you sure?”
He wanted me to invite him. He wanted me to open my arms and my legs and tear off my clothes, or at least give him a hint of whether things would go in the direction he expected. I knew it. I knew what he wanted by the heat of his body and the hard line of his cock as it pressed against my stomach as he held me closer. I swallowed the knot in my throat. He’d been kind to me. He hadn’t been mad when I zapped him accidentally. He didn’t seem like the kind of guy who liked to make it hurt. Maybe it wouldn’t be such a big deal if I let him...
But I’d been quiet too long, too tangled in my own thoughts. Henry lifted his head and studied me with half-gold eyes, curiosity warring with lust. “Ophelia?”
I couldn’t. I couldn’t trust him with all of me, even though he’d been kind and considerate. I cleared my throat and looked away. “I don’t know if...”
I didn’t know how to finish that sentence. I didn’t know if I was worthy of his attention. I didn’t know if he’d actually want me once he saw me naked or knew what an awful person I was. I didn’t know if I would be good enough for him, when a guy like him had to have brought supermodels home. I didn’t have the experience or wild streak to make the night worth his while. If I didn’t end up killing him with misdirected magic. If Rocko didn’t appear out of nowhere to kill me for “cheating” on him and to kill Henry for taking what Rocko thought was his.
Henry’s gaze searched my face and his hand drifted down my arm until his fingers tangled with mine. “Let’s talk. Will you sit with me?”
Sit with him? I swallowed but nodded, since sitting with him was a hell of a lot tamer than the suggestion I’d been bracing for. Henry grumbled and arranged the pillows and blankets into a nest against the headboard of the bed, then shooed me in. He practically tucked me in, frowning, before sitting on the end of the bed to study me. I felt his distance like a cool wind, both a relief and a hint of trouble to come.
He leaned against the wall, his legs stretched across the foot of the bed, and rubbed his jaw. “How long have you been running away from something?”
I blinked at the change of topic, and took a long while to reorient myself to having a conversation while tucked into bed instead of rolling around in the sheets with him. “Uh... it’s been a couple of months since Rocko...”
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “You’ve been running longer than that.”
He was right, although the moon only knew how he knew that about me. I concentrated on smoothing my hands over the sheets and quilt, distantly wondering if Cricket would reappear to snuggle and use my hair as his pillow. “A long time.”
Henry made a thoughtful noise, his attention never wavering from my face. “That makes it a challenging habit to break.”
“I don’t intend to,” I said softly. “It’s too dangerous to stay in one place. If it weren’t Rocko, it would be... something else.”
His attention drifted as I moved my feet nervously under the sheets, and his hand landed on my ankle to squeeze gently. “The nice thing about a pack, Ophelia, is that you have other people to help when things go wrong.”
“You don’t want me to stay here,” I whispered. “You don’t understand. I’m trouble. Every day of my life, I’ve been trouble. I’m just no good—even my parents knew it.”
He went still, head cocked. “Your parents?”
“I’m dangerous,” I said. He needed to understand. Once he did, he wouldn’t want to sit there on a bed with me, and he sure as hell wouldn’t want to sleep with me. Or even sleep in the same house as me. But I didn’t want him to think it was a normal situation where he could say sweet things and I’d fall in love with him and everything would be fine. Happily ever after didn’t exist for me. “I’ve always been dangerous—my magic doesn’t work right. We had to move constantly so other witches wouldn’t figure it out. We couldn’t stay with a coven. My parents…fought about it, all the time. What to do. Whether to send me away to some boarding school. Whether to just strip away my