I turn to see a woman standing close to him, almost pushing Peter out of the way. She’s gesturing as she talks, the massive diamond on her right hand catching the light every time she moves. The woman puts her hand on Griffon’s arm every chance she gets, in a way that seems more than friendly, and makes me more than curious. Most Akhet have a habit of touching people in order to get information, but she’s taking it a little far. Griffon backs up a tiny step, but she follows him, closing in on what anyone can see is his personal space. He’s smiling, but shaking his head at everything she says—his face is a mask of embarrassment. Griffon hasn’t glanced over here, but he must know that I’m watching. Drinks in both hands, he turns to walk away, but she folds something into his back pocket at the last second.
As much as I want to, I can’t pretend I didn’t notice. “Who was that?” I ask as the two of them hand us our drinks. I take a sip of the golden liquid to try to push down the annoyance that’s rising inside of me. Rayne stands next to me with her arms folded across her chest, always ready to be on my side, which is one of the things I love about her.
Griffon laughs, his dark eyes looking endless in this dim light. “It’s no big deal.”
I’m not sure what to say, because I know what I saw.
Peter grins and shrugs his shoulders. “You might as well tell her.”
“What?” I look at Griffon in confusion, wondering if the woman is Akhet and he can’t say anything. Peter doesn’t know about us. I told Rayne everything when Veronique tried to kill Griffon, but Peter doesn’t have a clue about past lives or Sekhem—any of it.
“She just gave me this.” Griffon digs around in his pocket and holds out a crumpled business card.
It’s thick and has letters embossed in silver. “ ‘Mary Belle’?” I read, and look back up at him.
Griffon rolls his eyes. “She’s an agent.”
“Apparently she owns the biggest modeling agency on the West Coast,” Peter says. He grins. “At least that’s what she said. And she set her sights on your boyfriend here. Practically begged him to come in and see her. Apparently he’s got ‘the look.’ “
I smile, feeling like an idiot. She’s not Akhet. Just a cougar. “I could have told her that.”
“Did you think she was hitting on me?” Griffon grabs my hand and squeezes.
“No,” I say. Rayne shoots me a look. “Yes. Maybe.”
Griffon leans in and kisses me. “As far as I’m concerned, there’s no one but you in this place.”
“Smooth talker,” I tease, relief making me relax at last.
Rayne takes a drink and looks around. “Wonder where the people with the teeny tiny food are. I’m starving.”
“I saw some trays near the kitchen,” Peter says, reaching for her hand. “You guys want anything?”
I hold up my wine. “I’m okay,” I answer, watching the two of them disappear into the crowd.
Griffon and I stand quietly for a few minutes, and I can’t help noticing some of the women in the room glancing our way. Or, rather, Griffon’s way. All the eyes on him make me a little jealous, but I get it. With his dark skin and golden eyes, Griffon draws attention everywhere he goes.
Just as I’m starting to get uncomfortable, I feel his hand on my arm. “The guy by the bar told me this place has a great view. Let’s go find it.”
“You can see the boats from this window.”
“Yeah, but he says there’s a better one. Grab your jacket.” Griffon leads me out of the room toward a doorway at the end of the hall. The cold, wet air hits me as soon as we push it open, and I pull my jacket tighter. The fog hasn’t completely rolled in yet and you can still see some stars in the black sky overhead. There’s a set of stairs that snake along the outside of the building, and Griffon heads for those.
“You first?” he asks, looking up.
I turn to him. “Why? So you can watch my butt from below?”
He holds up his hands in surrender. “You caught me. I was going to say that I was just trying to be polite, but look who I’m talking to. The human lie detector.”
I follow his glance up the stairs. They go up three stories and disappear at the roof. “Can’t we just enjoy the view from down here?”
Griffon kisses the palm of my hand. “You know this is a different rooftop. Nothing’s going to happen, I promise.” He makes a big show of looking around. “No Veronique in sight.”
I smile, but it just pokes at the guilt I’ve been carrying around with me, because I haven’t told him about running into Veronique. At first I could never find the right time, and now that it’s been almost a week, I don’t know how to bring it up. It seems like she listened to me, though, because I haven’t seen her since.
“Let’s go check it out,” Griffon says. “And if you don’t like it, we can come right back down.”
I totally agree when people say you should face your fears. I just don’t want to face mine. I hear loud laughter from the hallway on the other side of the door and suddenly, desperately want to be alone with him. “Okay. But just for a minute.”
As soon as we reach the top, I suck in my breath. The view from up here is really amazing. I can see over the Marina Green to the dark water under the Golden Gate Bridge. The cars on the bridge look like a river of light as they flow to Marin, where the edge of the fog licks at the hills.
“There’s Alcatraz,” Griffon says, pointing to some tiny dots of light in the middle of the water.
“Would you believe I’ve never been there?”
“I haven’t been there this time,” he says. “But I visited last time, in the seventies, when they’d just opened it up to the public. It was pretty creepy back then—they did this one demo where they’d lock you in one of the solitary confinement cells for two minutes. It was pitch black and silent, and two minutes seemed like forever. I heard they don’t do that anymore, though.”
I watch Griffon as he speaks, loving that this conversation about a trip he took in a past lifetime seems normal. Our normal. “We should go and check it out.”
Griffon takes a step away from the stairs, and I notice the rooftop deck for the first time. The surface is covered with wood like a regular deck, but it runs the whole length of the roof, the fact that we’re the only people up here making it look even bigger than it already is. Over in one corner are a nice outdoor table and a set of chairs, and closer to us are a thickly cushioned couch and some chaise longues that look like they’d be more at home in a living room than on a roof in the middle of the city. “Hey, a fire pit.” Griffon walks to the big copper bowl by the couch. “And there’s wood.”
I slowly walk over to him, feeling safer as I move away from the edge of the roof. Griffon reaches into his jacket and pulls out a silver Zippo lighter. “And now we have fire.”
“Do you always carry a lighter with you?”
“Habit. I got used to having one.” He gestures with his fingers like he’s smoking.
I make a face, trying to imagine him with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth.
“Come on,” he protests. “That was, like, forty years ago. Everyone smoked then. It’s not like it is now.” He bends down, flips the lighter around with one flick of his wrist, and holds the flame to the small sticks of wood in the bottom of the pit. “Even in this lifetime, a nice, solid lighter seems like a good thing to have.” He blows on the flame and I can hear the wood crackle as it catches fire, a few sparks shooting up into the sky before they burn out completely.
Griffon flops onto one of the lounge chairs, patting the small space beside him. “Let’s pretend we’re camping. Somewhere high up in the Sierras next to a little lake in front of our roaring campfire.”
We sit quietly for a minute, staring at the flames. “Two truths and a lie,” I say, bringing up the game that made me like him in the first place. “My turn.”
“Make it good this time.”
“I’ll make it easy. I know you stink at this. Okay; I once got attacked by a bear while camping, I
’ve been snorkeling with dolphins, and I can make chocolate chip cookies without looking at a recipe.”
Griffon makes his thinking face, scrunching up his mouth until I have to laugh out loud. “Um, for some reason I believe that anyone who inhales chocolate like you do can whip up a batch of cookies blindfolded in the middle of the night, so I’m guessing that one’s true.”
“You’re one for one.”
“Last month you told me that you’d been to Hawaii twice, so I’m going to say that you’ve been snorkeling with dolphins.”
I frown. “I never told you about Hawaii.”
He looks at me like I should know better. “It was May fifth. A Sunday. And we were sitting in my living room watching TV. A commercial for an airline came on, and you said that you’d been to Hawaii twice, once when you were three and then again two years ago.” Griffon smiles. “Is that good enough?”
“Show off.” I laugh. It’s hard to argue with someone who has an eidetic memory. “It’ll do. So the lie?”
“Is obviously that you were attacked by a bear.” He grabs my hand. “In fact, these hands are sissy soft. I’ll bet you’ve never even been camping in your life.”
“Not true! I’ve camped plenty. And for your information, I was attacked once. It was by a baby deer on the way from our tent to the bathroom, but still.”
“Car camping doesn’t count,” Griffon says, pulling me down to him. “We should go backpacking sometime. Just the two of us in a tiny tent in the big mountains.”
“Ooh. Sign me up.” I settle in next to him, pushing myself against the length of his body until he rolls onto his side and puts his arms around me from behind. I watch the fire dance in front of us, feeling the warmth from its heat on my face and the warmth from Griffon’s breath on the back of my neck.
“Did you bring the marshmallows?” I ask, turning my head toward him.
Griffon laughs. “I knew there was something I forgot. You should never go to a posh party in the Marina without a bag of marshmallows.”
I roll over so that I’m facing him, wrapping one leg around his. Reaching up, I ease my fingers through his curls and then trace the side of his face. “If I was Kat, I’d make you go get some.”
Griffon pulls back and smiles. “If you were Kat, I’d make Owen do it.” A serious look passes across his face. “But I’d do it for you. I’d go and get you anything you want. Even marshmallows.” He pushes a strand of hair away from my face and leans down to kiss me, his lips soft but urgent, and I can feel the desire in his touch. The vibrations that always exist whenever we’re together become insistent and almost visible in the small space between us. I run my hands up the inside of his shirt, feeling the muscles of his back contract and goose bumps form as I touch his skin. He keeps his hands outside of my clothes like he usually does, feeling the contours of my body through my jeans as he runs his fingers down my thigh. I inch toward him, closing off any remaining space between our bodies.
My fingers slide down where his jeans meet his skin and he moans softly, pressing against me with even more urgency, his hand firmly on the back of my neck. I can feel his hesitation and silently urge him to keep going, to not stop at that invisible line we’ve respected all of these weeks.
I sense the moment it changes, and reach up to pull him to me even harder, but Griffon’s breathing heavily and pushing himself away from me on the lounger.
“We need to stop,” he says, and I can hear the effort it costs him to force the words out.
I reach for him again, wanting the connection I felt just a few seconds ago. With everything we’ve been through together, I’m not a kid anymore. “No we don’t. There’s nobody else here. Just us. I want to show you how I feel.”
Griffon hesitates, and I can see the emotions playing on his face. He squeezes his eyes closed and shakes his head. “I know how you feel. You don’t have to prove it to me.”
“I know I don’t have to,” I say softly. “I want to.”
He bites his lip as his eyes search mine, looking for the truth in my words.
With centuries of experience behind him, sometimes he seems like an adult—but sometimes he’s every inch a seventeen-year-old boy. I run my hands up his shirt, smiling when I see him flinch. “Why are you hesitating? It’s not your first time.”
Griffon looks at me seriously. “It’s my first time with you.”
I watch his face in the flickering orange light, wanting to lock this one moment in time so that I can go back to it over and over again. I wonder if it will be different when I remember my other first times. If it will make it any less special. “It doesn’t matter whether we’re in some fancy hotel room or right here under the stars. I want to be with you.”
Without saying anything, he bends down and buries his face in my neck, tenderly kissing the curve behind my ear. The air around us seems to have changed, taken on a weight of expectation, and I feel a thrill of anticipation and fear run through me.
I’m so focused on his touch that I don’t hear the voices on the stairs until they’re almost to the rooftop. Griffon must hear them at the same time because he jumps back from me, and the two of us frantically adjust our clothes as Kat and Owen appear at the top of the stairs.
“I knew it!” Owen shouts, and I can hear the pride in his voice.
“Oh. My. God.” It doesn’t take a genius to recognize Kat’s angry voice. “I told you not to embarrass me!”
I struggle to sit up, my heart still pounding at what almost happened. “Which is why we’re up here alone and not making out in the middle of the living room.”
“Right,” she snaps. “Like everyone in the place couldn’t look at the two of you and know what you’ve been up to.”
Griffon glances at me with a smile, and I can’t help laughing. “So what are you doing up here, then?” I ask. “Just coming up to check out the view?”
Kat looks at Owen, and even in this light I can see her face get red. “As a matter of fact, we were.”
“Which is exactly what we were doing.” Griffon points to the other lounge chair. “Have a seat. It’s not so cold with the fire going. I’m going to go get us a couple more drinks.”
I watch Kat and Owen settle into the chair, thinking about how much I don’t want to spend the whole evening watching them make out. I want to go back to the place Griffon and I were just now. “I’ll go,” I say. “Besides, I want to check on Rayne. I didn’t tell her we were up here.” I slide off the chair before Griffon can object and grab the glasses. Bending over to give him a quick kiss, I whisper, “Be right back.”
I know I’m grinning as I open the door at the bottom of the stairs, but I can’t help it. As frustrated as I am at getting interrupted, it felt so right. I lift my sleeve up to my nose just to get the faint traces of his scent, to nudge the last ribbons of memory of what we almost did. Of what we’re still going to do. Soon.
I’m not paying attention to anyone as I walk down the hall toward the living room, just thinking about Griffon up on the roof and how much I want to get back there with him. Which is why I’m caught totally off guard when I hear a shout coming from the crowd in the kitchen.
“Cole! Wait!”
I stop and glance through the doorway, but the person who emerges from the crush of bodies is the last one I expect to see at this party. I’m so stunned to see him again that I can barely get his name past my lips.
“Drew.”
Five
“I heard you were here,” Drew says in his thick Australian accent, glancing behind him as he follows me into the hallway. “I’ve been looking all over for you.”
“I thought you were gone,” I say, taking a step back from him. Even though I know I can’t avoid him forever, I didn’t think I’d be face-to-face with him so soon. My hand goes automatically to the ankh around my neck, and Drew’s eyes follow. He reaches out to touch its silver curves, but I shrink back from his hand, which seems to snap him back to reality—the reality where we barely know each other.
“You didn’t call,” he says. He takes a step toward me, and I can feel the faint but insistent vibrations between us. “I was hoping you would.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I say, staring at the hardwood floors to avoid the intensity of his blue eyes as he looks at me. With his short blond hair, he’s not my type at all, but I can’t deny that he’s very good-looking, and it’s a little intimidating. As far as I’m concerned, Drew’s just a jewelry designer who is practically engaged to Kat’s boss. And also happens to be Akhet.
Drew takes a step back, and I can feel the intensity of his energy ease, as if he’s consciously forcing himself to slow down. “Is that how we’re going to play this?” He nods slowly, but I know it’s not with approval. “I thought you’d be glad to see me after so long. All things considered.”
I glance behind him, half expecting Francesca to step into the hallway any minute, but only one fairly drunk guy weaves past us, not paying any attention. I look Drew straight in the eyes, hoping that I can stop this conversation before it goes too far. If we don’t acknowledge it, then I can keep it from being true. “I barely know you. I met you twice in the shop, and you like my necklace. I don’t know what else you think is going on here, but that’s all we are to each other.” I hear the words and close my eyes, willing myself to believe them. That’s all we are to each other. I can’t let myself think about any other possibility.
Drew stands so close I can feel the warmth of his breath on my skin. “You and I both know that isn’t true. You know exactly who I am to you. Who I’ve been to you. I can tell that you remember.”
“You’re wrong,” I say, looking past him. Not daring to look right at him for fear of what I might see there. “I don’t remember.” I inhale, trying to make myself believe those words. “I don’t remember anything.”
“Why would you say that?” Drew asks, and something in his voice makes me meet his eyes. I’m surprised to find a glimmer of hurt behind them. His voice trembles as he continues. “It’s taken centuries to find you again, and I thought you’d be as thrilled as I am to finally be together in the same place, in the same lifetime.”
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