“My mother giggled,” I say.
“She did.”
“She has never giggled in my entire twenty-six years of knowing her.”
“I have that effect on people.”
My laughter bubbles back up. Strong enough to make my shoulders shake.
I look at him. He’s looking up at the sky. His profile in the dark is all sharp angles, the red of his eyes dimmed to almost nothing, just a faint warmth.
“You told her I was extraordinary,” I say as I wipe a tear from my eye.
“You are.”
“You didn’t have to do that.”
Hex turns to look at me. “Yes, I did.”
I hold his gaze for a moment. My heart is doing that thing it does. That complicated, inconvenient, increasingly difficult to ignore thing.
This is temporary. A few months. He’ll get his strength back, and he’ll go, and I’ll be here on this bench or one very like it, alone, with an extraordinary story and no one to tell it to.
I know that. I know it completely.
But the stars are out and Hex just told my mother I was extraordinary, and made my cousin feel small, and somewhere out there a confused man is getting an Uber with no memory of his evening, and I am laughing in a park at ten o’clock on a Saturday night in a way I haven’t laughed in longer than I can remember.
It might only last a few months.
But it is going to be the best few months of my life.
Chapter 14
Coffee Date
Iwakeuptothesound of someone thumping and stomping around in my kitchen.
Oh no. I think Hex is rearranging things.
Not subtly. Not quietly. But with the particular energy of someone who has decided that everything is in the wrong place and appointed themselves to fix it. Cupboard doors opening and closing. The scrape of something along the counter. A pause. Then the unmistakable sound of judgement.
I lie very still and stare at the ceiling.
It has been seven days since a shadow prince materialised in my bedroom and turned my life upside down. Four days since I accidentally nearly killed him with a salt shaker and then held out my hand anyway because apparently I cannot help myself. Two days since he crashed my family dinner in a stranger’s body and made my mother giggle for the first time in recorded history.
And now he is in my kitchen. Rearranging things.
At seven in the morning.
On my day off.
How is this my life?
I close my eyes. I’m not ready to face the world. Not when it involves seven foot tall shadow princes who are incredibly hot in bed but utterly infuriating out of it.
“I know you’re awake,” says Hex from the kitchen.
Of course he knows.
