Darknight (The Witches of Cleopatra Hill Book 2) Read Online Free

stuff.”
    The first floor of the apartment was pretty much open-plan in style, except a few closed doors that might be a guest bath and a coat closet. The dining area sat just on the other side of the bar of granite that acted as a sort of separator from the kitchen, so I went there and settled myself in one of the heavy wooden chairs. Like the table, they were simple, almost rustic in appearance, but that didn’t fool me. I’d spent too much time shopping for furniture recently not to know that they, like almost everything else in the apartment, had not been cheap.
    Connor came out of the kitchen carrying a couple of glasses and a bottle of Evian water, along with some brown earthenware plates. He set everything down at the table, then seated himself across from me. Probably just as well that he didn’t sit directly beside me; one brush of his knee against mine under the table, and I would’ve been in serious trouble.
    After he sat, he busied himself with pulling the paper napkins and the sandwiches out of the bag, not really looking at me as he set a sandwich wrapped in white paper down on my plate. “I didn’t know what you’d eat, so I got you smoked turkey with provolone. Hope that’s okay.”
    “It’s fine,” I said. The bagel notwithstanding, I was ravenous. Probably my body trying to make up for all the energy it had lost last night through stress and sleep deprivation.
    He poured some water into my glass, then did the same with his. After that there wasn’t much left for him to do except eat. He began to unwrap his sandwich.
    “Eat first, then talk?” I asked. It was pretty obvious that he really didn’t want to have this conversation.
    Something that was almost but not quite a sigh escaped his lips before he set the sandwich back down on his plate. “I just want you to know that none of this was my idea.”
    “I had a feeling,” I said wryly, “considering you can barely even make yourself look at me.”
    This time he did glance up, and I had to hold myself steady as the eyes I had dreamed of so often met mine, and held. The muscles in his jaw visibly tightened. “I want to look at you,” he said. “It’s just…dangerous.”
    So he was feeling it, too. I’d begun to wonder. “It’s all right. We’re both adults. We can control ourselves, right?”
    His hesitation was obvious. At length he said, “Right. Anyway, I know how bad all this looks. Believe me. And you have every right to think the worst of me. Only…”
    “Only what?”
    “Did you ever stop to think that all those times you dreamed of me, I might have been dreaming of you?”
    His tone wasn’t exactly pleading. Not quite. But I could sense something in him was begging me to listen to what he had to say.
    “No, I didn’t,” I replied. “So…why do your brother’s dirty work for him? Why not tell him the truth?”
    “I think he knew it, deep down, but didn’t want to acknowledge it. My dreams became…distorted…these past few months. I think he was trying to interfere.”
    “Doing a pretty good job of it, too.”
    Connor frowned then, the straight dark brows pulling together. “He was in your dreams?”
    “Yes,” I said shortly. I didn’t want to go into any more detail than that.
    “Well….” He reached out and drank some water, then set his glass back down. “I didn’t interfere, because I knew he wouldn’t be successful in trying to bind you to him. And then once you were here, he’d be so desperate to make sure you were at least bound to a Wilcox that he’d have me try to make the binding.”
    Maybe that made some sense, but I still didn’t like it very much. I unwrapped my sandwich and forced myself to take a bite, although my appetite seemed to have deserted me. After I had sipped at my own water, I said, “But you knew I…liked…you. Why not kiss me at the Halloween dance, or down in Sedona when we met at the Day of the Dead festival?”
    “We weren’t in Wilcox territory.”
    Anger flared