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Alexei shook his head, but I could tell he was lying, which irked me.

“Alexei.” I waited until he stopped blowing up the mattress and looked at me. I swallowed before I started going off on him, a trick to try to get my anger under control. “You do realize that if you want to be with me, your loyalty will have to be to me first. Not my fathers or my mother.”

His eyebrows raised, a look of shock crossed his face. “Wow. We’re going there? Okay.” He finished the rest of the air mattress and then put the cap on it before rising to his feet. “You have my loyalty, but that doesn’t mean I can’t make decisions for myself. If I feel you don’t need to know something, I’m not going to tell you. Especially when you have other things going on and the thing you’re worried about is being dealt with.”

I stood now too. “You’re not hearing me. I want to be involved in everything. It’s my job.”

“Not yet it isn’t.”

I made a frustrated noise of disapproval.

Alexei only smirked. “Princess isn’t getting her way?”

I turned around and fell into bed again. Instead of getting a relaxing night in my room, I was going to spend it being pissed at my best friend turned…what? Love interest?

Who knew?

“Don’t be like that,” Alexei said, his voice softening.

“I’m not being like anything. I just don’t need you, or anyone else, treating me like I’m glass.”

Alexei shoved the mattress out of his way and walked up to the bed. His blue eyes shone down on me and I immediately averted my gaze before he sucked me in. His dark hair glinted in the glare of the ceiling light. “Come on,” he said, nudging me.

I looked up. “I just don’t know why you’re always mad at me lately. I’m not the one—”

“I know. You’re not the one who was keeping something from you.”

Surprised he actually admitted it, I sat up and faced him.

He knelt. “I don’t think you understand what it was like for me. What it’s still like for me.” He swallowed and searched my eyes. “Be as mad at me as you want, but I couldn’t tell you.”

“Why?”

He started to get up and walk away, but I pulled back on his arm.

He whirled, his eyes ablaze. “You want to know why? Maybe because you have no idea what it’s like to be around someone all the time and just wish they felt a fraction of what you feel for them. That having to look at you laugh and cry and not be able to do all the things I wanted to help and support. To look at you and not be able to say the one thing that’s always been on the tip of my tongue. Or for heaven’s sake, just to kiss you.”

My heart skidded to a halt and then picked up into an erratic rhythm. “Do it.”

“What?” he asked, his face pinching in anger.

“Do it,” I said. “Kiss me.”

Maybe this was what I needed to understand if I could feel something more for Alexei. Maybe it would just be the act of trying it out.

He shook his head. “You don’t mean that.”

“Don’t tell me what I mean.”

His jaw locked, and I stared him down more.

He pushed away from the bed and stood. “Just forget it.”

“Alexei Rajyvik.”

With his back turned and shoulders bunched, he stopped and waited.

“I said kiss me.”