“Of course not,” he told her. “If it doesn’t blow up, cut up, or shoot something, I wouldn’t know what to pick. I sent someone. We used your things in the SUV and the T-shirts as size guidelines. I like this. The color suits you.” He fingered the soft material of a sapphire blue tunic top then cocked an eyebrow at her as he nodded to the packages in her lap. “Aren’t you going to open those?”
She looked down at the three packages she held in her hands, feeling as if he had sideswiped her. She took one and picked the taped ends apart. She pulled out a box of Neiman Marcus chocolates. She set it down, picked up another package and opened it. It was a small perfume bottle of Joy. The third box contained dangly earrings. Each earring had a moon of silver and several stars in different shades of blue that dangled at varying lengths.
Her mouth worked as she stared down at the presents in her lap. Long, hard brown fingers came under her chin and tilted her face up. Tiago’s expression had turned quizzical, searching. “If you don’t like anything, faerie, it can go back,” he repeated.
“I love it, I love all of it,” she said unsteadily. She moved away from his touch on the pretext of opening the box of chocolates. She took a bite out of one. It was too rich for her overempty stomach, and she put the rest of it back in its place.
His quizzical look deepened. “Then what’s wrong?”
She held on to the candy box with both hands. “We should talk about when you’re going to leave.”
Silence. Her senses were so attuned to his presence she felt when the relaxation left him and his body grew tense.
“I’m not leaving,” he said in a calm voice.
Her knuckles whitened. “Well, we both know you have to, at some point.”
“I know nothing of the sort,” he said. He picked up his coffee and drank it. His Power flared and filled the room, turning smoky and menacing as it wrapped around her.
She tried again. “Tiago, I need to make a plan in my head so I know w-what to expect and when.”
“I am not leaving,” he said again. While he never raised his voice, his hawklike face turned into a blade. “Deal with it.”
“That isn’t helping—” she said.
He stood and stalked out of the room. She stared after him, disoriented. Then she heard someone start to knock on the suite door. Tiago opened it.
It was the hotel manager, Hughes. “I just wanted to let you know, the representative from the Elder tribunal has arrived and has taken over one of the floors between her highness and the Dark Fae delegation.” He wrung his hands.
Tiago’s gaze narrowed on the nervous movement of Hughes’s hands. “Which Councillor did the tribunal send?” he demanded.
Hughes said, “The one from San Francisco. The next floor up has been taken over by Vampyres.”
SIX
“Is it true the Vampyre Councillor is a sorceress?” the hotel manager asked.
Tiago rubbed his face as he briefly considered lying, but he was more interested in getting back to the interrupted conversation with Niniane. “Yeah, it’s true,” he said.
The manager’s expression was a combination of dismay and fascination. If Tiago was a sympathetic type of person, he might have felt sorry for Hughes, whose entire fancy-ass hotel had been overrun by Elder politics in just a matter of days.
He scowled. Why was Niniane so interested in getting rid of him? And why was he just as determined to stay?
He started to close the door in Hughes’s face, but just then the door to the neighboring suite opened. A uniformed woman pushed a laden room service cart into the hall and angled it toward him. Only the thought of how little sustenance Niniane had taken in over the last few days kept him from slamming the door, throwing the chain and going back into the living room to pick a fight with her. He sighed and held the door open wide.
The living room was empty of both Niniane and shopping bags, and her bedroom door was closed. He moved the laptop as Hughes asked for permission to set out their breakfast. The hotel manager helped the woman arrange the table. The humans glanced often at Tiago, the closed bedroom door and the disassembled weaponry on the coffee table.
Tiago rubbed the back of his neck and resisted the urge to pace. The humans were fussing over the frickin’ table setting like it was some kind of religious ritual. They settled a white cloth into place and arranged a small vase of fresh-cut flowers just so, not precisely in the middle of the table but a little to one side. What was the big deal? All they had to do was throw down two plates, knives and forks and the food. Plus they were taking far too long. They were probably hoping to see her bloody mindedness. He gritted his teeth.