Page 92 of Prince of Masks
Two.
Then my face crumples. “Here?Now?”
His mouth ghosts into a smirk.
In a blink, it’s gone, and he’s as stone-faced as he often is.
He lifts his gaze to mine. “At the Debutante Ball. In your pretty couture gown. Two dances—and a kiss.”
The blood drains from my face.
“A kiss?” Those words should shout from me. But I falter on the fright, the slingshot of my heart, and the words come out as a squeak instead.
His gaze is steady. “I will say nothing of the book.”
“No,” the answer rushes out of me.
Two dances, I might have agreed to. I’ll be expected to dance with him at least once anyway.
But a kiss…
My mouth pinches at the thought, clamping shut.
His gaze cuts down to my pursed lips for a beat, then he lifts it back to mine. He blinks, patient, the slow drift of his lashes casting shadows over the sandy hue of his face.
“I will leave this library,” he tells me, and there’s a warning in the softness of his tone, “with or without our deal. What I say to your father is up to you.”
He wants me complicit in my own torture.
It’s not enough to have forced a kiss onto me, to have caught me between his body and the wall of a corridor at Bluestone. He wants the torture of mind, that Ilethim.
Dray is who he has always been.
And I blame myself for my own fucking stupidity, that I let my defences lower enough to follow him all the way to the back of the library, that I was led by curiosity.
No.
That’s the answer humming in my bones.
No fucking way.
The answer clamping my mouth shut.
Never in your life.
That answer has my wide gaze cutting around the muscles of his arm, as though I can spot an easy and quick escape.
But the escape isn’t what matters.
Really, I know that.
He does, too.
I could run now, leave the book behind and bolt back to the terrace. Dray would follow, casually, an unhurried pace. He would find my father, then tell him all about his strange encounter with me fishing through his library, asking about deadblood books.
Oh fuck.
I am so fucking fucked!
