“Come on,” he said. “You promised you’d be my sous chef today. We’ve got extra meals to make.”
“Ugh, fine,” Charles said. “You’re mean to me in the kitchen, though. I only like that in the bedroom.”
I bit my lip to keep back my laugh. Something about him was infectious and fun. He was unrestrained in a way I wished I could be.
“If you get bored, you can always join in,” Theo said as he began to guide Charles out.
“I just may,” I called after. While I hoped Cillian would show me the library, there was no guarantee, and with no meetings on the docket today, I would rather occupy my time with a project than nothing at all. They both vanished from sight, and I slipped into the bathroom to at least wash my face and brush my teeth before I started to roam. I was dressed down today in a soft gray Henley and fitted cargos. I ran my fingers through my curls, which behaved today even without product.
A creak sounded from my door. Had Charles or Theo swung back in?
When I stepped out, a new visitor awaited me.
Cillian leaned against my doorframe, his horns brushing the top, and his massive shoulders taking up most of the space. His arms were crossed and the sleeves of his button-down were rolled up to the elbow, displaying his veiny forearms. I all but swallowed my tongue. My heart thumped harder. In the time I’d been here, about a month at this point, Cillian had never once swung by my room.
And having his presence in my bedroom…fuck.
“Did you make a wrong turn?” I asked, unable to help myself.
He arched a single brow. “In my own casino?”
I shrugged. “It’s a bit dramatically large. Do you need a room for every day of the year?”
“Speaking of dramatic,” he commented, amusement in his low, husky tone. “Did you want a tour of the library or not?”
“Yes,” I responded, taking a few steps forward automatically. His eyes crinkled in amusement, again, showing me dimensions I never would’ve expected from the callous demon I’d first met.
“Come on,” he said, pushing up from his lean.
The fact he’d taken time out from his busy schedule to give me a personal tour of the library hadn’t escaped me. Nor had the fact he was giving me longer lingering glances, or that he’d made an exception for me in the first place. My chest heated, the warmth suffusing my whole body, and I did my best to ignore it. The more time I spent around him, the more I grew aware of his presence, his scent, his graceful movements.
All of it was far too dangerous, and yet I followed him out the door anyway.
Even in the early morning, the dimly lit corridors cast their midnight quality to the upper Spires, as if Cillian couldn’t bear to face the sun. Although, maybe that was a demon preference I was unaware of. My time here, working as Cillian’s personal assistant, had made me realize how little I knew about monsters. I’d lived among them, worked among them at the library, but our interactions were sparse. Which was a shortcoming of mine, if anything.
We passed the kitchen, the dining hall, all the familiar areas we proceeded by. While I’d explored, I’d kept to open areas, not wanting to burst in on anyone’s private space, especially after stumbling into Sofia and the werewolf girl that one night. Which I still had a theory about. Cillian’s footsteps boomed through the corridor, his tread heavy.
“Here we are,” he said, coming to a halt in front of a set of double doors. They weren’t anything too ornate—probably why I’d walked past them by so many times. “You ready?”
“You know, whenever men hype something up too much, it usually ends up being disappointing,” I responded.
Cillian’s fangs poked out with his grin. “Trust me, I never leave anyone disappointed.” The heat in his voice had to be my imagination, but his golden eyes scorched into me. He took the first steps into the library, and I strode in after him.
And then came to a dead halt.
I wasn’t sure why I’d thought the man who owned the Spires would have a paltry, commonplace library, maybe a few bookshelves lining a room.
This was…well, exquisite barely summed it up. The room was about as huge as the dining hall, and the middle of it held polished wooden desks with chairs, as well as a few sofas by the windows that offered a cozy appeal. However, the entire walls of this huge room were stacked with books. Shelves stretched to the ceilings, ladders stationed near one end of each wall, considering you’d need them to be able to scale the breadth of these stacks. Smaller glass-covered cases were interspersed throughout the room, with backlit open tomes inside them that made me wonder what sort of treasures he possessed.
The breath snagged in my throat as I soaked it all in. Dust motes sparkled in the air under streams of light, and combined with the citrine chandeliers, the rich mahogany wood and wine-red accents lent the room the studious, hushed feel I adored about libraries. The place held the rich almond and leather scent I’d been craving, and joy bubbled up inside me as I took my first steps in.
“How is it organized?” I asked as I wandered in, trying to scan the stacks.
Cillian snorted. “Why am I not surprised that’s your first question. The fiction section by genre, and the non-fiction section by topic. Though the stacks get a bit convoluted. I don’t have the time to constantly reshelve or change the order around.”
“You realize you have a personal assistant, right?” I said, bypassing him to head over to the nearest shelf. This seemed to be classics, leatherbound editions, ones that would be the envy of any library. “Why was I wasting time wandering the halls when I could’ve been organizing in here?”
“Why indeed,” he murmured, stepping up beside me. The books spanned in every direction, the sheer sight of them sending a frisson of excitement through me, and yet the enormity of this gigantic library was somehow dwarfed by the presence of the man at my side.
