Page 108 of Beautiful Secrets

I narrow my eyes at her. “If I’m a wolf, then you’re a cunning little fox.”

“I thought I was little rabbit,” she says, as if to herself.

That earns her a low chuckle, but I cut it off too soon. “You expect me to forget who the fuck I am like it’s nothing, but you can’t?”

She frowns hard at me. “Excuse me?”

“You don’t want to tell me because you’re scared he’ll punish you.”

She drops her eyes. “So?”

“If you can push past your fear, then you can make this right.”

When she keeps her eyes down, I gently grab her chin. “Don’t you want to make this right?”

She wraps her fingers around my wrist—feather-light. Her eyes are dark with something, but I don’t know if it’s sadness for herself or pity for me.

“I wish it could be so,” she says, “but I live in real world, not fairy tale.” She tugs my fingers off her chin, squeezes my hand, and stands.

“Do you think old man will let me lie down for a few minutes?”

“He won’t dare say no,” I tell her.

She smiles, but it’s a fleeting, pitiful thing.

And then she’s gone, leaving behind only a tease of her scent and the memory of those gorgeous, sad blue eyes.

And her uneaten biscuit.

Which I promptly eat.

39

Mika

Athunderous crash wrenches me from sleep. When I open my eyes to infinite blackness, my body tenses until my mind can register what it is that woke me.

Thunder.

As the thought enters my mind, a hand slides over my waist and draws me back against a warm, hard body.

Cole.

His smell washes over me—comforting, arousing, terrifying. He murmurs something that might have been, “Mika,” into my hair before going still behind me.

Every logical bone in my body screams at me to push away from him. But I am so tired of fighting. So tired of keeping him at arm’s length just to avoid him getting close enough to touch my heart.

And even that didn’t work, did it?

He still got in.

But the joke is on him, because I got in too. I know he took to heart what I said earlier in the dining room.

I shift a little, and then grab his wrist and force him to hold me tighter. For a moment I am sure he must be awake, because he wraps around me until I’m scrunched into a little ball…but then his breath is so slow and steady against the back of my neck that he must be asleep again.

Why are we still here? Despite the thunder clanging out like rolling paint tins in the distance, it sounds as if the storm has lessened.

I suppose when he saw I had fallen asleep, he decided to join me.