Page 75 of The Bright and Hungry Future of Hawks

Fuck it. He went nuclear.

He just pinched a tiny fold of her sleeve and lowered his eyes, fanning his long, dark eyelashes on his prominent cheekbones. Like kissing, it was something he saved for special occasions. There wasn’t a single person, alive or dead, who had ever resisted that look. He even felt a bit of stirring himself.

She snorted and batted his hand away.

He snapped his eyes up, clenching his jaw.

She laughed delightedly. “Get dressed.”

Furious, but—he gave himself great credit for this—fucking woman—outwardly calm, he went to the wardrobe, pretending to select something.

“Whyareyou here, anyway? Not home, I understand that, but here, in my bedroom?”

She perched on the bed, regarding the ruined clothes once more. “We argued.”

“Yes, I know. The wife. You said.”

“No, she was the catalyst, but it turned into a bit of a dingdong about you actually.”

He turned, still undecided what outfit expressed the mood he was currently in, still holding the pathetic towel, despite starting to shiver. “Me? What have I done?” She raised her eyes in derision from the cashmere, and he pulled off one of his nicely irritating, dismissive waves of his hand. “To upsethim. You argued about me?”

“Well, he was the only one actually shouting. It’s very hard to take such nonsense seriously when it used to be exactly the same silly fuss about wanting more pudding than was good for him.” She shook her head sadly. “You’ve got to stop flaunting yourself at him all the time.”

Flaunting? He thought he knew what that word meant. Flaunting! How much more tightly packed inside his little box could he be! Sometimes he was so constricted he couldn’t breathe and his heart couldn’t even beat! But that was a thought he didn’t want to explore just then, because somewhere in his formidable brain he had made the connection between hearts beating, or lack thereof, and what he’d discovered in Ben’s cottage that night. So no, not going there.

He gave up his search for clothes and turned. She narrowed her eyes. “Don’t deny it. You know you do it. He pops down from the palace, you happen to be coming in from a ride, all salty windswept Viking. He gives me a very nice little present, something from the garden—you buy me a gift so expensive that I have to tell himhismothergave it to me! From one of her collections! It infuriates him, and you know it does. One day you’ll push him too far, and then you’ll discover who does actually hold all the power.”

He sat on the bed on the other side of the blackened coat.

“Like you did tonight? Having him shout at you? Who was flaunting tonight? Who shoved the beloved young wife in your face, Philipa? Do you think he did not know she would be staying the night there but that he invited you anyway, because you are like one of the dogs that wriggle around his legs for attention, which he will give to them only when it suits him?” He moderated his tone a little, realising that he was actually saying something worth hearing for once. “Why do you put yourself through this? Give it up. Give him up. You are better than this—thanhim. Stay living here with me. This...fiction gives us both great freedom. You have become wealthy through me; I have become respectable through you. If you constrict yourself into such a small thing, you will suffer, unable to stretch and fly free ever again. You will never be able to be yourself.”

She studied his expression for a long while, perhaps as shocked as he that he’d put two rational words together into a sentence and offered them to her. “I’ve always wondered, Nikolas. About you. I think you’re speaking from your own experience of this experiment. Whoareyou? Why do you wasteyourselfhere with me in thisfiction? Because…” She reached out and put a finger on one of his scars. One that cut into impressively honed muscle. “Nikki, you could be God’s gift to women and yet you...well, I’m not entirely stupid. I don’t think you play billiards with Ben withcolouredballs, now do you?”

He curled his lip slightly at the implication, but refused to be derailed. “The few women I havegifted, as you so flatteringly put it, have not enjoyed the unwrapping which entailed.”

She chuckled delightedly, which hadn’t been the reaction he’d been going for at all. But he cut himself some slack. He was still in a tiny towel and his teeth were now chattering with the cold.

The touch of the finger turned into a warm palm on his icy skin.

“Then maybe, just maybe, you should stop choosing bed partners for their pretty faces, or their eyes, come to that. I didn’t get where I am today,” she shrugged self-deprecating, “or where Iintend to beone day by having a pretty face, now did I?”

It turned into a bit of a contest then.

Not a pissing one, obviously. He’d have won that. But he wasn’t too sure who came out victorious after the bout that followed that declaration, thatchallenge.

But he was injured and it hurt every time he was shoved onto his back, so it was hardly a fair match in his book. But they didn’t appear to have kept score anyway. They were just lying there. Recovering. Possibly in shock.

His singed skin was now apparently stuck to something on the sheet. He rolled onto his belly. Pretty sticky there, too.

“This shouldn’t have happened.”

He was drifting off to sleep. It had now been an even longer day. “No.”

“It won’t happen again.”

“No.”

“Hecan’t know.”

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