Billius picks up his pace and continues down the path. Soon he’s out of sight completely, and the sound of another door opening and closing reaches my ears.
I don’t dare move for several moments as I wait to hear if anyone else is coming. When it appears we’re safely alone again, I release a breath and turn around…
And find Dorian still pressed in close.
His forearm is braced on the trunk over my head and his other hand is somewhere near my waist. I back up as close to the trunk as I can, but that barely places more than an additional inch between us. My breathing grows shallow as I bring my eyes to Dorian’s.
His gaze roves from my eyes to my lips. I watch his throat bob. Then his focus settles somewhere around my nose. “You have freckles,” he whispers, his lips so close I can feel his breath mingling with mine.
As breezily as I can, I say, “I have a lot of them.”
“They remind me of the night sky. The way it looks when you can properly see the stars. They’re…beautiful.”
No one has ever said that about my freckles. I’ve always known my complexion is anything but fair.
His gaze slides from my lips to my neck, then hovers over one of my shoulders. It’s then I realize my coat must have slipped down when we fled under the willow and now hangs off to one side. Slowly, he lifts the hand that had been propped near my waist and brings it close to my neck. There he pauses and meets my eyes, perhaps seeing if I’ll pull away.
I don’t.
He lowers his fingers and lights them over a strand of pearls trailing over my shoulder. “I like your dress.”
“You could have fooled me.” My voice is far raspier than I intend. It takes all my will to focus on my words and not the feel of him tracing the line of pearls again and again. “You didn’t seem to like it at all when I took off my coat at the match.”
“Maybe it was myself I was fooling.”
I roll my eyes, but I think all it does is make my eyelids flutter as he lightly tugs one of the pearls. “Whatever happened to me being an evil temptress?”
“I may have called you temptress but I never said you were evil.”
“You insinuated as much.”
His fingers still over the pearls and his eyes move back up my neck, my face, locking on mine. “Why didn’t you let me kiss you tonight?”
Any possible answer dries in my throat. I gulp a few times and try to steady my breathing until I manage to form a coherent string of words. “You kissed my cheek.”
A corner of his mouth flicks up. “Yes, and don’t try to pretend you didn’t know it was meant for your lips.”
I try to back up farther but there’s nowhere else to go. A searing warmth tingles low in my abdomen, making my head feel light. “You sound disappointed, but you didn’t like it when I tried to kiss you. It stands to reason those feelings haven’t changed. You dislike me, do you not?”
“I’ve never disliked you.” He brushes his fingers along the strand of pearls again, trailing it from my collarbone to the bottom of my shoulder. He pauses and narrows his eyes. “But I haven’t fully trusted you either.”
“Why is that?” I ask, but I’m not sure I want to know the answer. It could strike too close to the truth.
“Because I can’t fathom why you’re here,” he says, sounding a little more like his old self. His cold self. The detached brother of Saint Lazaro. “Everyone else has a reason. An obvious one. Vanessa Courter is a religious fanatic who clearly can’t find a husband amongst her own circle. Greta Garter wants to be famous and have a wealthy husband to fund her goals for stardom. Briony Rose…well, she’s just bored of being stuck in a convent. And most of the other girls were simply desperate for a good match or forced by their parents.”
I feel a pang of something like jealousy over how accurately he describes the other contestants’ motives. It’s exactly what I learned about the girls the first day of the pageant. While it could suggest the girls’ pasts have been thoroughly investigated and revealed to Dorian, I’m fixated on the thought that he’s taken the time to get to know each girl so well. Well enough that he could like any of them…more than he likes me.
I shouldn’t care if he likes anyone else more than me. He’s supposed to be my victim, not my lover. I’m supposed to kill him, end him, punish him for the crimes of his past and all the things the Alpha Council is certain he is yet to do.
But it would be a lie if I said I still see him as I did when I accepted my mission. It started to change before tonight, but now that he shared so much about his past, how he feels about his father…
Now, he’s more than just a target. How much more, I don’t know. But he very well could be the death of me.
He continues. “You, on the other hand, are a mystery I can’t solve. The brotherhood thinks I should send you home, and they’re right. You aren’t the kind of wife the church wants for me. You aren’t the type of fae who will accept thesalvationSaint Lazaro offers. You aren’t chaste or meek or subservient. If I’d obeyed Father Viktor, I would have eliminated you at the ceremony tonight. I should have.”
I frown. “So why didn’t you?”
He averts his gaze and his expression softens so thoroughly it almost seems to pain him. “Because I’m not ready to send you home.”
