Page 51 of My Dark Horse Prince

“So you are human after all,” I say.

“I’m a stallion shifter, actually.” His smile’s back to being cocky. “And I did just power up two hundred and eleven turbines.” He exhales. “By Aleks’s estimations, they should run about three times the capacity of a normal turbine. That means they’ll power six thousand homes worth of energy apiece. And we get paid about ten to twenty percent of that cost.” He smiles. “It’s going to be an absolute gold mine.”

“I’m happy for you,” I say.

“A gold mine in the sky.” He shakes his head. “Trust Aleksandr to come up with a way for us to do that.”

“Is he good at business?”

Grigoriy laughs. “He’s lucky in that regard. He has an earth magic that allows him to find gold, oil, precious gems, you name it. He can even summon them to himself, which means he has limitless resources at his literal fingertips. Forget working in mines and taking risks and hoping and praying. He can just. . .” He waves his hand over the ground in front of us. “Print his own money.”

No wonder he and Kris are rich.

“But my power’s never been like that.” He sighs. “It’s always been the most useless.”

“Useless?” I look up at the massive windmills churning. “It looks pretty useful to me.”

“Now, but a hundred years ago, all I could do was make sure bad weather blew away and rain came toward my people.” He shrugs. “Useless.”

“Well, good thing you have Aleks, then.”

“I still can’t believe he set this all up before he even found me.”

“He must have been pretty lonely,” I say.

“Lonely isn’t the right word,” Grigoriy says. “He had Kristiana. He’s happier than I’ve ever seen him. But Aleks has a very deep-seated sense of duty, and I think it pained him to think of us in that weird stasis, never living, but not quite dead. He wanted to save us in the way Kris saved him.”

“But she told me he was a horse when she found him, and she had no idea for days that he could shift.”

“True,” Grigoriy says. “But she blew all the money she needed on him, which was out of character. He intentionally threw a race so she could win. They clearly both felt something from the start.” He steps closer to me, his eyes on mine.

“I guess.”

“Do you really feel nothing for me?” His eyes drop to my mouth.

My heart’s a disloyal fiend. “Like what?” I try to lighten things by shrugging and pretending I don’t understand him.

He lowers his head toward mine.

My heart gallops away with my brains.

“It’s like that feeling just before a lightning strike. I think it’s called ozone,” he whispers, his lips now hovering over mine. “It’s a feeling of expectation. Like whatever happens between us will be incomparable.” The corner of his mouth curls up, and I look at it.

It’s a mistake. His lips are so full. They’re so confident. They’re so close. I sigh involuntarily.

And he knows. Without another word, without a warning, without asking permission, he kisses me.

Kiss is the wrong word.

It just means pressing your lips to someone else’s. It implies a kind of intimacy, a give and take.

But this isn’t a kiss. It’s a claiming. When Grigoriy said he looked at me and his heart said “mine,” he meant it. His body angles over mine, his arms both bracing me and pulling me closer. His lips completely cover, and then coax, somehow in the same moment.

I’m such a liar.

I can’t believe I looked at him with a straight face and pretended I felt nothing. My entire body sways toward him, like a tree craving the touch of the wind. My heart pounds, just for him. My soul longs for more.

And then, far too quickly, he releases me.

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