“I know enough.” He lifts his chin and looks across the way, and stops short on Logan, who seems to be reciprocating the terse look to Marshall—or perhaps more to the point,me. He’s not Dudley’s biggest fan, despite the fact they’re vaguely related and are darn near doppelgangers.
Marshall straightens. “What has she done now?” he growls as he continues to stare Logan down.
Logan knows.
I know.
Heck,Brielleknows just enough at this point.
I don’t see the harm in adding Marshall to the list.
I’m about to open my mouth when Marshall clamps his hand onto the top of my head, and it feels as if my soul is being sucked right out of my body in a very deliciously sexual way.
“Oh wow,” I moan. “Ohyes,” I say a little too enthusiastically.
He tips his head back, and a wicked smile curves on his lips.
And I’m assuming, just like that, Marshall, too, is in the know.
“Well, Ms. Messenger,” his cutthroat features sharpen like iron, “as your lexicon anemic peers would say—game on.” He cups my chin with his hand. “And I’m not talking about you and the Pretty One. I’m talking about you andme.”
I frown up at him
“You’re light driving,” Marshall says without preamble, his voice low and gravelly in a way that does unholy things to my pulse.
I blink up at him. “I thought we covered that.”
“We did. But what I don’t know is why.”
The way he says it makes my stomach do a little flip. Marshall doesn’t ask questions he doesn’t already suspect the answers to, which means I’m either in trouble or about to be.
Around us, the party continues its bizarre blend of teenage debauchery and historical reenactment, but Marshall’s hotter-than-hellfire presence creates a bubble of intensity that makes everything else fade to background noise. Which is saying something considering Ellis just proved that roses and recreational substances don’t mix as he becomes one with the shrubbery.
“My mother told me this all has something to do with Demetri, trying to prevent a power grab with children who aren’t even born yet,” I start, then catch myself. Even saying it sounds insane. “She said he’s been watching my kids, that there’s some kind of threat coming. She needed Logan and me to go back in time to set an anchor—some kind of protection ritual or hedge that requires us to relive a meaningful memory.” Wait, did she say meaningful memory? Ironically,mymemory is lagging in the departmentwhere my mother told uswhat was whatand why the hell we’re here in the first place.
Marshall lifts one perfectly sculpted eyebrow but doesn’t say a word, which is somehow more unnerving than if he’d launched into a lecture about the dangers of light driving under my mother’s questionable supervision.
A particularly enthusiastic whoop from the hedge maze punctuates the silence, followed by what sounds like someone discovering the hard way that Marshall’s topiary animals have actual thorns and horns and most likely sharpened blades sticking out of them as well.
“You don’t believe me?” I ask as I bat my lashes at him. “Or is it that you don’t trust me?”
“It’s not you I don’t trust.”
Well, that’s cryptic as hell. The weight of that statement settles between us like a stone dropped in still water, and I’m about to demand clarification when Logan’s voice cuts through the tension from somewhere near the ornate cherub sculptures to my right.
“Dudley.” Logan gives him that look—the one that says he knows that Marshall just took me on a supernatural magic carpet ride of ecstasy and he’s about two seconds from violence.
“Well, if it isn’t the Pretty One.” Marshall looks both disgusted and irritated by his presence all at once. “I suppose you’re here on a little field trip yourself.”
“Something like that,” Logan growls as he slides an arm around my waist, apparently unfazed by the fact that we’re having this conversation while someone behind us is trying to teach a courtesan how to do the Electric Slide.
“Hands off my wife,” Marshall growls at Logan, and there’s enough menace in his voice to make my knees wobble.
“She’s not your wife,” Logan shoots back with a grin that’s all charm and challenge.
“Neither is she yours.”
“Technically, she is, and I would be moved to kill to protect her.”
