Page 54 of Until the End of Ever
There was something seriously wrong with me.
“Thea Briar pursued me since she was just out of her teens. I am uninterested,” he stated baldly. “So, two years ago, I told her I’d wed her when she’s thirty if we’re both still unattached and that was still her wish.”
I stared in silence, my brain taking in the new information.
He was…engaged? I’d fucked an engaged guy?
“This is when you’ll keep your part of the deal and ask what you want to.”
I remained resolutely silent. Mostly because if I didn’t, I would scream at him.
I am uninterested. I told her I’d wed her.
Those two sentences didn’t make sense side by side. One of them had to be a lie. As the second was a fact, it stood to reason that the first was dishonest.
“Kleos. Use your mouth, not your brain.”
He wanted me to speak? Fine. “Get out.”
22
LUCIAN
There was one reason why I hadn’t made an actual move on Kleos Valesco during our brief acquaintance.
I wasn’t counting the eleven years of stolen glimpses when I pretended I wasn’t stalking her from a distance and she pretended I didn’t exist. The two of us properly met the day she broke that equilibrium by deciding to speak to me in the office I temporarily shared with her cousin.
How insane was it that we’d only gotten to know each other a few short weeks? It likely felt longer because I’d barely let her leave the manor the previous week. We got closer to each other in my kitchen, my library, and then, my mattress.
But in all that time, even when my cock was balls-deep into her mouth, or getting strangled by her drenched pussy, there was a clear understanding between us. I was a Regis, very much entrenched in the underside, and she, a valer. A dutiful daughter following her mother’s every edict, resigned to accepting the suitors her house considered appropriate. There was an invisible wall. And scratching on it, even so much as mentioning anything that crossed the line of casual, made herrun.
Highvale might be one city, but it was still two distinct worlds. Kleos liked the underside, but she belonged up in the vale.
But she wasjealous. Of bloody Thea, of all people.
“Oh, I don’t think so.” I watched the angry witch point to the open door with a trembling finger as she glared at me.
Not just a little jealous. She was irate, on the brink of shouting or punching me. Never mind that I had a stronger relationship with every single person I’d ever met, my demon cat included, than with Thea Briar.
My mother, Cassius, my father. Even Ronan. Curse them all, but they had a point. If Kleos was in any way intrigued by the thought of what we could be together, despite the disapproval of her clan, she needed to know I was on the damn list. At the top of it. I’d gladly take out the rest of the list if that was what it took. All I needed were the names, and her acquiescence.
It was frightening how intense my desire to touch her, hold her, mark her, and keep her to myself was now that I’d allowed myself to give into it.
“I think,” I said slowly, getting to my feet, “we’re going totalk.”
“I don’t have anything to say,” she practically growled, the storm in her ocean-blue eyes belying that statement.
“Well, good. In that case, you can listen.” I gave her ten seconds before she started shouting at me. “There’s no commitment between Thea and I. I’m entirely unattached at present.”
I would very much like not to be.
“Oh?” Kleos drawled, with no small degree of sarcasm. “And doesshesee it that way? I sincerely doubt it.” Quickly, she continued, “Which again, isnoneof my business.”
“If it isn’t any of your business, why are you so mad?” I asked, somewhat unwisely.
Women didnotappreciate being called out on being angry. Between my mother, Kore, and Lucky, I was fairly certain that there was no surer way to utterly piss them off. Except perhaps asking them to calm down.
But I needed her to lose it a little. She wasn’t going to be honest until she did.
