His hand rises. “Please wait.”
His quiet request reaches me just as the magic in the cube begins to trigger. I pause, sensing the magic is ready to release me from the cube. All it will take is a small step.
He twists toward me, still kneeling on the bed, his gaze burning through me. His fists press into the tops of his thighs as if he’s fighting an inner war.
He curses quietly beneath his breath before he says, “I take it back. I don’t want you to leave.”
Surprise builds inside me. If I want to take the rubies to Mother Kadris, I should go now. The longer I delay, the greater the chance Alexei will see them, but his request makes me pause.
The weight of this moment settles onto my shoulders, freezing me to the spot.
He approaches me slowly, climbing across the bed’s surface. He’s still naked from the waist up. His hair is ruffled, but he doesn’t try to fix it. His disheveled appearance makes me want to close the gap and ruffle it even more.
Damn. How does he do that to me with a single look?
He slides off the edge of the bed, standing two paces from me in the confined space. “I don’t know what love feels like, but maybe this is the closest I’ll ever get.”
His gaze holds mine. “I don’t want to be selfish. I don’t want to be that guy. I should push you away. Ishouldtell you to find someone better.”
“You did,” I whisper.
“But that’s not what I want.” He takes a deep breath, his big chest rising and falling as he takes a step toward me. “I want you in my life. I want to be selfish. I want to give you everything. I want to promise you…”
He doesn’t reach for me. Instead, he takes a knee. The space is barely big enough to accommodate him as he gazes up at me. “Tansy Gray, I will never betray you or walk away from you. Even if my heart can’t give you what you need, I will be yours always. If you want me.”
My heart is in my throat.
The rubies are like a burning flame inside my fist, filling me with guilt. I wish I’d left them hidden on the bed. I never expected him to stop me like this, to change his mind like this.
I never expected him to make any promises.
Confusion is a storm inside me. Alexei said he doesn’t know what love feels like, but the way he’s looking at me, the way he touches me, the way he has always treated me is beyond mere intellectual thought.It can’t all be logic. Can it?
Or am I seeing what I desperately want to see, interpreting his soft touches as feeling, interpreting the tone of his voice as caring, not as carefully calculated decisions on his part to appear that way?
Despite my confusion, one thing I am sure of: he is always true to his word.
So I allow myself to wonder… What if I accept the life he’s promising me?
What if I don’t get the revival spell? What if I accept that he’ll never love me, but hewilldo what he promises—never walk away or betray me.
I’ve always kept my emotions to myself. I found it so hard to show them, so hard to make myself vulnerable, but now I carefully drop to my knees, leaning in to wrap my arms around his big chest, careful not to reveal the rubies.
I tip my head back to press a kiss his lips. “Yes.”
“Yes?”
“Yes. No matter what happens.”
A smile breaks across his face. A weight seems to lift from his shoulders. He scoops me up into his arms. If I didn’t know better, I would believe he was happy.
But I have a new problem. I nearly dropped the rubies, barely closing my fist in time. One of them slips to the edge of my fingers, and fear of discovery makes my palms sweat.
“Let’s go dance,” he says.
“Dance?” I gesture at the bed, my cheeks suddenly burning. I was counting on returning to the bed, where I could hide the rubies again. “But don’t you want to…?”
He gives me a lazy smile. “I have a lifetime to explore your body, Tansy. Let’s take it slow.”
