips.
As I watch, they part, ever so slightly. The tiny sliver of blackness between her lips is the edge of a cliff that I absolutely, positively, under no circumstances can allow myself to fall over.
So when I do exactly that—when my lips graze hers—I’m not even sure who to blame. If she pulled me over the edge or if I made the plunge myself. I’m not sure it even matters.
Not when I realize that I would burn the whole world to ash for the sake of a single kiss.
35
ILARION
She’s the one who pulls away.
Her eyes are still swimming with tears, but now, I suspect there’s a different reason for them. “What are you doing?” she croaks, her voice strangled with guilt.
I get to my feet, parsing her expression with the precision of a coroner’s blade. Instinct is telling me that the kiss was both our faults. She’s vulnerable. And I…
I want to say that it was about nothing but her lips, but I can feel the truth becoming more and more obvious in my head.
There was something about this woman that drew me from the second I first saw her. It washer. Strength and vulnerability in one. She fought in one moment and fell to pieces in the next. Fierce and fiercely loyal at the same time.
The fact that she’s beautiful strikes me as a mere afterthought. Icing on the cake, as they say.
Desperation boils in her eyes. Her own guilt screams,Blame him; it’s his fault, all of this. And if I were a better man, I would let her.
But if I were a better man, this whole situation would be a thousand times less fucked-up.
“Nothing you didn’t ask for,” I snarl in answer to her question.
She cringes, but doesn’t stay hunkered in her recoil. There it is again—that balance. “You are engaged to mysister.”
“A fact that you’re just as aware of.”
She sucks in her breath. “This is not about me!” She gets up and circles me with eyes blazing, my littletigrionokon the prowl. “I knew—Iknew—from the beginning that your feelings for her weren’t real.”
“Kissing me was just a way for you to prove your suspicions then?”
