But against her better judgment, she murmured, “What way?”
Leaning back on his hands, he appeared to be settling in, and she wasn’t sure whether she liked that or not. Her stomach was a painful mess of quivering, dancing butterflies and her throat felt much too thick. Her tongue swollen, she had no idea what was the matter with her. Why all her wits seemed to have suddenly fled.
Nibbling onto the corner of her lip, she glanced at her toes.
“I was born from a pit of flame in a world called Delerium.”
Brows gathering into a tight vee, she peeked at him from the corner of her eye. She’d been asking him for weeks to tell her more of himself and he’d always seemed to have one excuse or another not to. Now suddenly he wished to share?
Not that she minded, but what had brought about the sudden change of heart?
“It is an old world full of old ideas. We live in a caste system, immediately born into it. Our lives and our roles in society are dictated from the moment we open our eyes and take our first breath.”
Wetting her lips, she stopped wondering about the why and decided if he was going to share than she would ask the questions that’d been gnawing at her from the moment she’d first spotted a demone.
“The wolves are much the same way,” she admitted hesitantly. When he smiled back at her, she felt bolder to continue. “Alphas are not made, they’re born. And they’re usually terrible, demanding everything, thinking of no one but themselves. I much prefer the company of real wolves over my own kind—isn’t that terrible?”
“No.” He picked up a twig and toyed with the dried edges of it. “Not so terrible at all. I found during my life there that I was good at what I’d been created to be, but I wearied of the life.”
“You were a warrior?”
His lip twitched just slightly. “Indeed I was. I even bore a moniker.”
Laughing, she played with the pile of loose moss strings by her knees. “Aye? And what was it?”
“The Black Death, for I brought it wherever I roamed.”
“My father would have been impressed. He, too, was a bred warrior for a dark queen many, many years ago.”
Snapping the twig in half with his blunt fingers, he tossed them over his shoulder. “And what made him walk away?”
She snorted remembering the stories her parents always told. They were an unusual pair in that they’d truly fallen in love. Many wolves married, not for love, but power. “Father fell in love.”
“You make it sound like he contracted a disease.”
“Well.” She shrugged. “To my kind, it is. Love is a weakness.”
He sighed. “I do wish you’d change. This conversation loses something when I’m forced to speak to the beady eyes of a reptile.”
Chuckling, she dropped the illusion. Mostly.
His jeweled eyes narrowed as he reached for a tendril of her hair. “Blonde?”
She shivered as the end of it slid through his fingers. It was on the tip of her tongue to tell him she’d done it in hopes of discovering what his preferred form for her was, but instead she snapped her jaw shut. There she went again. Forgetting why flirting him was such a bad idea.
“I prefer you in your natural form,” he whispered it so low, every cell inside her body stilled.
Surely he’d not said what she’d just heard. It’d been a trick of her subconscious. “Excuse me?”
“We are alone in the woods, Lilith, no monsters can attack us this close to the safety of the shack. Be as you are.”
Not a declaration of his heart, but…not so bad, either.
Banishing the illusions completely she wriggled her wrist. “There. I am who I am.”
“Better.” He grinned.
And she clamped a hand to her stomach. “Knight, have you been bewitched? You’re acting quite unusual.”
Immediately the easy banter and smiles ceased. He leaned back and gazed up at the stars, exposing the long column of his throat. It would have been impossible to rip her gaze away from his posture even if the woods were burning down around them.
If he’d been a wolf, she would have understood the position to imply his wish to mate her. Exposing his weakest point to her and telling her without words that he trusted her wolf to come out and play with him.
Squeezing her eyes shut, she turned her face to the side and swallowed hard. Giles was no wolf, and what he’d done he’d done unknowingly.
Clenching her fingers into her mother’s cloak, she bunched the fabric tight in her fist and counted slowly to three in her head, doing her best to ignore the primal urge to crawl onto his lap and suckle at the base of his throat with her teeth and tongue.
“You are right.” His deep, barrel-chested voice sliced through her thoughts. “I know I am acting differently. I’ve been debating what to do about a certain situation for over an hour now.”
Her eyes snapped open. That was not at all what she’d expected to hear him say. “What do you mean? Debating about what? Our journey?”