you be interested in dating me if our lives were appropriately arranged to do so?”
“They’re not,” she said flatly.
He watched her reflection. She walked over to sit at the edge of the bed and put her head in her hands.
“Because I would date you,” he said quietly. “I would see you every opportunity you would let me. I would go with you to the doctor appointments, sit in on every ultrasound, listen to the baby’s heartbeat with you. I would make love to you in the morning while we shut out the rest of the world, and I would kiss the back of your neck while you cooked us breakfast.”
He had done that in New Orleans. He could tell the moment she remembered it as her head lifted.
She wiped her face and whispered, “What do you want from me?”
“I want a timeline,” he said immediately. “I want a negotiation. We’ve both said things in moments of high emotion, and now I want to know what it means. You’re right. You do deserve someone who always puts you and the baby first, and I want the opportunity to apply for the position. If it were a matter of simply quitting my job, I would have already done so and moved across the country, but I have five coven members who depend on me. We’ve all suffered terrible injuries from the individual we’re hunting. They lost people they loved to him—a wife, a daughter, a fiancée, coworkers, parents—and I’m the one who convinced them to join me on this quest. I owe them something, Molly. I don’t think I’d be the kind of man you would want to be with if I just abandoned them.”
“Okay,” she said, sounding calmer. “I can see how important that is, and you’re right. I wouldn’t think much of anyone who could drop those obligations and run, so I understand why you wanted to talk.”
The pinched tension between his shoulders began to ease. “Thank you.”
She walked over to put a gentle hand on his back. “Look at us, sounding so reasonable.”
He spun to grasp her upper arms. The suddenness made her flinch. “Nothing about this is reasonable. The feelings I have for you aren’t normal. I’m obsessed with you. I can’t stop thinking about the way your skin tastes, the sound of your laugh, the way you face life with such fierce anticipation.”
Her lips shook. “I can’t stop thinking about you either.”
“Thank God for that.” He passed a hand over her hair. “Because thoughts of you are interrupting my work, my decisions. I can’t sleep. Is this love? I don’t know. I’ve never been in love before. All I know is I’m ready to abandon almost everything just for the chance to be with you.”
“Josiah…”
“Don’t call me that,” he hissed.
“I have to call you something.” The pragmatic words were at odds with the way she touched his face. “I want to fling everything I’ve got at you, and if it were just me, I would do it and take my chances. But my life is not just about me anymore.”
“I know. I get it.” He caught himself up, then added more quietly, “Because my life isn’t just about me anymore either.”
“How much danger are you and the others in?” She searched his expression.
“I don’t know,” he told her truthfully. “It varies, depending on the situation. From things he said when he had me imprisoned, this witch is over a thousand years old—he’s dangerous, canny, and unprincipled, so we’re obsessive about covering our tracks. The only thing I know for certain is that it’s going to get more dangerous the closer we get to him. Our seer believes he’s in the Atlanta area, and we’ve seen other indications that something dangerous is hiding there, such as spells layered over the local internet hubs.”
And he had been taking the most dangerous position of all of them, always at the forefront, in the public eye, initiating face-to-face contact with likely suspects. He did not offer that statement. Molly was already aware of it.
“He must have hurt or killed so many people,” she murmured. “Can your coven defeat him?”
At that, he had to serve up another dose of truth. “We think so, but we won’t know until we fight him.”
She shuddered, then gave him a clear-eyed look. “You said you wanted to negotiate. So tell me what you want and lay it out in specific detail. Then I’ll let you know if I can give it to you.”