“But he can’t pin it on you because the body is gone.” He chuckled. “I would have loved to be a fly on the wall when he realized that.”
I leaned back and grinned. “Yeah. I can see him going full Rumpelstiltskin.”
Caelan pulled into the parking lot of the hotel where we were staying. “It’d be a lot easier if he stayed dead. If he starts throwing accusations out about your involvement, things might go sideways.” He shook his head. “I don’t understand how this happened. I would have bet money the guy was dead.”
“Maybe we should have stayed and waited for the police to arrive.” Hindsight was always twenty-twenty. “Then we could have seen for ourselves.”
“Getting caught would have been worse.”
Caelan opened the room door and held it open. “If you say it’s Donovan, I have to believe you. I’ll check with the Keep mage when we get back.”
I shrugged off my jacket and tossed it onto the chair. “What do we do about the land?”
“We go out first thing in the morning and stake your claim.”
I turned to see him standing by the door, watching me with glowing eyes.
My heart skipped a little. No matter how many times I looked at him, he always stunned me. Tall and lean, dark hair and stormy eyes that turned gold when he was experiencing high emotion, Caelan took my breath away. We’d started off rocky and stayed that way for months.
He came on too strong, and I was a paranoid little rabbit constantly overthinking things. But when I’d finally gotten out of that cursed tree and got a second chance, none of that small shit mattered anymore. Rowan had already knocked some sense into Caelan before my forced disappearing act, but he never got the chance to talk to me before I was gone.
Caelan felt the same way when I made it out. None of it mattered to him either, but he did stop trying to rope me into marriage, and the guy had become a serious snuggleholic. I was not upset about it.
In fact, I’d sent Rowan a big ass package of hybrids and new plants I thought he might like, along with a year’s membership to a fancy whiskey club. The other Lord was going to make some woman very happy.
My thoughts had scattered the second I looked at Caelan because the guy was looking at me like I was the only thing on an all-you-can-eat buffet.
“Um.” All the thoughts were falling out of my head, so I had to ask about the land now before I lost all train of thought. “How do we stake my claim?”
He stripped his shirt off. “We can talk about it tomorrow.”
“Err. Okay.”
Caelan grinned, the edge to it making me a little nervous. There was nowhere to run, and he was looking decidedly predatory. I took a step back when he prowled my direction.
He untied the drawstring of his joggers.
Everything tightened. “Are you taking a shower?” My voice came out far huskier than I intended.
“Nope.” The grin widened.
“Huh,” I said. “Whatever shall you do?”
“I have a few ideas.”
Caelan pounced.
Chapter
Three
We spent the next few days driving as we traced the outline of the claimed land. When we finally made it back to the starting point, I was feeling a little ill.
“It’s too much.” Total understatement. I had no idea how I’d managed to claim that much, but I’d stopped counting at six states.
Caelan had his arm on the back of my seat, fingers toying with a strand of hair loosened from my ponytail. “You took as much property as you could claim.”
I slid him a look. “I didn’t mean to take anything. Can I sign it over to you or something?” I rubbed my forehead. “Or lease it to you for like a dollar?”
