Eternal Hope (The Hope Series) (27 page)

She looked at his hands, looked at the room, looked at him. He took hold of her wrist and kissed her knuckles, pulling her towards him. “Don’t freak out, okay. I used to come here sometimes when I wanted a break. I haven’t been here in five years. When I
was
here, I liked smashing golf balls off the roof. They used to leave buckets of them up here for me, no questions asked about how the windows on the surrounding buildings kept getting smashed. I hit a helicopter once.” He pulled the left side of his mouth up into a lop-sided smile that made her insides flutter. “And no, I’ve never brought a woman here in order to pay her for sex.”

Somehow, that clarification didn’t make her feel better. “Oh? Just plenty of women who didn’t want payment, right?”

Daniel frowned, pulling her into the room. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

A horrible, bitter thought formed as Farley spun around taking in the beautiful artwork and the plush rugs and the sleek-looking kitchen that branched off from the main room. There was one girl she did
not
want to have been here. She was already picturing her running around half naked in nothing but one of his shirts. Farley scowled, shaking her hands out of his. “Cassie’s been here, hasn’t she?”

“Uhh…” Daniel looked around, as though he thought she meant Cassie was here now, hiding behind the sofa or something. He shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

“Right. So you only ever hooked up at the cabin.”

He took a step back as though he needed space between them in order to see her properly. “What?”

“You know what I mean.”

By the look of confusion on his face, he possibly didn’t. There was no way she was going to spell it out for him; the mental images were bad enough without voicing the whole nasty thing. She shoved her hands into her pockets, wishing away the past few seconds. Who knew jealousy tasted so disgustingly, horrifically bad? Daniel turned around slowly, his shoulders tense, and made his way into the kitchen.

“I’m going to pretend I don’t know what you’re talking about so we can avoid this conversation, okay?”

Unbelievable. Totally unbelievable
. He was a nightmare. Farley charged over to the view of the city below, surging and throbbing to a rhythm that could only be heard on the other side of the glass. The metropolis, like any other night, was a living, breathing, ugly, beautiful thing. “Coward,” she whispered.

Daniel’s reflection approached her quietly from behind, his face serious and sharp. He wound his arms around her waist and rested his chin gently on her shoulder. “I
am
a coward. But only when it comes to you.”

“Well, don’t be. The thought of you with someone else makes me feel physically sick but I’m not a child. I’m not stupid. You’re
ancient
. Of course there have been people before me, Cassie included.” Farley re-focused her eyes, not wanting to look at the intense expression on his face; instead, she concentrated on the dark outlines of the high rises, lit sporadically against the darkness. Daniel’s arms fell slack from around her, and his hands came to rest on her hips.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he murmured, pressing his face into her hair. He hooked his thumbs under her shirt and rubbed them in slow circles over the base of her spine. She shivered, fighting with herself. It was hard to be angry when he was so close, when the smell of him flooded her senses.

“Then tell me,” she demanded, placing her hands behind her over his. His thumbs stopped working over her skin.

“There was someone. Once,” he whispered.

Farley narrowed her eyes, intending to zero in on the Daniel in the glass again. Before she could see what his face was doing, though- whether he looked awkward or uncomfortable- she caught sight of her own reflection. Backlit from the room behind, she looked pallid and washed out. Her clenched jaw made her look tired and hard. Suddenly she wished she hadn’t pushed it. There was no way she wanted to hear about this. “Stop. Don’t. It…it doesn’t matter.”

“No.” He shook his head, softly brushing her hair back over her shoulder to expose her bare neck. “It doesn’t matter.
This
matters.” He leaned forward and slowly lowered his lips to her skin, his eyes still locked on hers in the glass. The heat from his kiss was explosive, wracking through her body. She twisted in his arms, turning to face him. He rolled with it, slouching down to continue kissing her neck, gently grazing his teeth across her skin in a way that made her legs go weak. It felt like he was holding her up, his hands rough against her back, her hips, her thighs. He shoved her against the glass, hard, and she slapped her palms against the cold surface, momentarily scared. The whole world was at her back. It felt like with one heady heartbeat they would topple back into it, lost in the dizzying sensation of the fall and the kiss and the way everything felt like it had stopped moving.

Daniel brought his hands up to cradle her face, kissing her like didn’t need oxygen to breathe, couldn’t bear the space between them. A low crackle ripped through the air, and Farley felt the sweet burn of his light biting at the skin on her neck. Her whole body tremored involuntarily. She gasped, low and shocked. Daniel sucked in a deep breath and jumped back, clenching his fists by his sides. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to.”

Farley slid down the glass as her knees buckled. Her breathing matched his, ragged and uneven. “What?”

He raked his hands back through his hair in a motion that gave away his frustration, and shot her a pained look. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t do that. It’s… it’s kinda weird.”

She looked up at him in a daze, feeling slightly flushed and embarrassed. There was no way her cheeks weren’t fuchsia right now. “It’s
not
kinda weird,” she said in a breathy voice that barely sounded like her own. “It’s kinda
hot
.”

Daniel quit pacing and pulled a troubled face. “You don’t think what I just did bares any resemblance to Simeon’s predilection for doping up his wife?”

Confusion burst through the crazy lust crowding her mind, and Farley finally gripped hold of her senses. “No, I don’t think that. Simeon was forcing energy into Aria and getting energy in return. He connected with her soul in a physical way. She was addicted to the feeling, like it was an incredibly powerful drug. This…” She slowly got to her feet and closed the distance between them. “This is different. Your power’s just light when you want it to be, right?”

He fixed his green eyes on her like she was speaking a different language. “Yes.”

“And when you do that to me… it’s not like you’re connecting with my soul, taking my energy. You’re just…” she shrugged, “shocking me a little. Pleasurable pain and all that.”

Farley’s words were barely out of her mouth before something crazy happened: Daniel
blushed
. He dipped his head and hid behind the curtain of hair that fell into his face. “I guess, when you put it like that…” A surprised laugh worked free from Farley, and he looked up at her ruefully, running his hand over his face. “Be kind,” he laughed half-heartedly, prodding her in the ribs.

“I’m always kind.”

He wrapped his arms around her and pressed his forehead against hers. “Not always. Sometimes you can be positively cruel.”

She constructed her face into mock hurt. “When?!”

“Like when you say things about me hooking up with Cassie. I don’t know-”

“Hey, I thought we agreed that wasn’t important. I really don’t want to know anything-”

Daniel placed a finger against her lips, cutting her off. “I don’t know where you got this idea from, but you couldn’t be more wrong. I’ve never looked at Cassie. Not like that. If you don’t want to know anything else, you should at least know that.”

A wave of something palpable crashed over Farley- the strongest sensation of relief she’d ever felt. He’d never been with Cassie. He’d never even
looked
at her. There was something weird about that, because Cassie was, after all, strikingly beautiful. But Farley wasn’t going to argue. She sank her face into his t-shirt, feeling the material pull against her nostrils as she inhaled. “Have you ever thought about killing Anna?”

The rumble of his laughter sounded deep there, with her ear so close to his chest. “On a daily basis. Let me guess… she told you Cassie and I dated?”

“No. She flat out insinuated you were sleeping together. That it was an ongoing arrangement.”

“Well, she lied. Never mind. I’ll be having a few words with her when they others arrive tomorrow. Come on.” He took her hand and led her past the bathroom, where the biggest bathtub she’d ever seen sank into the slate floor, and drew her into the bedroom. The bed wasn’t some gigantic monstrosity with too many pillows. It was like the one back at the cabin- big, but not big enough to lose him in, and made up with simple white sheets, folded clinically at the corners. He collapsed backwards, pulling her with him. She nipped him hard on the collarbone in retaliation, at which point he tickled her mercilessly until she cramped up with multiple stitches, the sheets tangling around them.

Farley was catching her breath when she realized Daniel had stopped laughing. He was staring at her with such burning intensity that it made her skin redden. He rolled on top of her and pulled the sheet over their heads, blocking everything out so there was nothing but her and him and their small, white world. He held himself up so that he wouldn’t crush her, and stared down with a hint of a smile on his face. His hair was wild, raven black against the material of the sheet.

“I love you so much,” he whispered. The sound of his words, seeing how much he meant them, made her throat burn and close up. She shut her eyes and fell back against the pillows, pulling him with her.

“Why do you always stop before we get too out of control?” she whispered.

He gathered her hair in his hand and gently arranged it in a fan around her head. When he finished, he placed a slow, lingering kiss on her lips.

“I just told you why.”

Farley bit back the grin itching at the corners of her mouth. “I understand that. But I’m ready to…I want…”

“I know what you want. I want it, too. I just…”

For a moment Farley thought he wasn’t going to respond. He stared down at her collarbone, biting his lip. His expression was torn when he looked up. “The other person I mentioned before… I, well, we went spent a while together and…” He blew out a long, unsteady breath. “We slept together too soon and it ended badly. I don’t want that to happen to us.”

Fighting the urge to wiggle out from underneath him, Farley processed what Daniel had said. She could tell he wanted her. She could literally feel the evidence of how badly he wanted her.

“When isn’t going to be too soon?” she whispered. It was great that he’d been out into the world and made all his mistakes before he met her, but it was frustrating that he couldn't see what she did. Farley had never slept with
anyone
before and yet she knew that it- them together,
really
together- would be perfect.

“I don’t know. Soon?” he murmured, his voice rising at the end to form a question. He kissed her forehead and lowered himself a little, letting his body weight press down on Farley’s chest. It felt more than good, but still not close enough.

“Soon,” Farley agreed breathlessly, working her hands underneath his t-shirt. She traced her fingertips lightly down his sides. Daniel shuddered, closing his eyes. The smile he wore as he shook his head was a rueful one, and gave Farley the distinct impression that his will power wasn’t as strong as she’d thought it was.
 

Nothing was harder than behaving. Nothing. Farley looked like an angel when she slept, and not the Kayden kind- the real,
sent from Heaven to do God’s work
kind. It made him want to scoop her up and protect her; to hold her to him and never let go. He’d spent decades constructing this façade where he pretended to be cold and hardened, determined not to care about things or people. Only killing the Reavers. Well, Jacob in particular at the beginning. It was only after a few years of planning that he’d started to fantasize about wiping the whole lot of them out. But anyway, that aside, it had been almost impossible to build up that wall. He’d always thought it would come crashing down at the slightest nudge, given how hard he’d had to fight to keep it from crumbling on occasion. But when he’d gotten there, desperate to give in and let these strange new emotions take hold, he’d realized the truth: the wall was bombproof and he was going to have to tear it down with his bare hands, brick by brick.

Saying,
I love you
had destroyed that wall’s cornerstone. With that gone, being here was easy. Being in love was easy; Farley made it that way. She stirred in his arms, turning into him against the first light of morning, which eked its way through the blinds, declaring the day arrived. He kissed the top of her head and she groaned.

“Why do you hate me so much?”

“Why would you make such a cruel accusation?” he shot back, playful.

“Because you didn’t lend me a shirt to sleep in and my clothes are twisted around my body at least eight times.” She bucked on the bed, yanking at her jeans until they were apparently back in their correct position. When she finally settled, she fell back against his chest and looked up at him, slowly cracking her eyes. Damn, she was so beautiful, even half asleep.