Chapter 19

It took her eyes a moment to adjust to the sudden disappearance of sunlight. She fanned herself and brushed her bare feet, wondering where her shoes had gone. Ah. There, by the door. Everything was just as it should be.

Almost.

“I have something for you.” She ducked into the kitchen, grabbing a small bundle from the counter. “It’s wrapped inside this handkerchief.”

Their fingers touched when she handed it to him. Chills tumbled up her arms.

His brows bunched lower and he eyed her, his fingers closing around the cloth reflexively. “I—”

“Open it.”

He plucked each corner of the handkerchief, lifting each flap with exaggerated care. Inside lay the ugly old ring, too dull to even catch the lamp light.

His breath snagged in his throat, his throat bobbing as he swallowed. “The ring. But why?”

“I want you to have it.” A warmth spread through her chest, a tingle of a glow. Pleasant and comforting, a sense of knowing she’d done the right thing. “It seemed to mean something to you.”

His eyes widened. “Tamarinda, this ring is too precious—”

“Well, take it.” She closed her fingers around his. “Really, you said yourself. I don’t have enough security. And I really can’t have a dragon in here. I signed a no-pets lease. Take it back to your place and keep it. It’s all yours.”

“Just like that?” His whispered words held infinite doubt.

“Sure.” She shrugged and released his hand. “Why not? You’ll feel better. So will I.”

He stared at her for a full minute, searching her face, his brows drawn.

Had she broken some kind of custom or committed some taboo act?

He slipped the ring into his breast pocket and patted it before performing a salute, a wave of his hand in front of his mouth, sweeping his hand down with a flourish that ended in a bow. “I humbly thank you.”

“Are you sure you wouldn’t like one of the prettier items? You said you liked treasure—that old thing looked like it fell out of a sink trap. Would you like something else?”

“You don’t understand. I have none of my own, Tamarinda. I had never been allowed. This ring is the closest I’ve ever come to having a treasure of my own.” He gently lifted her chin so she could look nowhere but into his green eyes. “I will cherish it every day of my life.”

“Okay.” She patted his hand and slipped from his grasp. “Glad it makes you happy. You’re easier to be with when you’re happy.”

“I don’t know what to say.”

“I do.” She tilted her head. “I’m sorry about making you think I banished you. I did that because I had to. I am a woman of principles, no matter how distasteful you find that to be. I can’t be your therapist because it would be unethical.”

“Unethical.” He laughed, a disdainful sound. “What could possibly be unethical about my coming to visit you?”

“You don’t visit, Burns. You sought counselling, in my office, where I work as a therapist. You didn’t pick me up in a bar. You came to me and said I need a counsellor. And I am telling you, I’m sorry. We cannot continue.”

“But why?”

“Because.” She ducked her head, scratching at the bridge of her nose with a slender finger. “I think I love you, you idiot.”

There. It was out.

She drew a deep breath, expecting any one of a dozen responses—

Except the one she got.

He narrowed his eyes and thinned his lips, suspicion written into every line of his expression. “What do you mean, think?”

“I—I don’t know. I don’t feel things the way people do, Burns. I’m always on the outside looking in. You want to know why I do this for a living? I’m looking for a clue. I’m looking for the thing that makes me different. What don’t I know? What haven’t I done right? What didn’t I learn?” She hugged her ribs and looked away. “I don’t feel. I evaluate people and conditions and events and I make logical decisions on how to react.”

If anything, her proclamation seemed to leave him disappointed. This was difficult, this communication—she was a conglomeration of cold fact and data, while he was a tempest of heat and emotion. How was she to explain the unexplainable to someone who existed upon the mere force of his feelings?

He regarded her quietly for a few moments. “So what makes you…think…you love me?”

“You made me react,” she said, knowing that it was the absolute truth. That is what had set him apart from every being on the planet. “The day you came to the office. You did something I’d never seen—”

“Ah, the water bottle.” He grinned.

“And you made me react. You startled me.” She chuffed out a short laugh. “I didn’t know what it meant, at first. I needed time to process it because that had never happened before. Never. Not once. Then you walk into the room and in the space of fifteen minutes you startle me. I didn’t even know what it meant. A friend had to tell me.”

A smile threatened to ruin the serious line of his mouth, but he leveled his expression. His hands flexed at his sides, as if the energy had to be channeled elsewhere. “And did this friend tell you that you loved me?”

“Kind of.” She smiled then, again noting the ease with which the corners of her mouth tugged. He was the first creature to draw out spontaneous smiles from an otherwise mechanical doll. “I must. This can’t be any other feeling.”

He swallowed hard and looked away. “So. You weren’t just banishing me.”

She stroked his arm, wanting to soothe him. Touching him seemed as easy as smiling. Something else she seemed to have gotten right. “I have a duty, Burns. I can’t break the law.”

“They don’t throw people in jail for—connecting to another.”

Connecting. It was such a deceivingly simple concept.

“Well, I feel so out of my element right now I wouldn’t be surprised if they did.” She didn’t tell him just how deep a dilemma she’d found her way into. Deep enough that she didn’t think she could climb out, let alone examine the depths.

No matter, not at the moment. She peered at him, slipping her hand onto his. “Am I forgiven?”

“Nothing to forgive. You were doing the right thing. I just didn’t understand it.” He patted her hand, then stood to leave.

She couldn’t help but be dismayed. “Going already?”

“I do not want to, but I feel I should. I am feeling very…” He paused, giving her a slow sweeping gaze. “Impulsive, at the moment. Given how things usually go wrong when I act on impulse, I will leave. I don’t want to ruin anything. Not when it’s so…”

He cleared his throat but abandoned the thought. Instead, he opened the door, looking over his shoulder as he turned to leave. “Tomorrow. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Wait,” she said. He couldn’t leave now. They were both so close to a breakthrough. Herself, especially. She spent her career listening and encouraging those who needed her help and she knew, at this moment, she truly needed him. “A wish. Do I still get one?”

He leaned against the doorway, arms crossed, chin tucked. His eyes smoldered. This time, there was no anger behind the flames dancing in his eyes. “I can be persuaded to give you one. What is your wish?”

What a voice. It was everything a bedroom voice should be: deep, rough, smoky. His accent pushed it right over the line into the realm of Too Much Sexy.

She dug her fingernails into her palms. Too easy to get distracted when he used that voice on her. “I want to be like you.”

Surprise brightened his expression. “Like me?”

“Yes. Like you. You are so…” She shook her head, trying to find the right word. “Irritable sometimes. And you get excited over little things. Like my grandma’s junk.”

“Not junk,” he said, his tone sullen.

“See? You drool over it. You broke a sweat the first time I let you play with it. And you yell—you scream! You burn things accidentally when you get mad. On purpose when you think you need to make a point.” She glowered a little at the last part. She had to throw out that jacket.

“So…” He looked perplexed. “You want to burn things?”

She grasped his hand and drew him away from the door, closing it behind him. “I want to feel those things. I want that passion. About anything.”

“You are passionate about your work—”

“I am dedicated. Not passionate. I care because people need someone to care for them. But I’m not emotionally vested. I’m objective and dedicated and committed. I’m goal-oriented. I’m task-dependent.”

“But your wish—”

“I want to feel. Something, anything. I do, when I’m with you. But only then. It’s like my soul is on loan, and I only get to visit it when we’re together.” Until she met him, she didn’t complain. She didn’t know she had a reason to. “But now…Emotion. I’ve studied it all my life. I just want to experience it like everyone else. How can others expect me to fix something I never felt?”

He winced. “I can’t grant that wish.”

“But—”

“I’m a thief, Tamarinda. That’s how I grant wishes. I steal something from someone else and I give it away on a wish. Emotion isn’t something I can simply thrust into your heart. It’s like—it’s like faith. Either you believe or you don’t. No one can make you believe in something. It has to come from within.”

“But I want it, I do. Doesn’t that count?”

“I am a thief,” he repeated, his voice softer. “I cannot give you feelings any more than I can give myself a simple ring. I hate granting superficial wishes. Money, wealth, anything of the material sort. I possess those things briefly and it incenses me to know they are not mine. I cannot grant someone riches out of the thinnest air—I must steal riches from some other fool so that I can grant it to another. I cannot keep anything I steal. A slave has no property.”

“You are not a slave.”

He pressed his lips together and shook his head. “As long as no one wields my talisman, I am on holiday. As long as I am bound to it, I am a slave. These are facts that have endured for millennia. Just because I flaunt my apparent freedom, it does not change facts. A slave.”

“Oh, Burnsie.” What had it cost for him to apologize the way he did? An entire seashore, absconded…How high was the price of his magic?

Fierce emotions warred within his eyes, sorrow and anger and flickers of flame.

This was him. This was what always roiled beneath his surface, that cocky arrogance, that silly conceit.

She’d read tales about genies and their magic lamps but this was the first he’d spoken of his own constraints. Bound to a talisman? No wonder he’d bristled the day they met, when she spoke the word servant.

Pain.

He was a soul who dwelled in eternal pain, eternal in a sense she’d never fully understood before. He’d wandered from her, standing apart. His left arm wrapped his waist, his right palm over his heart, patting his chest in a slow cadence, emphasizing the futility of his words.

She ached, a sympathetic echo of what she imagined him to feel.

“I don’t know why I’m telling you any of this,” he said. “These are not things to be told, not to be spoken aloud, especially not to mortal ears.”

“But you trust me.”

“I do. Even if you weren’t magically bound to your word…which still intrigues and delights me.” A twinkle surfaced briefly, a wry grin. “You feel—familiar. You draw me. That isn’t safe.”

She drew him? She’d swear to the opposite. Despite the rules, the expectations, she couldn’t keep a safe distance from him as a client any more than she could resist him as a man. She stole to his side and reached up for his hand, which still mirrored the panic of his heartbeat, and stilled it with a touch. She could be good for him, if he let her.

If she let herself. “For you, to be close to someone?”

His expression fell, regret weighing his eyes, his lips. He slipped his fingers around hers, holding her hand to his chest. He released his waist and gently lay his free hand on her hip, a ghost of an embrace. “For you, to be close to me.”

“I’m not afraid, Burns.”

“Why not?” He extricated himself from her touch and backed away, his pupils large and bottomless dark. “You aren’t a silly girl.”

“That might be why. I’m a woman. And you, I think, have something I need. Something I want. All I have to do is figure out how to get you to give it to me.”

He beheld her, something lurking behind his gaze, a word unsaid. When he responded to the innuendo, he did so just the way she’d hoped he would.

With his hands.