He gave her a sheepish grin. “OK, so I fucked up. I put too much in it. That’s why I never told you it was me.”
She glared at him several moments and then snickered. “I knew it was you. That’s why I put alum in yours.”
He burst out laughing. “I hope you know I beat the pure hell out of poor Grant for that.”
Dalia grimaced. “I know. That’s why I never told you it was me.”
He shrugged, his eyes still gleaming with amusement. “He deserved it anyway, the asshole. I never did like that son-of-a-bitch.”
She cast her mind back to their days together in training, the incident under discussion in particular, and chuckled at the memory. “You looked so cute with your mouth all puckered up from the alum.”
“Right! That’s why I got slapped by three different females before I could get out of the shower room. They thought I was making lewd faces at them.”
“Oh!” Dalia commented, covering her mouth with her hands and trying to look suitably repentant. She failed. Despite her best efforts, she burst out laughing and kept laughing until tears were streaming down her face. “Oh, I’m so sorry, Pierce,” she said when she could catch her breath.
“No you’re not,” he said without rancor. “You’d have laughed yourself silly about it then, if you’d known it, you heartless baggage.”
Dalia mopped the tears from her cheeks, stifling the urge to laugh with an effort. “I am.”
His eyes gleamed. A slow smile curled his lips. “Paybacks are hell, you know.”
“You wouldn’t!” Dalia said, managing to give him a wide-eyed look of remorse.
“You needn’t bat those beautiful brown eyes at me. You know I’ve always been a sucker for you, baby, but nothing will save you now. Those females still glare at me every time they see me.”
“Well!” she said indignantly. “You got me first, remember?”
He laughed. “Yes, but you got me better.”
She bit her lip to keep from smiling back. “Are they here?”
He rolled his eyes. “Yeah, they’re here.”
“You’re serious? You’re not making it up?”
“Which part?”
“The slap.”
His eyes gleamed and she knew he’d been teasing her. “Maybe I exaggerated a little bit.”
“How little?” Dalia asked suspiciously.
He sighed. “All right. I only got slapped once, but I did get glared at. The main thing is, it made you laugh. I always loved the way you laughed, Dally.”
Dalia’s heart skidded uncomfortably at the look in his eyes. Despite the teasing way he’d said it, she realized suddenly that he meant it. He’d always meant it, all the times he’d looked at her in just that way and said ‘I love your eyes’; ‘I love your hair’; ‘You’re beautiful’--he’d been saying ‘I love you’.
It was disconcerting the transformation that seemed to occur right before her eyes. He looked the same--blond, gorgeous, playful and addicted to teasing and annoying pranks, but quite suddenly she ceased to feel almost as if he were her brother and saw him as a very desirable man.
Why was it that everyone else had seen what she’d been blind to? The programming? Or had she just been too close? Had distance and time and the situation changed the way she felt? Or was it because Reuel had opened the door to passion and then deprived her of it? And, if that was so, was it mere animal attraction? Or more?
She looked away from him uncomfortably. “Is she here?”
“The psycho woman? Yeah, she’s here. Still looks at me like she wants to boil me in oil or something.”
Dalia was instantly distracted from her uncomfortable new awareness of Pierce. “Zenia?”
“How’d you guess?”
