He clenched his fists.
“I could,” he agreed. She was testing him, staring at his right ear, but he wouldn’t even look at her.
“But then you would get angry again,” he reminded her.
“I wouldn’t,” she insisted.
“You might,” he said.
“I’m not who you think I am,” she said into the darkness.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Malcolm turned hisface to hers, trying to see her better.
“Are you an Imperial spy?”
“An Imperial ... No!” Then she started to laugh, which was even harder to ignore than her sweet giggle. It was a gloriously sunny sound, making him want to lie down in a field of flowers and look at a blue sky with puffy clouds. As long as she was there, beside him, laughing, and preferably naked.
“What’s so amusing?” he asked.
“That the first thing you think of is which side of this awful conflict I’m on.”
In the darkness, he shrugged. “What else can you be hiding?”
“For one thing,” she said, “I’m not experienced.”
“You handle a gun very well,” he said.
“No, you addlepated fool. In bed, I mean, or outside of bed, for that matter.” She no longer whispered or laughed but spoke seriously. “I am not in any wayexperienced. Except with you.”
His brain did a strange shift in perception, realizing the import of her words. His heart felt a little lighter, and he realized he’d harbored an unreasonable jealousy toward any man who’d touched her before him.
“Are you saying I was your first kiss?”
“No,” she confessed. “Well, yes.”
