Dancing With Danger (Goode Girls #3) - Kerrigan Byrne Page 0,18
at hand and not give in to the strange and unmistakable lure.
It was as if she had his heart affixed to a spool of string like a kite, and he trailed after her—above her—in quivering anticipation of the moment she would pull him out of the wind.
No good could come of this. He...should...just...
“I’ll squire you out.” The offer slipped from his lips before he could pull it back.
She rewarded his chivalry with a sharp glare. “I hardly need a squire, and don’t require your company.”
“Evidently not, but in order to quit the zoo, I also need use of the gate.”
“There’s the other entrance.” She pointed toward the back where he’d left Marco.
“Alas, this one is the one I prefer.” He offered a gesture of regret that conveyed there’s nothing to be done, and sauntered after her.
She made an exceedingly unladylike sound of exasperation and quickened her pace. “Just keep your hands and your lips to yourself.”
Raphael lengthened his strides, having no issue keeping up with her. He breathed in the frigid air tinged with her singular scent, and didn’t even lament the clouds as they drifted toward the sun in a threatening manner.
Even at the bitter end of winter, when all tended to be grey and gloomy, she smelled of sweet herbs and sunshine, evoking memories of sipping pastis on sun-drenched verandas of the Mediterranean.
The shadows could not touch her. The grey couldn’t dim her, no matter how it might try.
And he was a moth mesmerized by her flame.
A vendor called to her, holding out paper wrapped around candied nuts.
“No, thank you,” she said as she bustled on by.
He trotted to catch up. “You’re a lady of taste, surely you can spare a coin for—”
Raphael maneuvered himself closer and it only took a censuring look to send the man scampering in the other direction.
“Unbelievable,” she muttered beneath an irate breath.
“You’re welcome.” He flashed her a winsome smile as if he’d not caught the sarcasm in her voice, and clasped his hands behind his back to make himself seem more casual.
She whirled on him, thrusting a finger at his chest. “What is the matter with you? Do you enjoy throwing your strength and malice into the faces of those less powerful? Do you prefer it when people fear you? Does it lend you some perverted sort of thrill?”
“Of course not,” he defended, running the tip of his tongue over lips that still tasted of her. “I get my perverted thrills elsewhere.”
“Bah!” She threw her hands up in an ironically violent gesture of defeat and stomped away, abandoning all pretense of composure.
Thoroughly amused, Raphael fell into step with her. “I shouldn’t like you to fear me,” he explained.
“As I said, I do not, but you just intimidated that poor man back there.”
“I didn’t want him to hassle you.”
“No, of course not, when you’re doing such an excellent job of it.”
He sighed, hating that he felt the need to explain himself to her as he had no one else in his entire lifetime. “Fear isn’t something I find enticing, merely...useful.”
“Useful?” She wrinkled her forehead in puzzlement as if she couldn’t fathom how or why anyone would use such an awful, powerful phenomenon. “You mean, in your criminal enterprise?”
“Yes.”
“You make men fear you so that you may control them.” She said this with conviction, as if she had experience in the matter.
Keeping his hands distinctly clasped behind him—so as not to give in to the overpowering urge to once again pull her against his body—Raphael surprised himself by telling her the truth. “There is a difference between leading men and controlling them. Again, I prefer people not fear me.”
“But you just said you use—”
“It does me no good to incite terror of me, per se,” he clarified. “If I have an enemy, I find out what they already fear and turn it on them. I figure how to sow it among their own ranks until the right eye doesn’t trust what the left eye sees. I can make it so the heart and the brain fear each other, and then the muscles and blood don’t know whom to obey. When men fear what they used to love, that fear often turns to hate. And then they rip out their own hearts. They pluck out their own eyes... They devour themselves.”
“That’s...” To his abject astonishment, she was quiet for five entire steps before conjuring a word. “Diabolical.”
“That, mon chaton, is when I strike. When they are blind. When they’ll never see me coming.”
“Oh.” She looked