Jessica Andersen - Dawnkeepers

The knock came a second time. For all of Carlos’s faults, he was pretty good about fucking off when told to fuck off, suggesting that whatever he’d come to say was important. Hoping to hell that it wasn’t, because he couldn’t stand any more drama today, Nate pushed to his feet and headed for the door, hissing against the pull of countless bruises from the day’s events.

Those small annoyances fled the second he swung open the door and saw Alexis standing there. In their place flared heat and want, and a sense of the inevitable.

She was wearing loose light blue yoga pants and a cropped sweatshirt two shades darker, in deference to the chill of the night air. Unlike her usual put-together outfits, which dared a guy to peel them away layer by layer, this one was easy access, two items, maybe a couple more if she was wearing panties and a bra. He was betting not, though, because he knew the outfit, knew it meant she was in the mood. Before, it’d been a signal, a sort of cosmic don’t bother prettying it up with speeches; I need to get off. Now, however, though there was heat in her eyes; there was something else, as well. There was warmth.

“Help you?” he asked, which was about all he could get out through a throat gone suddenly dry.

The year before, her answer would’ve been something along the lines of a coy, “I think we can help each other,” and it would’ve been accurate. But now she paused for a second, then said, “Can I come in?”

The question hung in the air, becoming everything. Before, they’d mostly used her rooms, or a spare bedroom elsewhere in the mansion. If he invited her inside his parents’ cottage, things shifted to a new level, a new degree of importance. If he invited her in, they would have each other, Nate thought, using the safe euphemism when his conscious mind couldn’t cheapen the act to sex, couldn’t call it making love. But more, they would do it with their eyes open to each other’s flaws and the ways they didn’t fit.

He cleared his throat, and yearned. “Why now?”

Her lips turned up at the corners in a sad, self-aware smile. “Because for the first time in a long, long time, neither of us needs anything from the other. This would just be us together, because we want to be.”

Which begged the question of whether he wanted to be with her, despite everything. And the answer, damn it all to hell, was a resounding, stupid-simple yes .

So he stepped back out of the doorway. “Come on in.” He probably should’ve said something way smoother, but what smoothness he possessed seemed to have deserted him. She didn’t seem to mind, though. Head high, she marched through, not looking at him. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes bright with excitement and, he suspected, nerves.

Or maybe he was the one who was nervous, and he was projecting like hell, knowing that if they had sex now it’d skirt the line of making a commitment he didn’t want. It was bad enough he’d wound up a royal adviser. He wasn’t letting the gods pick his girlfriend—or worse, his wife. He refused to use the Nightkeeper words of “mate” or “jun tan,” because he was a guy first, a Nightkeeper second. Or so he liked to think. The way things kept happening around him, exactly as the gods seemed to have decreed, he had to wonder about that. Problem was, he didn’t exactly have a decent out clause in his contract. Hell, he didn’t even have a contract; it was all blood and ancestors and destiny and shit.

And none of that mattered now, really. He’d already let her inside.

She stopped in the middle of the main room and looked around, unspeaking. He couldn’t read her body language or her expression, and suddenly he realized he cared more than he expected to what she thought about him all but living in his parents’ old place.

“You’ll make some changes,” she said after a moment. “I see you as more of a black-and-chrome sort of guy.”

That surprised a snort out of him. “That’d be my office back in Denver.” He wasn’t sure it suited him anymore, though. Wasn’t sure what the hell suited him except the sight of her in his space, and that was far from a comforting thought. So he went for light. “What, you don’t think shag carpeting is me?”

“Carpet can be replaced.” Her eyes lit on the paintings, and the oversize medallion. Like him, she was drawn to that wall, crossing to stand very near the painting of the Mayan ruins seen from above.

“The rest of this place suits you, though, or what I’ve seen of it. It’s practical and stripped down, and there’s not much in the way of family pictures or mementos, but there’s a sense of latent power and . .

. an honesty, I guess.” She shot him a look. “I don’t always like what you say, but I know that if you say it, you mean it.”

He didn’t know how to respond to that, or how to deal with the possessive clutch in his chest at the sight of her standing in front of his bloodline symbol. Yes , a thousand generations of his ancestors seemed to say, she’s for you. This is meant.

Because he couldn’t deal with that just then, and maybe because he wanted her to see, he waved toward the bedroom door on the right and said, “Have a look in the spare room.”

He followed her, stood too close to her when she paused at the threshold and breathed, “Oh.” Just that one word. Oh.

It still caught him the same way too. His old nursery, preserved intact for nearly twenty-five years, telling him that he’d come from somewhere, that he’d been loved. That love was in the boxed photos stacked in the closet too, though he didn’t want to show them to her now, couldn’t bear to go through them again so soon.

He wanted to shy away from the snapshots of his parents and his infant self, taken here and there around Skywatch and elsewhere, pictures of his parents with the other magi, his father standing slightly apart from the group, pictures of Nate with other babies and Nightkeeper children. The images were difficult for him to look at, knowing that everyone in them was dead except him, and because he’d spent his entire life not caring about the parents who hadn’t cared enough to keep him. It probably should’ve helped to know that they’d cared, and cared fiercely. But somehow it was worse knowing that he should’ve been with them, or, failing that, with a winikin , growing up like Alexis had, pampered and groomed, always having someone to tell him that he could do better, that he could be better.

It was worse knowing he should’ve grown up thinking he was important, when instead he’d been taught that he was nothing, that he had to scrap to survive, steal when he wanted a little extra, and defend himself every second of every day.

Alexis seemed to sense at least part of that, though. She took his hand, threaded their fingers together, and squeezed gently. “I’m here because of who you are in this lifetime, not who you might’ve been.”

He turned to her then, and lifted their joined hands so he could kiss her knuckles, where a faint bruise darkened the skin. “And I let you in the door despite who you are in this lifetime, because even though I keep telling myself I want something—and someone—else, it keeps coming back around to you. To us.”

Her eyes flashed at that and her jaw went a little hard, but then she shook her head ruefully.

“There’s that honesty again. Refreshing, if not always complimentary.” Then her lips turned up and she tipped her face to his. “Kiss me before I remember that you annoy the shit out of me and start to wonder why I’m here.”

“You’re here because I annoy the shit out of you,” he said, then obliged by touching his lips to hers chastely, letting the contact kindle warmth as he murmured against her mouth, “You’re here because I won’t pander to you like the boys down at the marina, and because you know that I won’t make promises I can’t deliver on. I might be a gamer, but I’m not a game player.”