79. Summer #3
The stranger stops just before the doors to the ballroom and turns to look at me. “Stay with me tonight.” It’s not quite a question, not quite a demand, but something in between.
“What?” I ask, not because I didn’t hear him, but to buy myself some time.
“Stay with me. In my room.”
“I . . .” Fuck. “I don’t know . . .”
He pulls me close, and my body immediately molds to his.
“Yes, you do,” he says, and his voice is so low, so dark, so mysterious that if he told me to drop to my knees and lick his shoe at this moment, I probably would.
My breath hitches, and he glides his fingers along my lower back.
“This dress is driving me wild. Is that what you were hoping for?”
“Yes.” The answer slips out, the bare truth offered freely to him.
“I can already picture it in shreds on my floor,” he says, slipping his hand over my ass to fist the satin in his hand.
“Yes,” I gasp, my breath catching as desire pools in my stomach. My legs feel like jelly, and my stomach flutters uncontrollably. Every time he touches me, my body tries to realign to his desires, his needs, his wants. “I’ll stay with you,” I say, barely a whisper.
He leans down and hovers his lips over mine. “Good girl.”
I flick my tongue over my bottom lip and stretch toward him, but with a last caress of my ass, he steps back.
Placing his hand back on the small of my back, he dips his fingers beneath my dress and guides me through the ballroom to our table.
Rafe and Alice are both missing, and I look around, a little concerned.
The stranger takes advantage of my distraction and pulls me down onto his lap.
He leans in to whisper, “Alice is making out with a shifter.” He points her out in a corner of the room. “And Rafe has run off with a phoenix.”
“Rafe did what?” I ask, leaning back to look at him, my brow quirked .
“He’s fine,” he says, running his hand up my thigh. His fingers tease open the slit to play with the chain, his touch teasing against my bare skin. “There was something else you wanted to discuss. Wasn’t there?” he asks.
I meet his gaze, trying not to let his fingers distract me. “Yes, but not here.”
“Why not?”
“I want to do it when we’re alone.”
He lifts a brow and looks around. “Are you hungry?”
“No,” I say a little too quickly, a little too eagerly.
He smirks and easily lifts me into his arms as he stands. “I can order you food later,” he says, striding from the hall and toward the elevator.
We’re both silent on the walk through the corridors, and the tension ramps up with his every step.
I can’t pull my gaze from him, not even for a second, and he seems to be struggling as well, his eyes meeting mine again and again.
Before I realize where we are, he’s opening the door to his suite and walking into the room.
Slowly, he lowers me to my feet, and it takes me a moment to realize I’m standing a little taller than usual.
I look down to see that his bed is on a raised platform.
He still towers over me, just not as much as usual.
“What did you wish to discuss?” he asks, resting his hands on my hips.
I slowly unclasp my hands from around his neck and slide them down his chest. “Did you kill Torin?” I ask.
He goes unnaturally still, his every muscle locking up. “Why are you asking me that?”
“I heard a rumor,” I say, watching him. Even his gaze has hardened, but I am beginning to learn his expressions, and I know he’s worried about how I’ll react.
“Torin is clever.” Clever may not be the word, but he is a survivor.
“It would take someone smarter, more cunning, more powerful to get to him.”
He watches me for a long, torturous moment of silence before saying, “He was living in Camelot.”
My heart skips and then starts to pound as I fight back an instinctive panic. I release a shaky breath I didn’t know I was holding until spots formed at the edges of my vision. He places his hand on my hip, and I’m not sure if it’s to steady me or keep me from running.
“Once I found out he was trying to forge acceptance papers to get past the Avalon boundary, it was easy enough to make him run.” He drags his thumb along my hip in an almost soothing caress.
“And I did make him run, along with every one of his friends who tried to hide him from me. They all paid the price, and then you told me the story,” he says, stroking my hip again.
It occurs to me that he thinks I need reassurance, but he couldn’t be more wrong.
“That was when I finally let him stop running.” He pauses for a long moment, his eyes dark and full of danger. “The last words he heard were yours.”
“He’s dead?” I ask, lifting my chin, my face completely expressionless.
He searches my eyes before he nods. “His friends too. The last one very recently.”
He expects me to run, to run from him and never look back. To fear him.
He’s wrong.
“Tell me how you did it,” I say, and as a quiver of tension goes through him, I wonder if this is the first time I have actually surprised him.