“You look the same as her,” he said.
She nodded and brushed a hand down her front. “You understand the difficulty now, do you not, hunter?”
He nodded. “I do. I seek her hand. I wish to take the vows of Veritas.”
She sucked in a sharp breath. “You do love her.”
It wasn’t really a question, more a statement of fact. He dipped his head once. “Yes. Very much. And I know she’s worried about you, because you do not feel for me as she does.”
“She is right. I do not know you. But she is also wrong.”
His eyes narrowed.
“I respect you for what you did. For the choice you made. For listening to me. In many ways Lissa is very innocent. I kept her that way, intentionally, as I’ve told you. But not just to use her to free us. I kept her that way because I wanted her to not know the horrors of what I…we, would eventually become. I wanted that innocence, and I clung to her. She saved me and I saw the world through clear eyes whenever she controlled us. I saw her insecurities, her desire for you, her anger at times, but mostly I witnessed her falling in love and it made me…” her lashes flickered like moth’s wings, “it made me curious. And very jealous. I wanted what she had.”
His heart sank. Because if they were two different souls in one body, then Chrysalis would wish to fall in love with someone other than him. She’d kiss and rub and touch another and while his head would know it wasn’t Lissa doing it, he wasn’t sure his heart would feel similarly.
“You will fall in love with another, and wish us to share then, is that it?”
She gave a half snort and shrugged. Stripping a candy cane leaf off a peppermint bark tree limb, she twirled it between her fingers. “I did think that. All those years looking out through Lissa’s eyes, I craved what I never thought would be possible for me. Love, affection, children. A family of my own. But I know that my happiness would come at the expense of her own. Because eventually you’d start to wonder if it wasn’t me in bed with my lover, but Lissa instead.”
His jaw jutted out and he looked to the side. “Yes, I would wonder that and maybe some days it would hurt worse than others, but there is much I would do for Lissa, including sharing the body that I love.”
She sighed. “Well, like I said, she was wrong too.” Tossing the leaf, she dusted the peppermint crumbs off her hands. “Because I have a plan.”
He snorted. “You always do, don’t you?”
She laughed. “It’s a specialty of mine.”
And just as before, Aeric found himself responding to her teasing. Not with the same intensity as he did with Lissa, but with the first initial stirrings of something deeper. Was it possible that he could wind up falling in love with both Lissa and Chrysalis? It almost felt wrong to think it, to want it, and yet…
Flowers surrounded him. He remembered that too, that there were times when Lissa had smelled different than her scent of spring rain, that sometimes she’d smelled of a field of wild roses and he now realized it was because it hadn’t been just Lissa with him.
Her finger ran down the plane of his nose and across the expanse of his lips. He sucked in a sharp breath at the sensations her touch stirred. Blinking, he tried to take a step back, because even though this was the same body, this wasn’t the same woman and just as the thought of her being with another hurt him, he never wanted her to feel that with him.
That he could enjoy both her sides. Want both her sides.
Her gaze was curious, but excited. “I think I could fall in love with you too, hunter. You saved us both that night, and I feel a debt to you.”
He scoffed, shaking his head, finally able to step away from her. “That is not how you fall in love with someone. Feeling a debt of gratitude—”
Placing a finger against his lips just as Lissa sometimes did, she wet her lips. “All great romances start at the very beginning. A blossoming seedling of curiosity, the instant flare of sexual attraction when two like minds first meet…” Her fingers walked up his chest as she leaned up on tiptoe. “Woo me, hunter. And not only will Lissa’s heart belong to you, but so will mine and then you need never worry if we’ll stray, for we’ll both be yours.”
Finding it incredibly difficult to breathe, he placed his hands on her waist and meant to push her away. But instead his fingers dug into her flesh while his brain screamed that he should stop.
His thoughts were a mass of fuzzy confusion. This would be the simplest and easiest way to make it work between him and Lissa. But it would wound her. He knew it, because he’d be cheating on her.
Falling in love with another.
He shook his head. “I…I can’t do that to her.”