Lydia’s nose wrinkled. She leaned forward suddenly, and like a great white coming in for the kill, she chomped down on the ends of the Cheetos poking out of Mercer’s fist. The effect was to squish far more of the crispy orange sticks against her chin and cheeks than into her mouth. “Abort! Abort!” she coughed, spewing crumbs in her wake.
The sudden motion made Kat spring up from her post-breakfast lounging, her tail bursting into waggles as her ears perked. She barked once, jumping at Lydia’s legs like she could save the day if only she was tall enough to lick the crumbs off her face.
Despite the subtle pounding still lighting pain through one side of his skull, Mercer cracked up. He rubbed Kat’s head with one hand and smeared an extra line of the orange dust across Lydia’s cheek with the other, giving a maniacal cackle.
“Child abuse!” Lydia shouted, waving her hands in front of her face. But she was laughing—really, truly laughing, the kind of reckless giggling that he’d barely seen from her in months.
The sound made Mercer’s heart swell. Ignoring the orange dust, he wrapped his arms around his daughter, snuggling her against his chest. She made a disgruntled noise and wiggled as Kat bayed excitedly at them again.
“Daaaaad. I have to wash my hands!”
“And your face!” he laughed, letting her go and stealing another handful of Cheetos from her bag. Kat gobbled up the pieces that dropped from his fist.
Lydia bumped her shoulder playfully into his side, but as she moved to the sink, Mercer’s attention caught on the way she washed her fingers, awkwardly avoiding getting a brand-new band-aid wet.
He could feel himself scowling in the sudden pressure that built behind his eyes. “Did you get cut?”
Lydia flinched, her momentary joy dropping away. It hurt Mercer to watch it go, hurt him more to know that he was taking it from her. “I’m sorry, Puck. I’m just—”
“Worried, yeah.” She slid her wet fingers over his hand. “But it’s a tiny scrape. I’mfine, Dad, really.”
That was another lie. It made Mercer’s heart ache and his throat tighten, but it was all he could do to flip his hand around and squeeze hers. “Okay,” he forced out, quietly. “I believe you.”
An untruth for an untruth; was this their relationship now? But Mercer didn’t know what else to do.
As she strolled back toward her bedroom, Cheeto bag still in hand and Kat trailing happily in her wake, he wondered: did they even own band-aids with stars on them?
No matter how his relationship with Lydia twisted and turned, at least he now had his days with Rahil, if only for the moment.
Every time Rahil joined him in the shed, he had to remind himself that it was a business transaction. A momentary blip of touch and laughter that Mercer was, very decisively, not going to keep, for Lydia’s sake most of all. But, God, after nearly three straight weeks of working with Rahil, he was certainly enjoying their time together in the moment.
Though he’d never tellRahilthat.
Mercer grabbed the vampire’s wrist as clinically as possible, raising it to the silver cord awaiting him. It slid tightly into place.
Rahil watched him with a casual expression, one eyebrow lifting. “Do you really need to keep doing that? You should know by now that Icansimply be asked to stay put.”
“I do know.” Mercer lifted an eyebrow right back at him, adding flatly, “But you enjoy this more.”
“Oohhh,” Rahil replied, and his grin was so outright devilish that Mercer had to turn away to keep his face neutral. “My pleasure is your command now, is it?”
Theywere not flirting. Of course, Rahil was still flirting withhim, but it took two to tango and this was, at best, a dance in which Mercer had allowed himself to be momentarily pushed around on a gym class roller-board. “If that were true, I wouldn’t keep wasting our time together by staring at a chunk of golden metal.”
“You’re forgetting the bits where youprobeme with that metal and ask how itfeels.”
“Oh, no,” Mercer chided, already lifting his unfinished gold—which he’d taken to callingunholygold, in direct contrast to holy silver—out of the safe box. “I do that becauseIenjoy it.” He graced Rahil with the smallest of smiles, taking a quite-definitely-unholy amount of pleasure in it; he could pinpoint the exact unholiness of it by how aggressively his unconscious tried to shame him for the impropriety. Which was, frankly, silly, since these particular pleasure responses didn’t even involve sexual thoughts… At least not anything more sexual than Rahil already seemed committed to perpetrating, with his innuendos and open shirts. Mercer was pretty sure he wore so many of the old-fashioned ruffles just to taunt people into grabbing onto them. That was one scenario Mercer had spent far too long imagining just before bed last night, shame be damned.
“Do you also enjoy edging?” Rahil asked. “Because I think that’s what you’re doing to our poor unholy gold.”
Mercer nearly choked, recovering with barely a hum in the back of his throat as he forced himself to nonchalantly glance up at Rahil. “Ourunholy gold?”
“You wouldn’t have it if not for me.”
“As you so eloquently assured me, I technically don’t have it at all yet.” Mercer was trying to hold out hope. Every improvement had been followed by a sudden nosedive, if not a full-blown crash that required a brand-new piece of metal. They were, at least, finally making Rahil feel things.
Though, as he kept putting it, he’dfeltthings from the moment he laid eyes on Mercer. Mercer would remind him every time that he was fairly certain Anthony Hilker had no use for an erection-inducing metal.
“To reiterate—”
