“Would you just stand there and say nothing if I didn’t start?” he asked.
“Yeah.” I sipped the coffee; it was hot, and Nathaniel had taught Cynric exactly the way I liked it, but today, even good coffee couldn’t cheer me up.
“Why?” he asked.
“You’re the one who made everyone else leave the room, Cynric. You wanted the talk, not me, so you get to talk.”
“God, you are so much the dude.”
I shrugged and sipped my coffee; maybe if I just kept drinking it, I’d enjoy it eventually. It was a shame to waste good coffee on such a bad mood.
He ran his hands through his hair, but in the ponytail he couldn’t finish the gesture, so he pulled out the tie and let the thick, straight hair fall loose. It fell around his face like a dark blue curtain, making the ring of pale blue in his eyes richer, closer to cornflower blue, and the darker ring of midnight blue, almost as dark as Jean-Claude’s eyes, look richer, more blue, a navy bordering on something less deep.
He ran his hands through his hair, now that he could, and started pacing a short, tense circle in the largest piece of unobstructed floor in the kitchen. That just happened to put him directly in front of me, pacing, like one of those big cats in the zoo that forever paces, miserable, and eventually they go mad. His thick hair spilled forward around his face, so that as he turned it fell in disarray around his face. The morning light had made his hair oh so blue, but this was a darker shade of light, thicker, holding shades of gold so deep, it was like fire as it fades, so that some of his hair was rich, deep blue, but some of it looked black, so that the highlights and lowlights of his hair were… heart-stopping.
He stopped in front of me, at last, his chest rising and falling as if he’d been running. The pulse in the side of his neck pounded against his skin, already darkening from running shirtless in the spring practices. He tanned, did our Cynric. He stared at me, eyes a little too wide, lips half-parted in that triangular face, hair in that artful disarray.
I had the urge to push it back from his face, out of his eyes, but stayed leaning against the cabinets. I would lose ground if I moved toward him, and I would lose a lot of ground if I touched his hair. If we were going to fight, I didn’t want to do it with my fingers remembering the warm silk of his hair.
“I’m worried about you,” he said, at last.
“I’m sorry,” I said, and started to sip the coffee again, but realized I didn’t want it. I set it on the cabinet beside me.
“Sorry about what?” he asked.
I shrugged. “Sorry my job upsets you, I guess.” For Micah, or Nathaniel, I would have taken this, owned it, maybe even agreed, but Cynric hadn’t earned this yet; he wasn’t the boss of me.
“I’m a weretiger, Anita; I can smell your emotions and you’re not upset.”
“Now you’re telling me what I feel,” I said.
“You want this to be a fight. I don’t want to fight.”
I crossed my arms under my breasts and settled against the cabinets again. “I don’t want to fight either, Cynric.”
“Please, at least, call me by my name.”
I sighed. “Sin; fine, I don’t want to fight either, Sin. You know I hate the nickname.”
“I know you do, but then you hate a lot of things about me.”
“That’s not fair,” I said.
“Maybe not, but it’s true.” He took two more steps toward me, so that if I’d unfolded my arms I could have touched his chest easily. “I can’t help being this young, Anita. It’s not permanent; I’ll get older.”
I hugged my arms around myself, because I wanted to touch him. It was one of the up/downs to him being one of the animals to call. It felt good to touch the type of animal you could call, and it felt especially good to cuddle your very own animal to call, and Cynric was one of mine. The fact that I had a record number of animals to call didn’t seem to make any difference; I wanted to touch them all when they were near me. It was damn hard to fight when you wanted to wrap your arms around someone so you could breathe in the scent of their skin.
“I’ll get older, too,” I said.
“Older in years, but as Jean-Claude’s human servant, you won’t age.”
“I haven’t taken the fourth mark from him.”
“But you and Damian shared it, and he’s a vampire, too.”
“He’s my vampire servant; we’re not sure if that will change the dynamics.”
“I know that there’s a chance you shared your mortality with Damian rather than him sharing his immortality with you, but so far you both look great. I think you just don’t want to accept that it’s not an age thing.”
“I’m sorry if it wigs me to be sleeping with a high schooler.”
“I graduate this year, Anita; then what will your excuse be?”
“I don’t know what you mean by that.” I held myself very tight, because I was afraid that Cynric-Sin-was about to say some very grown-up things that I didn’t want to hear.
“Nathaniel was only nineteen when you met him; Jason, too. That’s just a year older than me. It isn’t just my age, Anita.”
I looked into those eyes, those almost frantic blue-on-blue eyes, and couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t stand the thought of him knowing that I didn’t love him. I couldn’t bear to hear him say it out loud, and yet part of me wanted someone to say it, if it meant he’d go back to Vegas and I’d have one less person to take care of in my life. I was tired in a way that had nothing to do with police work, and everything to do with the fact that no one person could date this many people. You could fuck them, but you couldn’t have a relationship with them. Maybe I’d been ready to jettison Cynric out of my bed and life, not because of him, really, but because I had to find a way to thin down the people in my life, and concentrating on how young he was seemed a reasonable excuse to thin the herd. Was my issue with Cynric not him personally, but just being overwhelmed with all my lovers? I collected them the way a crazy cat lady found strays to bring home, except I could afford to feed and take care of all of them, I was just running low on emotional resources, or so I told myself.
Was I really ready to send a whole person away, just so I could date the leftovers more easily? Put that way, it seemed a shitty thing to do. Hell, it didn’t sound good to call the men I loved and slept with the “leftovers.” If I was going to get rid of Cynric and risk Nathaniel losing yet another brother, I needed a better reason than being emotionally tired; didn’t I?
I reached out, touched his hair, and smoothed it back from his face. His hair was so soft, softer than Nathaniel’s, but not quite as thick; almost, though. I wanted to say,
He put one hand over mine, holding it against his face. His eyes closed, and he leaned his face into my palm, rubbing his cheek against me, scent-marking me as his, like cats will do. Was I his? Was he mine? Fuck, I didn’t know. How could I not know after more than a year? How could I not know the answer to this? What the fuck was wrong with me? What the fuck was wrong… with me? With… him and me, with us? No, with me. With me. What was wrong with me?
His other hand went around my waist, drawing me in against his body. It was a possessive gesture, one that marked territory if other men were present.
I stared up at him, studying his face, trying to see something that would help me know what the hell I was feeling.
He drew me in tighter to his body, and I put my hands on his waist, just at the top of his hips, not holding him, but keeping that last fraction of a distance between his body and mine. I knew what was under the silky jogging shorts. I knew what he had to offer, and I knew my reaction to being pressed against it, even through clothes. It wasn’t just love that made me react to the men in my life, and somehow if I reacted to Cynric the same way, it would mean something. I wasn’t sure what, but something, something I didn’t want it to mean.
He tried to pull me closer, but I stiffened my arms and kept the small distance. He didn’t fight me. He just let me go and stepped back a few inches, so we weren’t touching at all.
I reached out to him, but the look on his face made me drop my hands to my sides. It wasn’t the anger that I’d
