Brave the Tempest (Cassandra Palmer #9) - Karen Chance Page 0,148

I meant nothing to him—

“You mean everything to me.”

“Stop reading my mind!”

“You’re projecting—”

“I’m doing no such thing!” Or maybe I was; I didn’t care. “Cut it out!”

“I’ll try. It’s not easy to block someone with whom I share blood.”

“I am not your blood,” I snapped, even as the two little marks on my neck pulsed in time with my heart. Among other things.

Damn it, sometimes I could just—

“Cassie, please sit down. I brought you here to talk, not for . . . anything else.”

I didn’t sit down. I couldn’t. I just wanted to get out of there before I did something stupid, because my brain was mad at him—no, my brain was furious—but my body hadn’t gotten the memo. My body didn’t want the memo. My body was busy remembering the feel of those hands and the taste of those lips and the strength of him pressing me down into—

Goddamn it!

“Say what you have to say,” I told him shortly, hugging myself. “It’s been a long night.”

Mircea sat back, and dropped the hand he’d been holding out to me, I don’t know why. He looked like he didn’t, suddenly, either. He decided to use it to run through his hair instead.

His expression was that of a man who’d had a long day, too. Someone who had had too much put on him for too long, and who badly needed a break. Everybody went to Mircea, and everything somehow ended up being his responsibility. I didn’t know how he did it, honestly.

I went to the bar and got us both a drink.

Mircea looked at it ruefully as I carried it back over. “Do I look that bad?”

“We both look that bad.”

“You don’t,” he told me, his fingers brushing mine as he took the heavy glass.

“Mircea—”

“We have to do this sometime,” he said, referring to God knew what. We had about a million things we needed to talk about, because we couldn’t before. For so long, for months, we’d had so many secrets—his wife and Dorina’s existence on his side and Pritkin’s true identity on mine—that we hadn’t been able to say much of anything. We’d had to tiptoe around each other, like two people on a minefield, so scared of putting a foot wrong that we barely moved at all.

And relationships don’t work like that.

“They stagnate like that,” Mircea agreed, reading my mind.

“Stop it,” I told him, but there was no heat behind it this time.

“I’m trying, Cassie,” he told me. “As I tried with us. And I did try—just not enough. I should have told you everything earlier, much earlier. But I was too afraid you’d say no.”

“I haven’t said yes,” I reminded him.

“I know.” He leaned back in the chair with his whiskey.

We drank in silence for a while. There’d been a lot of silences between us, but this one felt different. Better. We hadn’t talked much out in these past weeks, unless you counted a memorable screaming match. Well, screaming on my part and stubborn insistence—he’d probably call it “manful restraint”—on his. We’d both been exhausted, run off our feet, and in no state of mind to discuss anything.

And now that we were . . .

God, I just didn’t want to! I liked this peaceful quiet, this knowledge that I could talk if I wanted, that I could tell him anything, and that I wouldn’t have to bite my tongue or patrol my own thoughts so he wouldn’t pick them up. Because everything was finally out in the open.

It was nice.

It wasn’t going to stay that way.

And not just because I knew Mircea but because of this infernal, never-ending war! He couldn’t just let it all go for a while, let old wounds heal or even become old wounds. He had to press it, because circumstances were pressing him. The only way to end this thing was to kill all the gods—and considering how much trouble we’d had offing two, I wasn’t liking our odds there. Or to invade Faerie and take out the bastards running this show before they could let them in.

And no way was Mircea going into Faerie without some kind of assurance about his wife.

No way in hell.

I threw back my whiskey, sat down the glass, and looked at him.

“All right,” I said. “Let’s talk.”

Chapter Thirty-four

Mircea tilted his head, but when he spoke, it wasn’t what I’d expected. “It’s strange,” he said. “Before everything was revealed, all I could think about was how to tell you. What phrasing to use, how to approach