Page 63 of Blood Magic (Ariel Kimber 3)

“It’s after ten,” Julian told me. “Almost afternoon.”

I bit my bottom lip. Shit. Since giving up on school I’d had no reason to get up early in the morning, there’d been no purpose to it so I’d stopped doing it. In the hospital and at the Alexander house time hadn’t really mattered so I’d paid no attention to it or when I’d slept or woken up. I really needed to find a job so I would have something to do.

“Don’t sweat it,” Damien said. “I’d rather stay up all night and sleep all morning, myself. You can sleep until three in the afternoon for all I care. Here,” he pushed the coffee mug in my direction, “take your coffee, please.”

I took the mug from his hand with an appreciative smile.

“Thanks,” I mumbled happily as I took a sip of my coffee.

It was perfect, and this surprised me but shouldn’t have. Damien, who I barely knew at all, knew how I took my coffee. Geez. Were they writing down notes and emailing them to each other so that no one missed out on the tiniest little detail about me? I wouldn’t put it past crazy Uncle Quinton with his gung-ho nature and invasive personality. I could see him taking notes down on his cell phone and sending them out to the others, adding his personal thoughts at the end. I wondered if he’d let me look through his cellphone one of these days. Now I was curious.

I choked on my coffee as I got a good look at today’s coffee mug. It was a half-naked woman in shadow with her leg kicked up high and her hands wrapped around a stripper pole. This was Dash’s? Maybe I didn’t know Dash as well as I had thought I did. Sometimes I forgot that he used to be a really big manwhore who had sex with lots and lots of women.

“Shit,” Damien cursed. He reached for the mug and tugged it out of my hands. “Guess I wasn’t really paying attention when I was pulling a cup out of the cupboard. We got this one on a trip to Vegas last year. Dash always buys something stupid like this, some novelty item from every place we visit. Cups, shot glasses, weird little spoons, snow globes. If you flip the mug around you can see where it came from.”

He flipped the mug around, but I didn’t see it. I was too busy watching Damien’s face. Gone was the brooding and the anger. Complete blankness had filled its space. There was simply nothing there and I wondered how he did it and why.

He continued talking but I missed that as well. I watched his face while he talked, looking for something, anything. But there was nothing going on there. It was a blank slate. The lights were on, but it looked like no one was home.

When looking at the twins or Julian, he’d had no problem showing expression or feeling in his face. When dealing with me, he’d wiped it away entirely. Why? Could Damien possibly be as nervous and uncomfortable around me as I was around him? That couldn’t be it, right? Damien, so self-assured, confident and asshole-ish couldn’t possibly be nervous because of little old me. That would be absurd. I knew he wasn’t afraid of the female gender on the whole because he’d had that girlfriend and from what I’d heard, she’d been the last in a very long list of them. And, unlike with Julian, Annabell hadn’t been his first, either. So it couldn’t have been the fact I was a female witch that made him uncomfortable with me because he’d been around one of those before.

Or, was it something else entirely? Maybe he didn’t like me in the slightest. So much so, he had to wipe his face entirely clean of emotion, making it devoid, in order to deal with me.

To me, this made a lot more sense than him being uncomfortable or nervous around me.

“… so long as you’re cool with it, then here,” Damien said as he tried to hand the mug back to me.

I had no clue what he was talking about, but I took the mug all the same. I nodded my head for good measure.

I took a healthy sip before placing the mug precariously on my knee and wrapping my hands around it.

“Sooo,” I drawled. “Not that I mind, but why are you two here?”

I winced. That sounded rude, even to me. This wasn’t my house, what right did I have to ask this question of them?

Julian smirked at me. I avoided looking at Damien entirely. Maybe if I stopped looking at him he wouldn’t think he had to wipe the emotions off of his face for my sake.

“We got you some things from the mall yesterday,” Julian told me. “We brought them over so you could try them on and see if we need to return anything. We shouldn’t have to, though. I hope you don’t mind, but I took the liberty of looking through a few of your boxes in your room until I found some sizes for everything I would need.”

Julian’s lips pinched tightly as his body grew tenser with each word that left his mouth. He had been worried about my reaction to his looking through my boxes. Maybe he really hadn’t been snooping through my belongings. That made me feel better.

“Do you want breakfast?” Damien asked me in quiet voice.

Julian coughed loudly as his eyes bugged out and a look of panic crossed his face.

I looked to the right to see Damien’s fists clenched in his lap and his blank eyes drilling holes into the floor.

I had no idea what was going on between the two of them but knew I did not want to find myself in the middle of it.

“Uh,” I cleared my throat. “I think there are donuts left over from the other day?”

I winced when it came out sounding like a question because I honestly had no idea whether there were any left or not.

“Should be,” Damien said. “I bought enough of them.”

He shot me a small, empty smile and stood up from the couch.

“I’ll go check. Be right back.”

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