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“It does,” I whisper. Then I cave. “I know you’re one of the busiest men alive, and I can see in your men’s eyes they’re surprised to see you home for dinner every day.” It’s only there for a moment, but I never miss it, their puzzlement. Heat creeps into my cheeks. “I thought maybe it was because talking to me was entertaining.”
“Entertaining?” His tone and his gaze hypnotize me. “It’s riveting.”
I let loose a girlish chuckle that I’m ashamed of a second later. I clear my throat before I say, “I’ve been talking too much. We both know that’s the last thing a girl should do if she wants to be riveting.”
Zayne is a good listener, to say the least, or rather a skilled one. He knows how to make people comfortable talking, spilling the important stuff without even realizing they’re doing it.
“You’re amazingly skilled with people, much more than I expected. I imagine that took a lot of practice.” I tilt my head. “Did you use your talents on Kelly, too?”
“Kelly never intrigued me as much as you do,” he murmurs.
When the hell did I slide so much closer to him? He’s sitting in the same spot, so it was clearly me that ate up the distance between us. I straighten my back and place the untouched glass of wine on the coffee table. When I set my hand back on my knee, I pray he can’t see it trembling. Suddenly I feel silly in my sweatpants and fluffy socks paired with a tank top, the lacy margins of my bra showing over the rim. What was I trying to do, be seductive?
“I like the way you play with your hair when you talk,” Zayne says, running his fingers through a few strands of my hair, the scent of shampoo wafting in the air. I’ve been putting on make-up every day though I stayed inside, but I’ve been telling myself it wasn’t in order to look good for him. It was a lie.
“And you didn’t like the way Kelly played with hers?” Jealousy forks my tongue with every word.
His grin widens, and it’s so damn seductive I want to bite him. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say you’re jealous.”
“But you do know better,” I retort, desperate to save some face. It’s enough that I’ve drifted so much closer to him, practically inviting him to put his hands on me. “I’m not here of my own free will, after all.”
His eyes shutter. “Then why insist on the topic?”
His fingers stop threading through my hair, which leaves me feeling cold. I close my arms around myself.
“It’s just that the more we talk, the more you learn about me, but I still know basically nothing about you.” I look back at the endless bookcase looming behind us like a portal to a universe of arcane knowledge. “Your taste in books is some indication of who you are, but basic facts are still a mystery. Like, where does your interest in reading come from? Your mom or your dad? Are they still together? Are they even still alive? Do you have siblings?” My eyes fall to his chest. The scars aren’t visible, yet in my mind, they’re as vivid as it gets. “Even though...”
“Even though what?” His tone is soft, inviting me to speculate.
“They can’t be still together and alive, or, if they are, they must have a seriously dysfunctional relationship.” He says nothing, giving me space to elaborate my theory, so I do. “Maybe you don’t have a relationship with them at all. I would say maybe you left home very early. Early enough that you were barely more than a kid when those scars were inflicted on you. That was torture that stretched over a period of time, and there was no one around to protect you.” I glance over my shoulder at the bookcase again, my eyes narrowing as ideas pass through the filter of my mind and then come out through my mouth. “I’d rather argue you had an absent father, which allowed you to idealize the concept if those books are any indication. It’s probably why being responsible is an essential concern for you.”
I narrow my eyes until they’re little more than slits. “As for motherhood, I’m starting to doubt you ever knew a mother’s love. It’s not that you lack interest in that, but you pursue it rather mechanically. Like a child whose needs had been ignored for so long that they atrophied.” I shrug. “But of course, I might be dead wrong.”
He keeps staring at me with that arresting blue gaze. My arms clamp harder around me. “I hope I’m not very far off,” I manage. “Or that I’m not trampling your rose garden if your relationship with your mother was, you know, if I got it all wrong, or if I–”. I’m babbling, damn it.
Zayne takes his time inspecting my face with a mixture of bafflement and something else I can’t put my finger on. He leans in closer, and I sit up straighter, thinking this is it, he’s going to kiss me. But what he does is stand up and walk to the bookcase. He’s still gazing up toward the upper shelves as he says to me,
“The things you see, wild flame. How do you do it?” He speaks calmly, but there’s a trace of wonder in his tone.
I lick my lips, shifting where I sit. I’m breathing faster, all because of the way he looked at me before he stood up, of how I thought he was going to touch me again.
“It’s nothing special, really,” I reply. “Just observation and maybe some behavioral psychology.”
“Then Priest was right,” Zayne hums, pushing his hands into the pockets of his slacks. I ignore the mention of the clergyman, my eyes falling to his corded forearms, the sleeves of his shirt rolled up. The urge to lick his skin pools in my womb. It hits me that he rarely ever shows his forearms because of the scars above his wrists.
He turns to look down at me, a tortured god.
“You say you want to know about my past,” he murmurs, “but that would come at a cost. We could take the first step tonight, but you would have to declare yourself willing to pay the price. And it’s not a declaration you can take back.”
I swallow hard. “What is the cost?”
I didn’t think his gaze could become any more psychotic, but an unnatural will focuses it even further, deepening the connection as he says,
“You’ll have to stay with me forever. There’s no way you can know this and ever leave my side.”
I would start laughing nervously under any other circumstances, but not now, not with the lethal way he stares at me. I look up in expectation, not even breathing. Fuck me, he means every word.
“If I say no–” I clear my throat and straighten my spine before I pull myself together and continue. “If I say no, do I get to leave? Now?”
