“You will never do such an idiotic thing again,” he said, muscles bunching in his jaw.
Given my track record, I was pretty sure I would. I mean, really, if I was the Unseelie King—the most powerful Fae ever—I’d somehow ended up human and clueless. That meant I was not only evil, obsessed, and destructive, I was inexcusably stupid.
He began to circle me, looking me up and down like an exotic in a zoo. “And you thought I was the king. That’s why you tried to drag me through it with you. You just can’t get enough of killing me, can you? What’s the last thing you said to me?” He mocked in falsetto: “What’s the worst that can happen? I lead you into some trap and you die for however long it is you go away?”
I said nothing. I saw little point in trying to justify myself anymore.
“I imagine it got all your little romantic notions atwitter again, didn’t it?”
“Is ‘atwitter’ even a word?”
“Did you think we were star-crossed lovers, Ms, Lane? Did you need that excuse?”
He gave me that wolf smile and I thought, Right, star-crossed lovers with a double-edged sword. Because that’s what this man was. Sharp, edgy, dangerous. With no safe side. And, yes, actually, I had thought we were star-crossed lovers. But I wasn’t about to tell him that.
I turned to circle with him, meeting that dark, hostile gaze. “I thought we resolved this in the mansion, Jericho. It’s Mac.”
“It’s Mac when I’m fucking you. The rest of the time, it’s Ms. Lane. Get used to it.”
“Boundaries, Barrons?”
“Precisely. Where’s the king, Ms. Lane?”
“You think he calls me to check in? Says, Honey, I’ll be home for dinner tonight at seven? How the hell should I know?” Which was technically the truth. Even Christian would have had a hard time with that one. I didn’t know where all his parts were.
The concubine made a faint sound and we turned to look at her.
His eyes narrowed. “I’ve got to get her out of here. I won’t have the entire Fae race trying to get past my wards. I suppose we’ll have to protect her.” His distaste couldn’t have been more evident. If given a choice between having a razor-blade enema and protecting a Fae—had it been any other Fae than the all-powerful queen—Barrons would have willingly died a few times from internal bleeding.
But she was the one Fae he wasn’t willing to sacrifice—yet.
I was definitely up for moving her somewhere else; the farther from me, the better. I’d been worried that he might try to keep her at the bookstore and had been prepared to argue that, no matter how formidable his wards were, with the two of us coming and going constantly, she’d be left alone too much to guarantee her safety. “What do you have in mind?” I said.
Half a Dani Daily flapped on a streetlamp in the chilly night breeze. I plucked it off, scanned it for the date AWC, and did some hasty calculations. If it had been posted today—which it probably hadn’t, considering its condition—the date was March 23. Maybe a week later.
I read it and smiled faintly. She’d taken the bull by the horns while I was gone. The kid feared nothing.