That was what she felt like now. Like she was scanning for a feeling. Something that would tell her whether it mattered to her that Jamie knew.
She could not, for the life of her, find one.
“Michael knows, too.”
Oh. There was a feeling. A nervous one, an uncomfortable one. She’d come here to talk about Michael, about trouble between Michael and Emily, and whether or not she cared about Jamie knowing, she still didn’t want what had happened with Griffin to become a sideshow when things were already strained.
Griffin said—as though he was reading the scan himself—“He won’t tell anyone.”
She reached for the Perrier, poured herself a glass, and sipped. Steadying herself, even though the water sparkled joyfully in her mouth. The bubbles tasted better in France; she didn’t know how to explain it. She licked her bottom lip, liking the tingly feeling.
When she looked up again, Griffin’s gaze was there. On her mouth. Dazed and hungry.
I’m too far gone, she thought.
She straightened, cleared her throat. “How did he find out?”
Even as she said it, she realized she wasn’t sure which of the men she was talking about. Jamie, Michael, it didn’t really matter. But as soon as she asked, Griffin blinked out of his haze, shifting in his seat. Arranging himself so his left leg was straight. He looked uncomfortable, but she got the sense it had, for once, nothing to do with his body.
“He overheard a part of the conversation. With”—a long pause, like he was about to swallow something bad—“your ex.”
Layla almost laughed.Laughed!Instead, she smiled, hoped it looked sardonic. “You can say his name, you know. It doesn’t bother me.”
Griffin looked to the side briefly, his jaw flexing. “Well. It fucking bothers me,” he said bluntly.
She took another sip of her joy water. Waited for the bubbles topingtheir way through her before speaking again. Wondered why she felt so…soeffervescentabout this.
“Did you argue?” she finally asked.
“We…had words.” Another shift in his seat. “Guess he was in the hotel lobby when we came back last night.”
Here, he paused. Took a sip of his dark black drink and set it down with aclink.
“He’s worried about you,” he bit out.
Later, she would think so much—over and over—about this simple, specific thing Griffin said to her. Not even his own words, but someone else’s. Not even somethingnew, because hadn’t she heard it, some version of it, a hundred different ways, from all of the MacKenzies, since the separation?
And yet in that moment, in that shabby corner café, said to her bythisman—
It suddenly sounded soinsulting.
It was the beginning of having a curse broken.
Her dark, cruel-seeming fae prince, jolting her into a different reality than the one she’d been trapped in for the last two years.
“It’s not his job to worry about me,” she said. She sort of wanted to take out her phone and type it into the translation app so all these French people could hear her say it in their language, too.
Griff’s face softened, one side of his mouth tipping up. “That’s what I said, too.”
For a second, they looked at each other, as though both of them had just taken a big gulp of bubbly water. As though they were both thinking,This is simply delightful!
Then, wanting another hit, she said, “And what did he say to that?”
Griffin’s smile faded, his body shifting again, his eyes lowering. She thought, at first, that she might’ve miscalculated—showing too much interest in Jamie himself, when really what this was about was how little it mattered to her that Jamie wasworried, how she so thoroughly felt that she did not want that from him, not in any area of her life. Not anymore.
But after a few more seconds of silence, she could tell it wasn’t that. She could tell there was something Griffin did not want to say to her.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said.
