Page 73 of Inflamed By an Incubus

Fenix huffed. “He’s a liar.”

“And you’re not?” she bit out and tossed him daggers. Her shoulders slumped a heartbeat later. “Just take me home, and I won’t tell Archangel anything about your involvement in this. I won’t bring them after you.”

He shook his head again. “I can’t do that. You’re staying here.”

She folded her arms across her chest and he noticed that she wasn’t going for her weapon. Was he getting through to her?

“I’ve never lied to you.” He backed off a step, changed his mind and closed the distance between them instead, because he didn’t want her getting too comfortable around him. “Archer lied to you. He used you. You’re a pawn to him.”

“And what am I to you?” she whispered, and the look she gave him made him feel a lot hinged on his answer, and it was too much weight on his heart.

Everything. She was everything to him.

“Nothing,” he spat. “Just a means to an end. Unless you’re up for that quick bang against the wall? Then I guess you’d be dinner.”

She backed off, hurt flaring in her eyes for a heartbeat before they hardened again. “You’re such an arsehole. I don’t get you. You act like you want to help me… or save me… You make out that we’re old friends… but then you’re a callous, cold bastard towards me. Why? Are you always like this?”

Fenix pivoted away from her on a frustrated sigh and ran his right hand through his tawny hair, still hating how short it was now, how a moment of weakness had made him cut it to look like the Crow’s hair.

He glanced back at Evelyn, his gaze colliding with hers, and the hurt in her eyes, the confusion, hit him hard and had him heaving another sigh as the need to comfort her rolled through him.

This was dangerous, but perhaps it was better she knew what she was up against. She deserved to know what would happen if he stopped being cruel to her from time to time so she could guard her heart.

“I don’t want you falling in love with me,” he husked, all the pain he had felt over the decades rolling together in an agonising knot in his chest. All the brief moments of happiness. All the long, aching months of grieving her. All the fear of it happening again. The hopelessness. The cruel sense of it being unavoidable.

Inescapable.

Decades of feeling powerless.

Driven to find her.

Aware that when he did, it would only result in her death.

“No danger of that happening, incubus,” she scoffed and glared at him, but then a flicker of curiosity lit her eyes. “But, I’ll play along. Why can’t I fall for you?”

He was really going to do this. It was something he hadn’t tried before, and maybe it was the one thing he had been missing and would lead to success.

“If you fall for me, the curse that affects both of us will become active and you’ll end up being killed again, transported elsewhere for your rebirth, and you’ll forget everything.”

Her brow furrowed. “Killed again?”

He held his hands up, his palms facing her, when she looked ready to run or possibly laugh in his face. He wasn’t sure which it would be. There was a high probability she was going to call him a liar again.

Fenix sucked down a deep breath, held it and then sighed it out.

“You’re not human, Evelyn. You’re a phoenix shifter.”

Chapter 22

“You’re not human, Evelyn. You’re a phoenix shifter.”

Evelyn stared at Fenix, reeling as those words hit her, the desire to laugh in his face and tell him to pull the other one because it had bells on it falling away as she fell into his green eyes and saw in them that he was telling the truth.

Or what he believed to be the truth.

She wasn’t sure what to believe.

Archer had turned out to be a warlock, a non-human, just as Fenix had warned her. That alone had part of her wanting to believe the incubus, while the rest of her wanted to run for the heather-covered hills that surrounded the bleak grey mansion.

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