Page 79 of Elven Prince

But By the Blood, she couldn’t resist him inthis. Not now. Not when she could feel his desperate need for the answers, his fear of never getting them, and the brokenness that filled him when he believed he’d been kept in the dark.

By her.

She felt it all, even if Maxwell had never uttered a word. His pain became her own. His growing, desperate need with the power to end everything else that ever mattered if that need was never satiated.

The next thing she knew, Maxwell stood directly in front of her again, all but pinning her to the wall beneath his gaze and the desperation radiating out toward her. His eyes begged her to give him what he needed so badly, he’d started to believe it might kill him.

That flare of energy between them surged again, growing into an untamed heat like a raging wildfire burning away her common sense and her resistance. Her attempts to fool herself into thinking this could never be and why.

Until nothing remained but the pervading certainty filling every space inside her like water, like breath, like life. That she only needed one reason why this wasright, even if she couldn’t name it. Even if her rational mind couldn’t puzzle it out.

That one reason was right here in front of her, transforming her into something she didn’t recognize despite the growing certainty that this was exactly where she was always meant to be.

That all roads always had and always would lead right back here to this. To Maxwell’s silver eyes and the scent of dew-studded grass and moonlight drowning out all other thought.

To being almost certain she could not only hear his thundering heartbeat but couldfeelit racing in desperate rhythm with her own.

When Rebecca opened her mouth, it was as if someone else—somethingelse—opened it for her. Whatever she might have thought she wanted to say next fled beneath the words spilling out of her on their own, like physical pressure drawing the words out of her, drawing her response to Maxwell’s question and his need for the answers only she could give him.

Once it began, she was no more able to resist it than she’d resisted kissing him in the infirmary two weeks ago, before everything between them had become instantly more complicated in a split second.

“Right now,” she said, “at this moment, Rowan Blackmoon is an unpredictable threat and an inarguable danger I can no longer ignore. Nothing more.”

Her voice didn’t even sound like hers anymore, no matter how desperately she thought she’d struggled to keep it all locked away.

Maxwell’s silver eyes roamed across her face, searching her, probing for more, as if he could see through all the secrets and the darkness and the necessary evils of survival to peer straight into her soul.

Therewasmore she hadn’t said. A part of her still didn’t want to say any of it, but now she couldn’t help it.

“But he used to be something else to me. Once.” The words spilled out of her like honey oozing over the rim of an overflowing glass—slow and sticky and unstoppable, drawn out by natural forces without a name. “A long time ago, he used to be…more.”

22

The second those words slid past her lips—Rebecca’s first confession, just one of many she’d gone to great lengths over the centuries to avoid at all cost—her awareness slammed back into her with a vengeance.

By the Blood, what was shethinking, saying something like that out loud to anyone but especially to Maxwell?

She’d had no choice. The cord between them had drawn it out of her like breath, and Rebecca had not been in control.

She was now, though, suddenly and without explanation.

Of all the things she could have said to begin this conversation, she’d uttered the most compromising opening imaginable, leaving him to interpret it in any number of unforeseeable ways.

It was just the tip of the iceberg, sure, but if the shifter kept digging, if he kept pushing her like he’d pushed her now, how much longer could Rebecca resist him before she cracked wide open like a raw egg, never to be put back together again?

If that happened, there was no conceivable way to erase the enormous mess that would unleash.

This was foolish and reckless and nothing like what she’d convinced herself she had to be.

As all these realizations settled in while Rebecca gazed up into Maxwell’s eyes, helpless in the grip of their silver glow, she wanted to shake her head and shut this whole thing down. She tried to say so, but all she managed was a weak wobble of her head.

Maxwell’s eyes widened as he searched her face, and in an instant, his desperation erupted into murderous rage before he pummeled a fist into the wall just a fraction of an inch beside her head. “Tell me!”

Bits of plaster broke away beneath his fist. She felt a few topple onto her shoulder and heard more of them dropping to the floor at her feet.

“Or what?” she snapped. “You’ll beat it out of me? I’m not an easy target, Maxie, I can promise you that.”

His next growl cut off halfway, and he seemed to realize what he’d done, threatening her with violence to her office wall, once again pinning her in place beside the closed office door, as if she’d already attempted to escape and flee from him altogether.

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