Page 40 of Watch Me Burn

I swear, if ever there was a king of mixed signals, it’s Conall. One moment, he seems way too interested in my safety. Then there was how he spent the last week following me around the village whenever I left my house, and I haven’t forgotten what happened with the conditioner.

But since I arrived, I got the feeling he was counting down to the moment he would be seeing the back of me.

I wait.

“You’re here. That’s all that matters. Now, this thing of yours… what exactly does it look like?”

Way to bring the subject right back to where it was before. Oh, no. You’re not avoiding my question. You’re just trying to get this excursion over with so you can go back to the village and, I don’t know, pee outside of my house some more.

Then again, I need the fire opal. If only to get rid of the fire in my veins so that Elise can have something to drink without burning her tongue, Ineedit.

Okay.

“Orange,” is my answer. “It’s an orange crystal. Shiny, I think. Do you know where it is?”

“There are plenty of crystals down here. I’ve been exploring these caves since I was a pup, and I’ve seen all colors. We’ll find it, Red. Don’t worry.”

Is it that obvious?

To keep from saying something that would undeniably be an untruth, I look at Conall through the fire. Like everything else in the cave, he looks orange, too, but I peer at him, trying to imagine him as a pup. As a boy.

He was probably super cute.

The man standing in front of me now is definitely attractive. Even when he was unwittingly aggravating the crap out of me, I had to recognize that he was ruggedly handsome. Now that he’s stopped glaring at me?

He’s pretty freaking good-looking.

Damn it.

“How old are you?” I ask.

Let him be, like, two hundred. Give me something to shatter this sudden and inexplicable pull I’m feeling toward him.

“Thirty-three.”

Damn it!

“Shifters are long-lived like witches,” he continues, as though guessing why I asked—and only part way right, “but we’re not immortal like vampires. We should both reach hundred, hundred-fifty easily, but the corpse… sorry, Elise. She’ll live forever if she chooses to.”

Wow. That’s a pretty heady realization. All of it.

I don’t know what comes over me. Whether it’s knowing, one day, I’ll be dead and gone and Elise will still look like she’s in her twenties, or that I should have a similar lifespan as Conall, I can’t tell. But when I suddenly change the subject, you wouldn’t believe what pops out of my mouth.

Shit. I said it, andIcan’t believe it.

“That’s one way that vamps and shifters seem to be different. What about when it comes to mating?”

I’m still holding up my firelight, illuminating Conall’s face. That’s the only reason why I can see his stunned expression as he chokes.

I should let it go. Too bad I can’t.

“You know,” I say, pushing the topic. “Vampires have their blood exchanges. What do you do when you have a mate?”

He clears his throat. “I’ve never had one.”

Never had… wait. He’s not avirgin, is he?

No. No way. A thirty-three-year-old man that looks like Conall? No way. He must mean that he’s never bonded a woman—wait,female, supes have this weird thing going where they refer to each other as ‘male’ and ‘female’—to him before. It’s the equivalent of being married in the supernatural world. He just doesn’t have a shifter wife, but plenty of singlemalessow their oats before they settle down.

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