away. Once I got to where Raphek was hiding, he made sure the asshole never found us.”
Emma huffed. “Not the most ideal way to spread gossip about you in that town, but I don’t doubt for a second that he didn’t call the tip hotline.”
Amber made a face. “He snuck up on me when I was leaving the store, so he could’ve taken a picture of me at any time while I was inside the store.”
“If so, then no doubt that picture will have been shared online at least a million times a mere hour after dawn,” Sevek added. He turned on the tablet that was resting on his right thigh. “Now I’m curious.”
Emma pointed at one of the end tables across the room next to their second couch. “If you want to surf, too, while we wait for Raphek to come back, then you can borrow my tablet.”
“Thanks.”
Amber wasn’t particularly in a hurry to run across all the posts that undoubtably said horrible things about her, but even running into those potential gut-wrenching landmines was preferable to allowing her thoughts to stew without the distraction of conversation and make her emotions regarding Raphek even more of a tangled mess than they already were.
Exhaustion suddenly settled onto her shoulders as heavily as thousand-pound weights. What she really wanted to do was sleep, but that was likely a relief she wouldn’t experience for many hours, yet.
Seeing Emma and Sevek cuddled so cutely together on the couch while they shared Sevek’s tablet made Amber’s heart clench painfully. That kind of love was what she had envisioned for her own life when she had accepted Garrett’s wedding proposal. The dream had quickly fallen apart within days of saying “I do.” Knowing what she knew now, she wondered if the bastard had only asked her to marry him because his father had forced him to in order to protect his reputation for the sake of his political future.
Still, seeing Emma and Sevek also reminded her that such loving relationships happened all the time. Her parents were a good example. Her friend, Keri, was currently engaged to a great guy. Amber had been living under a dark cloud of fear, misery, and anger for so long it was no wonder that she had forgotten that loving relationships were normal, not the exception.
Could she have the same with a dragon-man that had showed both her and Matty only kindness? Especially when Matty had already taken such a liking to him. Images of her son tugging Raphek around the Elysian marketplace like a kite flashed through her mind, making her smile.
Amber reached over and carefully, tenderly smoothed away a stray lock of hair off Matty’s forehead.
It had been too dark to see Raphek’s face after that amazing kiss as he had looked down at her. She found she really wanted a chance to see what emotions his eyes had held after such a passionate moment.
However, before that, she and Raphek needed to have a serious talk.
Sleep could wait.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Luckily for Amber’s peace of mind, Raphek returned after being gone for only a little over an hour. Once she had made up her mind that she did indeed want to pursue a relationship with Raphek, time had seemed to crawl until she had been ready to start pulling her hair out in frustration. The fact that her eyes had kept straying to the tiny time display at the top of Emma’s tablet every few seconds or so hadn’t helped matters one bit.
That Raphek immediately claimed the spot on the couch next to her made her immensely happy and yet, at the same, quite irritated with herself that such a mundane action could cause such a strong reaction in her. Even so, for a split-second, Amber contemplated reaching for his hand and threading their fingers together in a sudden mad desire to feel his warmth, to prove to herself that the intimacy his actions seemed to be offering her was real.
She didn’t move a muscle.
“I swear, Raphek, you have one of the best poker faces I’ve ever seen,” Emma complained. “Good news, bad news, you always look like you just spent a couple of hours in your meditation room.”
He shrugged. “I’ve never been the excitable type.”
“Given that your conference with the king was fairly short, I would guess that things went well,” Sevek noted.
Amber’s impatience didn’t think over an hour was fairly short, but to someone like Raphek that had lived for thousands of years, they likely didn’t have