Chapter 28
ANNA
“Wait—” Isobel rushed after Sean as he deserted the suite, leaving Anna squeezed to David’s side and Autumn, face scrunched.
“Get out,” David said.
At first, Anna thought he was speaking to her, so she tried to escape, but he wouldn’t remove his iron arm from her shoulders.
Autumn stepped closer, uncertain, emotions brimming with consternation. “David, it’s not—”
His voice came out clipped. “Get. Out.”
Her mouth clicked shut. A moment passed before she turned toward the main door. Once it closed behind her, a minuscule degree of tension eased from David’s body.
Anna didn’t bother to ask why he’d dragged her here with him—he wouldn’t answer anyway. Instead, she tried to think of something to say, tried to forget the sudden coldness that had overtaken him in the clearing earlier.
I’m always okay, Anna.
But he wasn’t okay, was he? He was cracking ice, holding himself together with sheer willpower.
She didn’t know what this meant for him or how binding his soul to Sean’s would change him.
She hadn’t even known such magic existed.
All she knew was that today David Berkeley’s life had changed irrevocably and for some reason, he wanted her at his side during the fallout.
She waited for his grip to release so she could face him, but once it did, he marched into the sitting room, raking both hands through his hair. “Fuck!”
Anna shadowed him, silent, morbidly fascinated by the shattering of his perpetual ice. A bright mosaic of colors and feelings lived inside this man—a dazzling rainbow she wanted badly to see. Now it burst across her senses, neon edged in sharp shadows.
She flinched from the bombardment, trying and failing to shield herself. Despite the onslaught, she crept closer, just barely resisting the urge to hug him again. The man needed a hug bad. A thousand hugs. A million.
“How can I help?” Her voice was small, barely filling the scant foot of space between them.
Green eyes lifted, expression blank. He took her chin in his hand, holding tight. “You have no idea how dangerous Caden Sidera really is. If you ever again find yourself near him when he’s that angry, you run—don’t walk—away. Do you understand?”
Something tickled her insides. Something like…surprise. “He wouldn’t hurt me.”
David released her, still impassive. “Sean has no clue how lethal he is. Let him find out on someone else.”
Was this concern? Did he care?
She longed to touch him, to offer some sort of comfort.
Something terrible had happened to him, but he was looking out for her, even though she’d upset him at training earlier.
The man was utterly mystifying. Isobel had just hammered deep dents into his already disfigured self-worth, and he was worried about her? How did he have the capacity?
He’d been abused in ways Anna couldn’t fathom, placed in impossible positions, and managed not just to survive but to retain his decency. His empathy. He wore masks to hide it, but he couldn’t kill the considerate person he was deep inside.
She stared at the familiar lines of his face as a newfound respect actualized.
Anna wasn’t sure how to proceed. The wrong remark and he’d shut down like he usually did, finding whatever words he could as slings and arrows against her—his trustiest defense mechanism.
So, she sank onto the cushy sofa, patting beside her in invitation. When he obeyed, a thrill shot down her spine, and she took his hand in hers, holding tightly.
Deep breath. “Look,” she said, “this sucks. It really does. It was a shitty thing she did to you.”
He said nothing. His concentrated stare gouged into the wall while the colorful emotions retreated behind their fortress of ice.
Anna forged on. “But look at it this way. You haven’t lost anything. You’ve only gained something. Maybe you hated him at one point, but it’s obvious you don’t anymore. So use this to your advantage. Sean has a lot of strengths. Maybe you can tap into some of them.”
It took a moment before his gaze crawled across her face and landed on her eyes. “I’ve done nothing to her, and she did this anyway.”
Anna squeezed his hand. “She called you soulless, David. She has ridiculous opinions.”
He froze.
“And wrong opinions,” she added.
His head tilted, curious.
“Being who you are doesn’t make it okay to treat you this way,” she said. “You shouldn’t be persecuted because of the blood that runs in your veins.”
Pain coiled its way through the parts of him she could still feel. A wry smile pulled at his mouth. “Haven’t you noticed? Blood means everything around here.”
She chuffed out an incredulous laugh. “If these people are stupid enough to let your blood scare them, then they don’t deserve you.”
David’s eyes sparked, and suddenly his hand gripped hers back. “They don’t?”
Had she moved? Why were they so close? No, she sat in the same spot. He’d angled himself toward her, narrowing the space between them.
“Who deserves me, then?” His demeanor transmuted into something else. Something focused and intense, a predator preparing to pounce.
Anna’s mouth dried to fluffs of cotton. Her heart stuttered in her chest, tripping along in a strange, fluttery rhythm. It pumped fizzling, unexplainable heat through her body.
“Hmm?” He lifted a lock of her hair, rubbing between two fingers.
Black strands gleamed against his golden skin, and she stared at the contrast, afraid to look into his eyes again.
The crystals lighting the room cast strange shadows, but the Luster remained faithful, glistening about him with magic.
Ever the fairy prince, beckoning her closer.
“I’d really like to know,” he said. “Because earlier you were asking me to keep us a secret as if you were ashamed of having me close.”
Wait…that wasn’t what she said.
“Earlier you said there is no us,” she replied.
His mouth—that dangerous, coercive mouth—curled up at one corner, and Anna felt it like a blow to her chest. “I lied.”
Her breath stuttered.
“So tell me.” His thumb brushed her knuckles. “Are you ashamed?”
She shook her head.
“Do you deserve me?”
“I—um—I’m—”
Summoning her courage, she met his eyes. Her breath vanished from her lungs, and when she tried to refill them, she wasn’t breathing air but him.
Spice and mint, and something dark and merciless. It whispered of temptation and falling from heights she might not survive. The inchoate attraction that had built a rickety home in her heart sharpened into focus and laid down steel girders. It coalesced into a single entity.
Want.
She’d never desired someone this way, had never even felt a smidge of curiosity regarding it. It was like sex hadn’t existed until this moment and now it was the only thing that existed.
Terrified at what it could mean, Anna tried to tell herself it wasn’t as serious as she was imagining. Pixies were capable of these feelings without love involved. Affection was all she needed, and hadn’t she already admitted to liking this man? To respecting him?
A person couldn’t fall in love this quickly. Such ideas were laughable. Fanciful.
He wasn’t even a pixie!
And now she wasn’t sure what to do.
Did he want to—
Should she—
The worst part was the knowledge that David could sense every confusing emotion inside her—the desire, the uncertainty, the warm treacly sensation she feared might be a too-strong attachment growing roots inside her.
He dipped a tad closer. “You don’t have to be nervous, Anna. It’s just me.”
“I can’t help it,” she admitted with a trembly voice. “You make me nervous. You always have.”
The softest smile she’d yet seen on his face only tightened the coiling tension inside her. “We can go slow,” he said. “It isn’t a race.”
It might have been the most tantalizing thing he’d ever done—knowing how she felt in her most intimate places, understanding that he held the upper hand in both experience and emotion, and still yielding all the decisions to her.
He could have seduced her. It would have been easy. She might have even welcomed it. But this wasn’t seduction. This was a man who recognized his own power and chose not to wield it, who set aside his own desires in favor of her comfort.
“You never have to be nervous with me,” David said.
Damn if this dangerous, golden keila wasn’t absolute perfection.
All at once, her misgivings disappeared and the tension snapped. She reached for him, her hand sliding around his neck as she pulled him in for a kiss.
It was nothing like yesterday, that teasing hint of temptation and a barely there graze.
There was nothing slow or sweet about it.
This kiss was flame and freedom, and she dove headfirst into the madness.
He took ravenous handfuls of her thin undershirt, tugging her closer, and her arms flew around his neck, fingers plunging into his gilded hair.
The heat of him was everywhere. His skin. His tongue. His emotions. He was fire and she was kindling, and together they burned.
He pulled until she was flush against him, straddling him on the sofa, but it wasn’t enough. She needed things she didn’t understand. Friction. His weight on top of her. More.
“I want you,” Anna said against his lips, not knowing what to do or how to relieve this deep ache inside.
His hands spasmed on her waist, and he ripped his mouth away to look at her, to study her. “That’s a big decision, pixie girl.”
She shook her head.
Because it wasn’t. She trusted her body—it had never let her down—and her body wanted this man. It had chosen him.
His hands cupped her neck as he gazed into her eyes, thumbs grazing down the column of her throat. “Are you sure?”
She nodded, trying to breathe past her swollen heart.
“We don’t make sense, you and me,” David said.
Anna gripped his wrists. “We make more sense than anything else in my life.”
Whatever he saw in her gaze must have burned his reservations to ash because he stood with her still wrapped around him and took her to a room down a hall, kissing her as if he needed the air from her lungs to breathe.