Evelyn Vaughn - Underground Warrior

“How many guys have you been with?” he demanded.

She shook her head.

“C’mon, Smartypants. How many have you done?”

“None!” There. She’d said it.

But Trace let loose a few crude terms of his own, in a completely different context, and slumped back against his end of the seat. When Sibyl tried to follow, he said, “No!”

So she stayed where she was. She buttoned her shirt and felt humiliated.

“What, you thought I didn’t need to know? Or maybe I’d get stupid?” He was still scowling when she peeked back up from her buttons. “It’s not like I have money anymore.”

She still couldn’t think, so she didn’t say anything. She felt like crying from the rejection and the confusion and the dissatisfied ache. He was looking at her like the freak she was now. She wanted to explain that she hadn’t known it would upset him. She wanted to tell him that to get sex before she turned eighteen, she would have had to go with girls or guards—like clarifying that would recommend her. She wanted to cite studies about approximate age at first intercourse, and how being among about 10 percent of Americans who’d waited, while a minority, didn’t exactly make her as unusual as Bigfoot sightings or unicorns, either.

And damn it, once she started thinking in statistics, the moment—and that blessed, blissful silence—was pretty much gone.

Most of all, she wanted to be back in his arms, no matter what he was doing to her while there. She’d felt…she’d felt….

But feelings weren’t Sibyl’s forte.

Trace scrubbed a splayed hand down his face, then looked at her over it. “Don’t give me those big Bambi eyes. I’m the one you just…who’s still….”

But whatever he’d meant to say, he deleted. He didn’t look quite as angry.

Don’t cry. Don’t cry. Don’t cry. “Faline,” whispered Sibyl finally.

“What?” She didn’t think he meant to snap the way he did.

She took a deep, shaking breath. “Bambi was a boy-deer. Faline was the girl-deer.”

She hadn’t meant it as a joke, but his bark of laughter still eased her distress. He wasn’t too angry to laugh, anyway. “Fine. Don’t give me those big, Faline eyes.” He searched her face. “So this really wasn’t some kind of plot to get my father’s money?”

She shook her head against visions of rags-to-riches lottery winners. “Your father has money?”

“Ex-father. It’s a long…crap. Look, I’m sorry if I overreacted.” Now he reached across the space between them to catch some of her hair between his fingers, to tuck it behind her ear. She let him, savored his touch.

“You mean you really wanted me for your first time? Just…me?”

As opposed to…? Warily, Sibyl nodded. “Why wouldn’t I?”

“’Cause I’m just some illegitimate good ol’ boy who grew up in a trailer park on the wrong side of the tracks.” He said it like that was supposed to scare her off. “I don’t even have a job right now.”

And I’m an ex-con. And I’m so broken, I never even looked at a man until you. And the guy who owns this apartment doesn’t know I’m house-sitting, which kind of makes us trespassers. Did Trace really think he wasn’t good enough for her? Sibyl shrugged, even attempted a smile and a joke. “At least you aren’t Comitatus.”

His expression…stilled. A momentary pause in his breathing. A flicker of guilt in his eyes. Nothing more. “Yeah,” he said, but he sounded uncomfortable saying it—and then she knew. Because, whether she wanted to be or not, she was very, very smart.

Smart enough to rearrange seemingly unconnected tidbits of data into a new, unmistakable pattern.

When she’d met Trace, he was with three Comitatus descendents.

His father—ex-father?—was apparently wealthy.

If illegitimate, he might not bear his birth father’s name.

“You are Comitatus,” she accused in a whisper. This time she wanted him to laugh at her. She wanted him to deny it, maybe more than she’d ever wanted anything except for the nightmare of her father’s death, of her wrongful imprisonment, to never have happened. But he didn’t deny it. He opened, then closed his mouth. He swallowed, tried again, but only managed, “How…?”

By then, new and worse patterns had revealed themselves.

He’d brought her a sword from the LaSalle house. How had he happened to end up gutting the LaSalle house?

He had a cleft chin. By genomic imprinting, that could only be inherited from one’s father. She’d seen a chin like that before. And the pale eyes in his dark face, the same color as….

The court finds Isabel Daine guilty…

Sibyl stood. “Excuse me.”

“Wait.”

But she kept walking toward the bathroom, unwilling to show weakness, unable to show anything. She concentrated on taking one step after another, the ache in her throat tightening, tightening. “Are you okay?”

Sibyl made herself look over her shoulder toward where Trace now stood, looking concerned. She made herself smile to show teeth. “I’m fine,” she lied. As a child, she’d never lied. Jail—and the Comitatus—had turned her into this.

Then she locked the bathroom door behind her. She turned on the overhead fan. She turned on the water.

Then she fell to her knees and vomited, violently but almost silently, into the toilet.

She’d almost slept with the bastard son of Judge René LaSalle.

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