Page 3 of Elven Prince
And just like every other morning, as if they had a mind of their own, her fingers couldn’t help but brush against Maxwell’s in the process.
The jolting buzz of heat and energy and beckoning need zapped up Rebecca’s fingers at the contact. Shuddered up into her arm. Made her chest bloom with self-awareness and even more heat, like a furnace freshly relit and flaring back to life.
The moment seemed to last forever, both of their hands closed around the Styrofoam cup. Maxwell’s eyes glued to the sight of the contact between their fingers and Rebecca staring, unblinking, up at him.
She sucked in a stuttering breath, still audible no matter how much effort she put into stifling it.
Maxwell blinked furiously, pulled his hand away from the cup, and shook his head. He sighed, long and heavy through his nose, as if it were the only way to keep himself tethered to the present moment and the important work they still had ahead of them.
Including keeping everyone alive.
Rebecca hardly tasted that first sip of scaldingly hot, rich, deviously strong coffee with the requisite alarmingly high levels of sugar to perfect it. She was too busy forcing her gaze to remain on Maxwell’s face while he took a single step backward away from the desk and settled his empty hand behind his back while holding his own coffee cup with the other.
She kept wanting to look at his chest, at the top of his right pectoral muscle—the place where, beneath his light-gray long-sleeve button-down shirt she now knew was a tattoo no shifter had a right to ink into his own flesh.
The same rune she’d seen hundreds of times before in Agn’a Tha’ros. The rune that had been etched, among many others, onto the ancient bone tile Rowan Blackmoon had given her weeks ago—as a reminder of their combined vow neither of them had willingly taken on their own.
The half-circle swirl with the delicate ribbon to the right. Two meticulously formed dots with the tiniest smudge of a tail at the end, one bigger than the other. And the two slashing lines across the whole thing, which—now that she thought about it—did in fact look like claw marks.
Something told her her elven ancestors just hadn’t had shifters in mind when they’d created the first written Bloodshadow language.
With her second sip of coffee, physical sensation finally returned. The burn on her tongue made Rebecca suck in a gurgling breath through pursed lips, but it failed to efficiently cool it. Her throat burned almost as much when she swallowed, and she cleared it to pretend everything was fine.
“Definitely got the sugar pour just right,” she said. “Though Bor could maybe turn down the heat on his brewing.”
Maxwell looked down at his own cup, one hand still resting against the small of his back, and tilted his head.
“I had the same thought…” he murmured before blowing across the top of his drink and taking an obviously smaller sip.
Well, congratulations to the shifter who thought to try cooling his coffee beforehand.
Rebecca’s mind was elsewhere. Even with the silence somewhat broken between them, the task of keeping her gaze away from the shifter’s chest remained equally difficult.
“Have I spilled something?” Maxwell asked, his voice somehow still gruff despite the genuine concern for his own physical appearance. “Or are you seeing something I’m not?”
Damn. Another failure to tuck under her belt.
How long has she been staring at that same spot on his shirt? This time, envisioning the inked symbol underneath…
“No spills.” Rebecca cleared her throat again before forcing herself to look away. If she had to stare at something, it might as well be the mess of dossiers and intel reports scattered across her desk. “I’ve got my mind on a lot of different things right now. Zoning out now and then just comes with the territory.”
Maxwell gestured toward the papers with his coffee cup. “Is that what all this is?”
Before she could answer, he stepped around the side of her desk and stopped at the corner behind it—not close enough to call it hovering but definitely close enough to reinvigorate the intensity of that enticingly tingling link between them that just wouldn’t go away.
In lieu of moving away from him or tugging at the collar of her beige t-shirt, as if that could relieve the cloying heat burning its way through her at his presence, Rebecca swiveled her office chair to the side, moving slightly away from him despite the utter ineffectiveness of dampening the sensation.
It was easier this way—with her back more toward him while she pretended to focus on these recent reports—not to keep staring at his chest.
Which she couldn’t question him about anyway until she’d confirmed what that tattoo truly meant.
Specifically, whether Maxwell Hannigan was still with her as part of her team, on her side, or whether he was against her, sent by someone else to get into her head and under her skin.
He’d already accomplished the latter, but that could still mean anything before she understood the truth behind that tattoo and therefore behind the shifter’s real intentions.
“Yeah.” The word eked out of her in a breathless sigh before she reminded herself to breathe and at leastactput-together and in control. “That’s what all this is. Rick just brought me a bunch of new reports this morning, so at least I’ve got plenty of reading material for the foreseeable future.”
“Anything good?”
