Page 10 of Elven Prince

Beneath it all, though, Rebecca felt his surprise and hesitation. His discomfort.

She’d just hit a big sore spot on this shifter. She’d never broached this topic with him before, though she knew others had. Did she want to push him? Did she want to make him tell her the story he hadn’t shared with anyone else, as far as she knew?

No, Maxwell had only offered this as a transactional carrot on a stick, complete with the tit-for-tat expectation hidden in his veiled confession. He would expect her to return in kind with her own secrets.

Rebecca didn’t want that hanging over her head along with everything else. Plus, if she drove her Head of Security into revealing those hidden parts of himself, especially the story behind that fucking tattoo, there was always the chance he’d give her an answer she really didn’t like…

She wasn’t ready for that.

Either way, though, she couldn’t refuse him now. Not with the power this thing between them held over her and Maxwell, drawing them closer while they struggled independently to protect themselves. To maintain control of their own need.

Independent of this connection or not, she had to give himsomething.

With a heavy sigh, Rebecca bowed her head and gave in as much as she could afford. “All right. It’s…complicated. Because I’m…different.”

A puff of warm air fluttered across her face when he grunted. “We’ve established that.”

Was he still trying to make jokes? They really needed to work on his comedic timing now.

She tried again. “What I mean is, there are some things I can do that aren’t exactly…common practice for most other elves. Or even possible, really, no matter the clan.”

“You can heal others.” He said it not as a question, or a guess dressed up in false confidence, or even as a hope. He said it like he already knew.

Of course he did. She’d healedhim. That was a given.

“Not exactly. I mean, that’s part of it, obviously, but that’s not all.”

“And what is? All of it.”

By the Blood, this was so much more difficult than she would have thought.

Rebecca didn’t want to answer that question. How could she? To answer “all of it,” she would have to reveal so much more than merely how she’d saved his life that night, with Rowan’s help.

She’d have to tell Maxwell everything she’d been so close to telling him in the infirmary after that kiss. Things she’d yearned to reveal until finally letting herself believe she could trust him with all of it, if no one else.

That had changed in an instant as soon as she’d seen the rune on his chest under the infirmary lights. The ripples of that single change weren’t anywhere close to finished spreading.

Maxwell might only suspect who she was, if he worked with her enemies. Rebecca certainly wasn’t the only elf in the history of her kind who could heal others with her magic, just not quite in the same way.

He growled again, and this time, his irritation leaked through. “So far, you’ve only given me summaries and repetition of what I already know. Why won’t you give me what I’m requesting?”

Because she didn’t want to offer up her biggest secret on a silver platter without knowing whether the shifter would pounce on her with teeth and claws or tuck those secrets away and dutifully hide them beside his own.

She couldn’t just hand over the confirmation of his suspicions. If he’d aligned with others against her, he could be trying to claim absolute certainty that the Rebecca Knox he knew was the Bloodshadow Heir he’d been sent to manipulate.

“This isn’t really a tell-all kind of conversation,” she said. “It’s just something I can do.”

“And Blackmoon is like you, then.”

“No!” she barked, far too quickly and with more denial than necessary. Rebecca shook her head and forced herself to calm down. “No. Definitely not.”

No one was like her.

“Then how did he know what to do?” Maxwell dipped his head toward her again, sending another shivering tingle of want and hunger and the anticipation of agonizing separation through her from head to toe. “How did you know you needed him?”

Fuck. This was exactly what she’d feared would happen. That Maxwell would remember just enough about that night and his miraculous escape from death that he’d come up with questions like this. Hot irons and stinging barbs prodding the structural foundation of Rebecca’s resolve, searching for weak points.

“I wasn’t thinking at that point,” she said. If she couldn’t lie to him, she might as well go with circling the truth instead. “It wasn’t something I thought through as precisely as that, okay? You were down, Hannigan. I tried to heal you by myself, but it wasn’t working. It wasn’t enough. I needed help, and Blackmoon was there. He just…instinctively knew what to do, I guess.”

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