A wild shiver ricocheted through me at his touch, his hand almost big enough to totally encircle my arm, and ice-cold despite the balmy weather.
“Yes, Kill?” I blinked up at him, the picture of innocence. Of course, I knew he wanted me to fill him in on what the seer had told me. But something about his cool, calm, collected vibe made me badly want to ruffle his feathers.
“Tell me,” he ordered, but his eyes pleaded. Here was a man who knew his damn place in the pecking order, whether he liked it or not.
“Not here,” I replied with a tiny shake of my head. I wasn't totally sure, but I could have sworn I'd seen a sprite lurking around the front door just moments ago. Lower than rats, they may be, but they could still understand us when we spoke. And relay that information to others, if they chose to.
Killian stared down at me a moment longer, then nodded tightly and looked over to Caley and Amelie.
“Ladies, are we almost done here?” he asked impatiently. “We have important shit to sort out back at the clubhouse.”
“Almost.” Caley grinned back at him and I rolled my eyes. I'd barely known the girl a couple of days, but I knew her. Which was why I wasn't terribly surprised at her next suggestion.
“Ciarah just needs to pick out some underwear and try them on. You don't mind helping her, do you Kill? Just to hurry things along?” She batted her mascaraed eyelashes at the huge biker man and his eyes narrowed at her.
“It'd be my pleasure, mon chéri.” He smiled at me a little wickedly. Where for the most part, the guys around here used cher in the Cajun way—pronounced sha—Killian sometimes slipped into true French which made me curious about his background. My toes curled at the sexy way his mouth delivered those syllables.
Kill swept his ice-blue gaze over my body, sizing me—literally—before turning to the racks of brightly colored lace, satin and silks. His long fingers flipped through the coathangers with confidence, and before I knew what the hell was happening, I had both hands full.
“Changing room,” he prompted, giving me a small push toward the curtained alcoves at the back of the store.
Much to my curiosity, when I entered the small cubicle and hung the hangers on the little hooks, Killian followed and pulled the curtain shut behind us.
“You can tell me now,” he said, crossing his arms over his chest, his leather jacket creaking with the motion. I cocked my head at him and then reached down to put my fingers underneath the bottom edge of my borrowed t-shirt. “No, mon chéri,” he said, the edges of his knuckles playing against the warm skin of my belly as he reached out to take hold of the fabric. “Not until I leave the room.”
My belly … or her belly? Because … this isn’t the body I was born to, now is it? But then, birth was relative, wasn’t it? A soul entering the child of an infant, newly taken of its first breath, or me … entering the body on a last dying scream …
I blinked away the memories and started to pull my shirt up anyway. Killian stubbornly fisted his hand in the fabric and kept it from riding up, and I frowned.
“Call me confused,” I said with a slight smile, “because I may very well be the most confused living thing on this planet or any other, but isn’t modesty a human invention? Isn’t nudity as natural as breath amongst the fae?”
Killian’s teeth and jaw clenched tight, and I knew then that I was right.
He let go of the shirt and I pulled it off, exposing my breasts to the cool air of the shop, the old air conditioner blasting, the ceiling wet with tiny drops of condensation. I dropped it on the floor and reached for one of the bras, my fingers playing against the cream colored satin for a moment. I didn’t have bras like this before … in either before, really. In one of my befores, there were no such things. This was a human invention, something of this world. The Veil Keeper’s ancient skin had never once felt the caress of undergarments like this. And my other self … the self I was starting to realize was the me-me part, the soul as Sadhbh had said … she couldn’t afford things like this.
“Put it on for me,” I told Killian and heard him suck in a sharp breath. I looked over at him and found his ice-blue eyes lit up, the pulse in the side of his neck thundering.
“You want me to put your bra on for you, la petite chose?” he asked, and while the words were calm enough, the fire in his gaze was unmistakable.
“It’ll go faster if you help me into it,” I said, lifting the small scrap of fabric from the satiny hanger and passing it his way. He took it on a single, inked finger, letting it dangle there between us as he sucked in a deep breath and cursed in French.
“As you command, Le Gardien,” he said, his voice dropping to a low whisper as I turned away and faced my reflection in the mirror. It was the first time I’d really done that since waking up in the alley, and for a moment, I forgot to breathe.
There was nothing about the face that stared back at me that was familiar … those eyes … that hair … The Veil Keeper was beautiful, even in her glamoured form, with milky white skin, sapphire eyes, and long dark hair with a green streak near the front. It trailed down her … my? … body in gentle waves, curling around my ass in the borrowed white leggings I’d taken from Caley.
“This isn’t me,” I said as I lifted my hands up and palmed my own breasts. They were small but perky, full for their size with erect pink nipples. As I ran my thumbs over them, sensation swept through me and made me shiver. “This isn’t what I look like.”
“It’s what you look like now,” Killian said, leaning down toward me. He was so much taller. I could see him in the mirror, towering over me, his eyes as blue as mine but pale, like a winter sky. Mine … hers … ours were a deep, rich color, like a lake in summer, all the way at the bottom where the sun just barely shines. “Rebirth is never easy. Why do you think most souls choose to forget who they once were?”
“I’m much taller than this,” I said, standing on my tippy toes as Killian leaned over my shoulder, his raven dark hair sliding across his forehead, his tongue running over his lower lip. For a moment there, I thought he might slide it down the side of my neck, make my skin pebble with goose bumps. I thought he might take me by the hips and pull my ass toward him, shove my leggings out of the way …
But Killian wasn’t Arlo or Reece—he was a gentleman.
Carefully, he extracted my fingers from my breasts and slid the bra straps over my hands, up my arms, trailing his fingertips against my skin and making me sigh.
“I’m much taller, and I have bigger breasts,” I told him, and he chuckled against my ear, the sound low and deep as he slid the bra up to my chest and then dragged his fingertips across my rib cage to my back, making my breath catch. “And I’m blonde, I know that for sure.”