Chapter Six
“IWAS WONDERING,” SAYSa voice from the wingback chair by the fireplace, “when you’d run out of places to hide.”
I freeze in the library doorway.
Veil is sitting there with a book in his lap, looking like he’s been waiting for hours. Maybe he has. He’s in dark jeans and a grey sweater, legs crossed, perfectly at ease, and he’s watching me with those blue eyes like he knew, like he absolutely knew, that sooner or later I’d end up here.
The library was supposed to be safe. Lady Hampton told me she’d be working in the conservatory this afternoon, and Veil had said something at breakfast about ranch business, which I’d taken as permission to finally, finally have two hours to myself without constantly calculating escape routes.
I thought wrong.
My hand is still on the doorknob.
I could leave.
I should leave.
“I’m not hiding,” I say instead. “I’ve been working.”
“At five in the morning?” He finally looks up from his book, and those blue eyes pin me in place. “Every morning since the lake?”
How does he know when I’ve been waking up?
“Lady Hampton needed—”
“My mother,” Veil says, closing his book with a soft snap, “is perfectly capable of managing her own schedule. She’s been doing it for decades.”
He stands, and I take an involuntary step back.
The door clicks shut behind me.
I didn’t close it.
Did the wind do that?
“We need to talk, Evianne.”
No.
We really don’t.
Talking is what got us into this mess in the first place. Him saying impossible things in a hospital room while a heart monitor broadcast my reaction to the entire medical wing. Me lying awake every night since then replaying every word, every look, every I’m in love with you, like a song I can’t get out of my head.
“There’s nothing to talk about,” I manage. “You were exhausted after the lake. You’d been through something traumatic. People say things they don’t mean when—”
“Don’t.”
The single word stops me cold.
He’s walking toward me now. Slow. Deliberate. And I’m backing up until my shoulders hit the bookshelf behind me and there’s nowhere left to go.
“Don’t,” he says again, softer this time, “insult my intelligence by pretending I didn’t mean what I said.”
