He looked down at her fingers, and she did too. They appeared so slender and delicate in his much larger, square-palmed hand. Appearances were deceiving. She had lost count of the number of creatures she had killed with her bare hands.
Rune’s anger and aggression had vanished. She wished she could find a way to keep the sight of his lean, handsome face from hurting what was left of her tired, useless heart. The emotion was just another thing she didn’t understand about herself, and she didn’t know how to make it stop. She wished she had the ability to make the most of this fleeting time because it would be gone all too soon. She wanted to regard Rune’s male beauty in a way it deserved, with simple pleasure.
When Rune spoke next, his voice had gentled. “You have become too used to the thought of dying.”
She did not bother to dignify that with a verbal response. Instead she lifted an eyebrow.
He told her, “I know, but take what I say seriously, Carling. I think the mind-set may lead to some sloppy thinking. You no longer have the luxury of centuries or even years ahead of you for research. You can’t afford to be passive or silent about things right now just because they don’t make sense to you.”
She regarded him for a moment. Then she shocked them both, as she lifted her free hand and laid it against his warm, lean cheek. He froze, his gaze startled.
“I think you’re a good man,” she said. As old as she was, she had met far too few of those over the years. As a woman of Power, she had tended to attract men of ambition. Not that ambition was necessarily a bad thing, but it tended to skew ethics and perspectives. In the end there had never been anyone secure enough in his own power to not feel threatened by hers, nor anyone who was more interested in her than in meeting his own agenda. And there had never been anyone strong enough to make her believe in him beyond all else. She smiled at Rune. “I appreciate that you want to help me, and I am happy to try to fight for my life. But I’m afraid you may be tilting at windmills here.”
He gave her a crooked smile in return, his cheek moving under her palm. “Earlier I was pretty convinced I was Alice in Wonderland. Come to think of it, I faded out of sight on a few people, so I was actually the Cheshire Cat as well. I don’t think channeling Don Quixote should pose any problems.”
Amused, she said, “You’re not making any sense.”
A dimple appeared beside his mobile, sensual mouth. “That is only because you don’t know what I’m talking about.”
“I’ll give you one thing,” she told him. “That was actually a very Cheshire Cat thing to say.”
“Now we’re getting ahead of ourselves,” he told her. She started to let her hand fall away from his cheek. He caught it and pressed a kiss to her palm. He let go of both of her hands before she could react. Confused, warmed and somehow disappointed when he released her, she laced her hands together and held them stiffly in her lap. He said, “I’ll catch up on reading the rest of the research on my own. For now, I want you to tell me everything, even if it is conjecture or if you don’t understand it.”
She frowned. “You say we should not waste time, but I don’t see how—”
He overrode what she was about to say, his gaze stern. “You have to start trusting me a little bit. Not a lot. Not, I think, outside your comfort zone. But I am actually a very good investigator, and I’m quite experienced at deciding for myself what information might or might not be useful.” Then the sternness melted from his eyes. He gave her a coaxing smile. “And I can be so terribly charming while I do it. You’ll see. It’ll be fun.”
Her mouth shut with an audible click of her teeth. “Oh for heaven’s sake, all right.”
“Good, we’re making progress.” His expression as he regarded her was filled with such lazy, caressing warmth, she wanted to bask in it all night. He looked at her as if she were the only thing in the world that mattered. It was heady, exotic, dangerous, completely irrelevant stuff. She straightened her spine as she tried to drag her recalcitrant self back into line. “First, I want you to tell me what you experience when you have an episode.”
“Episode episode episode,” she said with sudden venom. “Gods, how I’ve grown to hate that word.”
“Oh-kay,” said Rune. He switched gears with apparent ease. “We’ll have to start calling it something else. You suffer from an extreme case of attention deficit disorder.”
She glared at him and grumbled, “Whatever.”
He suggested, “You kept the light on when you left the house.”
No. He wasn’t funny. She would not dignify that either. Somewhere in the middle of her glare, she started to smile. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
“You fed the bats in your belfry? You went crazier than a shit-house rat.”
“What?” Laughter burbled out of her. It felt strange, ebullient and light. She could not remember the last time she had laughed out loud, or why.