Page 25 of Can't Help Falling

Not that he was going to volunteer a single iota of that information to Fin right now. Not when he could practically track the tick, tick, tick of her bejeweled tail.

“Fin, what are you doing here?” he repeated himself.

She pursed her lips. “I’d like to talk with you. Let me come upstairs, Tyler.”

He couldn’t help but laugh at her audacity. “You’re not even going to ask? You’re just going to demand?”

“Would you prefer that I asked?” Her head tipped to one side with her question, taking the sheet of her hair along for the ride.

Dangerous.

“Either way I’m not getting the impression that I actually have a choice in the matter.”

Immediately, her hands dropped and slipped into her pockets. She took a step backward, a small one, her eyes softening and falling away.

In the absence of that zinging gaze of hers Tyler immediately took a deep breath, feeling as if a band of pressurized heat had just been released from around the cavity of his chest.

“Sorry,” she muttered, looking surprisingly chagrined. “I’ve been told that I can be really persuasive. Sometimes I let it get away from me.”

It was the first time that Tyler had ever wondered if she was telling the truth about her otherworldly talents. Up until now, he’d completely chalked it up as an act. She was so beautiful that anyone would find her confounding and mystifying. Psychic or not.

But right now, his heart pounding with the absence of whatever she’d just released him from, Tyler wondered if, in fact, there was something a little off about Serafine St. Romain.

When he remained silent, she eventually lifted her eyes again, but there was none of that persuasive, burning light that there’d been moments before. “I’m just hoping for a few moments of your time, Tyler. Then you can kick me out. If you’d rather, we can just talk down here.”

She gestured behind her toward the chairs.

The funny thing was, the second she stopped pushing to get upstairs, Tyler stopped feeling the need to protect his space from her. Suddenly, it seemed ridiculous to him that he was guarding his apartment from this woman. He could sit at his kitchen table, hear her out and politely send her on her way.

“Oh, fine. You can come upstairs.”

He could practically feel Benjy’s disappointment. He’d no doubt been hoping that they’d air their business out in the lobby, where he could lap up every word.

As he and Fin stepped onto his elevator, his last thought as the doors slid closed was that this was almost certainly a mistake. He just hoped it was one he could recover from.

EIGHT.

Uncharacteristically nervous, Fin leaned forward and pressed the elevator button for the eighth floor.

“How do you know which floor I live on?” Tyler asked suspiciously.

“You just said it to me,” Fin replied without thinking.

“No. I didn’t.”

Oh. As Matty would say, crap. Something about Tyler was throwing her completely off of her game. It’d been a long time since she’d responded to something that someone was thinking. She couldn’t read thoughts, exactly. But it wasn’t unknown for her to pick something like a floor number out of thin air. She’d taught herself a long time ago not to respond. It freaked people out.

Just like it freaked them out when she used her energy to get her way, the way she almost had with Tyler down in the lobby. When she really wanted something, she could look into someone’s eyes and talk her way into it. If she wasn’t careful, she found herself winning arguments, tricking her way into the last slice of pizza, into shows she had no tickets for. Anything she wanted.

She hated it.

Because she deeply believed in free will. She’d spent the first half of her life at the whim of her erratic, manipulative mother and she didn’t wish that loss of control on even her worst enemy. She had no desire to manipulate people.

But there was just something about Tyler that brought it out of her. His smug, handsome face, that untouchable look in his eye, like he’d just hopped out of a convertible without opening the door, simply hoisted himself over the side like the rich villain in an ’80s movie.

It inflamed something within Fin. Activated her desire to assert her power over him.

She realized now that his manner, his appearance, had subconsciously made her think of him as less feeling, less human than other people. She’d confused his untouchable demeanor with being unhurtable.

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