It’s going to be like that. With as many words Tiago signaled his intention to take her as his lover. She could follow him back to New York. She could work to make as much as she could out of the time they could have together—but sooner or later Tiago would go back to leading Dragos’s troops and living his nomadic warring lifestyle.
She could follow him, if he would let her, but she cringed to think it, silly woman that she was, with her fashion magazines and makeup and pink lipsticks and high-heeled shoes and purses. Sooner or later he would grow to resent her, or worse, he would become impatient, contemptuous and bored. Even if she abandoned her heritage and left everything behind, she could still hope to gain only a limited amount of time with him.
So she would stay her course, not because of her convictions since Tiago had destroyed those. She would stay her course because there wasn’t anything else to do. Days ago she had embarked upon a solitary road that had no turning point. She would be a good-hearted monarch, if not the most qualified or talented. That had to count for something, didn’t it?
It was time to take another step along that road. As she had said to Tiago, the innocent young Niniane of the past had been killed along with her family. She could never become that Niniane again, so she would just have to forge a different Niniane for the future.
She wiped her cheeks. What kind of time could she manage to get with Tiago? A couple of nights together, maybe at best a week? She would have to hoard every moment, to concentrate everything she had on remembering the slightest detail, because the memories were going to have to last her a very long while.
Faeries could live for thousands of years. If something didn’t kill them first.
That’s what it was going to be like.
Something had happened and Tiago didn’t like it. He didn’t like it one fucking bit.
She had gone to take a shower, smelling of an intoxicating blend of bewilderment and intense arousal. He liked putting that shattered look in those gorgeous gray eyes and being the one to lavish attention on all her sexy pieces. He didn’t like for her to walk away with that shattered look only to emerge again with the pieces put back together in a new unknown, cooler pattern. Unknown patterns meant something had happened in her head that might shut him out.
He was coming to understand why the other sentinels had nicknamed her Tricks. It wasn’t just because they had taught her all the dirty fighting tricks they knew. There was something about her that was just not bloody quantifiable. It was more than the effervescence that winked out of her like sunlight on water. It was an unpredictable feminine quality that could start off at say, point A but then jump to, hell, he didn’t know, an entirely different alphabet instead of going through a logical thought process that led from B to C then D and so forth.
That meant he couldn’t track from where she had been to where she was now.
He might have to break down and ask her what she was thinking.
He scowled.
While he was on the subject of things he didn’t like, he also didn’t like her disappearing from his sight. The last time that had happened, a freaking Djinn had made off with her. The memory caused him to break out in a cold sweat. It held him shackled to the outside of her door, straining to hear her slightest move, the rustle of her clothing, anything to reassure him that she was still safe and sound in the hotel suite.
He’d had a couple of bad moments when she had been in the shower. For a heart-stopping while she hadn’t seemed to move, and all he could hear was the steady sound of the water running. He had almost broken through the door to check on her. Then there had been a muffled clatter like she had dropped a shampoo bottle or bar of soap. The tight band around his chest had loosened, and he had been able to take a breath again.
It was okay when she ran the hair dryer. He could hear that all the way from the bathroom in the second bedroom where he dashed to tear out of his clothes, shower, towel dry and dress in clean black fatigues in five minutes flat. He was clean-shaven in just under two and a half minutes more. By the time she had clicked off the hair dryer he was back in the living room again with his steel-toed boots laced, buckling on his weapons.
He glanced up as she stepped out of the bedroom. In an instant he was so hard for her it nearly doubled him over. She wore jeans that molded to every inch of her tight, round little ass, a pretty shirt with a scooped neck, and a thin sweater that molded the sides of her curvaceous breasts, looked butter-soft and begged to be stroked. She wore the tiny flat slip-on shoes she had worn earlier. Her black hair was clean and shiny, and she had put on makeup. Somehow she had made her high cheekbones stand out, and glossy pink color emphasized those soft, plush lips. She had used a dark smoky gray eyeliner to devastating effect. It made her eyes even more enormous and compelling. They seemed to gather and reflect all the light in the room.