Page 38 of Lucky or Knot
A mate.
My mate.
Something I’d never really planned to have, because no one had roused the part of me that would crave so deeply, desire so powerfully, that no one else would ever be good enough again.
No one before Raven. And I knew, down to my bones, there wouldn’t be anyone after, either.
Oh, Raven had gotten it right when he said I wasn’t any smarter than I looked.
Sort of right, but also sort of wrong. Because I was even fucking stupider than that. The “Dominic could run intellectual rings around me” kind of stupid.
It took me another ten minutes to get my claws out of the ruined steering wheel for the second time, and to will my cock down to half mast, and by then the last of the dusk had faded and all the lights around me had come on. The front of the spa glowed a subtle sort of greenish-purple with little twinkly lights on strings making patterns across the curtained windows.
Fairy lights.
The Endless Sky.
I turned my head toward my open window, closed my eyes, and concentrated, taking deep breaths and consciously focusing on the sensory data my body usually processed instinctually.
Yeah, that was the scent of magic. Faint and almost muted somehow, sort of like that weird underwater light coming from the spa windows. But definitely there, and it didn’t smell like Raven. Any scent of him in the parking lot had dissipated before I arrived.
Was this what he’d meant by communing with the air? Did the Las Vegas fae community have some kind of secret hideout inside a strip-mall day spa?
I didn’t have long to wonder, because another fifteen minutes later, the door opened, the first time it had done so while I’d been parked here, I now realized.
Raven stepped out and let the door swing shut behind him, frowning down at the phone in his hand and with his car keys in the other. He was in all black again, but of course, and had his hair up in a messy bun.
My breath caught, the sensation starting to become familiar with repetition: a little hitch of wonder that he even existed.
He looked up.
And he stopped dead as our eyes met and held, even through my windshield and across the dim parking lot.
His lips pressed together in a flat line.
I tensed, my hand on the door release. He’d never make it into his car before I intercepted him.
But it wasn’t necessary, because he slipped his keys and phone into the pockets of his jacket and strode toward me, shaking his head at me as he did.
An instant later he’d opened the passenger door and climbed in, shutting it behind him.
Chapter 13
Raven filled my senses: his sweetness mingled with the scent of some herbal and slightly spicy spa product or other, the warmth of his body, the tingling presence of him all along my right side. When he half turned in his seat to face me, we were only a foot apart, and the jet black of his eyes glittered, reflecting the strip mall’s overhead lights. A flush spread over his cheeks, and one waving tendril of his hair that had escaped the bun curled along his jaw.
“I would ask how you found me, but I’m not sure I want to know,” he said. “And I’d ask what you’re doing here, but I’m afraid that I do know.”
I had to lick my lips and swallow before I could force my throat to push any words out. Every cell in my body strained to touch him.
“I doubt you do, actually,” I rasped. “You probably think I’m here to try to fuck you.”
A shadow passed across his face, so briefly I almost missed it, and then he’d composed himself again, impenetrable.
Blank, Sean had said. The face Raven showed the world at large.
And now me, apparently. I felt like a starving man plastered against the bulletproof glass window of—nothing as mundane as a grocery store, obviously. Maybe the kind of bakery that listed its pastries’ fillings in a language you didn’t know and which they refused to translate for you, but that you knew would be able to sell you the most delicious thing you’d ever tasted.
“That possibility had occurred to me,” he said levelly. Too levelly? Or with genuine indifference? “But that would be better than the alternative, that you want to…talkto me.” His tonesuggested that “dead, bloated, stinking fish” would’ve been the right synonym for “talk.”
