She gathered all the broken pieces of her composure together. If she couldn’t feel happy, she could at least make herself feel satisfied.Fate itselfhad just agreed with the Silver Council and ruled that she was the best match for the village’s golden boy. Her family would be ecstatic.
She took a deep breath. She wasn’t the only one who’d just been walloped with a major epiphany, of course. Keith looked stunned too.
And because he didn’t know fate had just sold him a lemon, a mate who couldn’t live up to the expectations he’d have for a mate, he didn’t look disappointed. Instead, to her surprise, there was a kind of wild hopefulness in his eyes, like he’d been just as scared as she was and now he thought things were going to be okay.
He started to smile, but then he looked at her perpetually sour expression, and he forced his own mouth into a flat line.
Oh, right: he was perfect, so he didn’t want to hurt her feelings by reminding her of what she couldn’t do. He was too flawlessly considerate to smile around her.
Wonderful. They could be the grimmest-looking couple this side of thatAmerican Gothicpainting.
The prickle of irritation she felt at that seemed almost as out-of-place in all this as the sorrow and loss. This wasn’t what meeting your mate was supposed to feel like. She was screwing it up.
She had to do better. Even though it seemed impossible, she had to salvage this. He deserved someone who could live up to the intense hope he’d given away for a second there. No one had ever looked at her like that before.
Was there any chance at all that she wouldn’t wind up disappointing him?
Say something!her unicorn cried.At leastpretendyou know what you’re doing!
“I believe we both just had the same realization?” she said crisply.
Keith’s eyes got even wider, which she wouldn’t have thought was possible. She could almostseehim pulling himself together, locking every internal door to make sure his feelings didn’t escape. It deadened his expression even more.
“Yes,” he said. “We’re mates.”
“I assume this means we’ll both consent to the match moving forward.”
Why was she talking like this? She sounded like a robot version of Lady Marianne.
“Yes,” Keith said.
Despite his impeccable composure and even voice, Iris couldn’t shake the sense that he was vulnerable somehow. She wanted to reach out and put her hand on his arm, but why? What comfort could she really offer?
And why did he think she needed it? Long pause aside, she was actually doing an okay job of masquerading as tribute material, so he couldn’t be too disappointed in her quite yet.
It was probably just her imagination. He reallywasthe kind of person she’d been pretending to be, and he’d been that person his whole life. He had it down to a science. And uncertainty and vulnerability didn’t belong in that picture.
Still, it looked like he was at a loss for words just like she was. She could tell he was groping around for something to say. When he found it, his eyes lit up just a fraction.
“Did the Council tell you about my job?”
“With the U.S. Marshals,” Iris said, wondering where he was going with this.
“Right. I started out doing traditional Marshal work, and I still do some, but the unit I’m with now specializes in shifter-related cases that are too tricky to handle through normal channels. Everyone I work with is a shifter too.”
Lady Marianne hadn’t mentioned that last part. Iris should have guessed it, really—it only made sense—but she hadn’t done a whole lot of calm, coherent thinking this last week. The exact makeup of Keith’s office had been pretty far from her mind.
She couldn’t help being intrigued. “No other unicorns, right? The Council wouldn’t assign two of you to the same place.”
He nodded. “I’m the only unicorn, but I work with a tiger, a dragon, a griffin, a hellhound, a spider—”
Iris managed to conceal her shock at hearing that Keith’s Council-approved work actually involved socializing with adragon, who usually just stood in for all the self-indulgence the Council hated, but she lost the battle at “spider.”
“I didn’t know you could go that small! I thought the lower limit was somewhere around mice and that anything smaller wouldn’t hold the human part of you, if that makes sense, like you couldn’t compress someone down any further than that. A spider. That’s amazing.”
Belatedly, she realized that her outpouring of delight hadn’t been exactly dignified, let alone decorous. It was exactly the kind of open, enthusiastic curiosity that the Council was wary of.
But Keith didn’t look wary. He’d actually forgotten himself enough to smile.
