Page 81 of Elven Prince

Just enough to satisfy the need.

“You’re right,” she said, tipping her head with a sigh of release as she prepared to continue with the rest of it. “About all of it.”

Maxwell’s rigid positioning shifted upon hearing her begin. Though Rebecca couldn’t quite look at him yet, she felt the shifter softening at her words despite his desperation to hear more.

At least she’d started the right way.

“Ididrecognize him the second I looked inside that holding room,” Rebecca continued. “Though I hadn’t known if I would. It had been so long since I’d seen him, and honestly, I hadn’t planned to ever see him again.”

“How long?”

The sudden gentleness in his voice prompting her for more filled her with an ache of longing she didn’t quite understand. Not the same longing for Maxwell brought on by their connection, or for anything else in her present life she could pinpoint.

It only occurred to her a second later that longing and grief were close cousins.

He’d asked how long it had been since she’d last seen Rowan, but if Rebecca gave him a number, she’d also be giving away far more about her true age than seemed safe.

With that pain of longing and grief still swimming in her eyes, she looked up at the shifter and could only respond with, “A lifetime.”

And it wasn’t a lie. She’d lived several lifetimes since then.

“Rowan and I were raised together. Grew up together. And at one point, we fought together. Hannigan, there are certain things our families, ourpeople, expected from us, and the longer I tried to be what they made me believe Ihadto be, the harder I fought against it.”

His eyebrows twitched upward before he murmured, “No surprise there. But you still haven’t answered my question. Who was he toyou?”

As soon as he asked the question, Maxwell approached her again with slow, measured steps. The energy growing between them flared in response, filling Rebecca with a surge of temptation, and closeness, and the promise of dark need and hunger she hadn’t felt with anyone but herself. And now him.

Dammit, was he purposefully using this bond against her to make her keep talking?

He was only three feet away from her now, and Rebecca was helpless in her attempts not to look at him.

Who was Rowan to her?

“That doesn’t have a simple answer,” she replied cautiously.

He leaned closer, his gaze impenetrable. “I didn’t ask for simple answers.”

Once more trapped in his gaze, Rebecca felt all her protective barriers—all her determination to keep the past in the past, all her resistance to opening up to anyone—tremble on their foundations and crack beneath Maxwell’s insistence.

Beneath his closeness, the heat radiating off his body like she was inches away from burning up inside a star.

Beneath his all-consuming need to know the truth and to hear it from her lips.

Their connection kept her from lying to him, but she couldn’t have withheld a response now even if she’d tried.

It was so much easier to stop trying.

“Tome,” she began, “Rowan Blackmoon was once my best friend. My only friend. A single point of light orbiting a world of darkness. My life.”

A shaky sigh escaped her. “But in my home, my life wasn’t my own. Neither was his.”

By the Blood, she was actually going to say it, wasn’t she?

“What everyone else wanted took precedence over whoever I might have thoughtIwanted to be. It was the same for him. Almost from the very beginning, Rowan Blackmoon and I were supposed to have been—”

A loud, urgent knock on the office door ripped the rest of Rebecca’s confession out of her mouth and tore it to shreds.

“Knox?”

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