“Aren’t you glad you didn’t tell me no?”
Surprising herself, she snuffled another soft laugh under her breath. “You’re very sure of yourself, Pallaton.”
“Call me Wyatt.”
She shifted her gaze, staring over his left shoulder, feeling as if his dark, onyx-colored eyes could see straight into her. “I thought everyone called you Pallaton or Pall?”
“They do.” From the edge of her vision, Elise watched the corner of his mouth lift in a devastatingly sexy, purely male smile. “But I want you to call me Wyatt.”
“I’m going to call you desperate if you don’t stop,” she warned him, hoping like hell that her face wasn’t actually as red as it felt.
“Stop what?” he asked, angling his head slightly to the side as he tried to recapture her gaze.
“All of this,” she said, fully aware that she sounded like an idiot. “Trying to dazzle me with your manliness and charm.”
“Oh, yeah? Is it working?” He kept his expression carefully blank, though she could see the glitter of humor in his dark gaze.
She rolled her eyes. “Like I’d tell you if it was.”
His head went back as a low, rich chuckle rumbled up from his chest, and her toes curled in her heeled sandals at the pure carnality of the sound. How did he do it, make a laugh sound like some kind of insidious new form of seduction?
Though she tried so hard to fight it, everything that he did made her feel drunk on lust, the hunger heavy in her body, like a weighty thing inside of her. The flash of his smile. The smoldering intensity in his dark eyes and the way they did that sexy crinkle thing at the corners when he grinned. She’d heard he was considered the tamest of the Runners, at times even stoic. The most easygoing of a volatile bunch. But being close to him, talking to him, Elise couldn’t help but wonder if the people who held that opinion of Wyatt Pallaton knew him at all. Were they blind? Because from where she was standing, there wasn’t a safe, easygoing thing about the man.
Desperate to regain control of herself and the situation, Elise asked a question that had been playing in the back of her mind for the past hour, slowly driving her crazy. “I saw you and Michaela on the dance floor earlier. Doesn’t it bother Brody when you dance with his wife?”
His hands shifted, one resting against the small of her back, while the other stroked its way up her spine until it reached the edge of her bodice, his thumb brushing against her bare skin in a slow, sensual caress. Her gaze shot immediately back to his, and she watched the groove form between his dark brows as he asked, “Why should it bother him?”
Suddenly, she wished she’d just kept her big mouth shut. Thanks to her friendship with Max Doucet, Michaela’s younger brother, she knew that Brody and the fiery Cajun were madly in love with one another, as did anyone who had ever met the quiet Runner and his gorgeous human life mate. Still, she couldn’t help the jealousy she felt when she witnessed the closeness that Wyatt and Michaela shared. “I just thought that the two of you...that you were...”
He leaned forward, putting his silky words into the sensitive shell of her ear. “Despite what a few gossips seem to think, El, Mic and I are just friends. And that’s all we’ve ever been. She’s in love with her husband, and I... Let’s just say that I don’t think of her that way.”
There was something there, in his words...in the tone of his voice...but she couldn’t afford to look at it too closely. Not if she wanted to keep it together. Instead, she said, “Why haven’t you danced with Reyes?”
She didn’t know what to make of him when he lifted his head, staring down at her with a bemused expression, as if the thought of asking his beautiful partner to dance had never even occurred to him. “Carla? Hell, she’d probably stomp on my toes just to be ornery.”
“But you two seem so...close. I thought...”
His dark brows lifted. “That we were also intimate?” he asked, looking as if he were trying hard not to laugh.
Before she could respond, his lips twitched with another wry smile. “We’re close, yeah. But not like that. I love Carla like a sister, but she’s my partner. Dancing with her would be like...like dancing with one of the guys.”
“Well, there has to be some woman here who you’re involved with,” she practically snapped, becoming desperate. She needed a cold slap of reality in the face, some kind of sign that declared him hands-off, because if she wasn’t careful, she was going to get herself in deeper water than she could handle. “Don’t you have a girlfriend? Someone you’re dating?”
“I’m sorry to disappoint you, honey, but no. No woman...and no girlfriend. I’m as free as a man can be.”
Hell. That so wasn’t what she needed to hear.
It didn’t matter how badly she wanted to accept the fleeting moments of sexual pleasure he was offering her with that wicked smile and smoldering stare—she simply couldn’t do it—and for the second time that night, Elise wondered why she couldn’t have met him when she was younger. Of course, knowing the kind of girl she’d been back then, she probably would have turned up her nose at him, believing herself too good to have a fling with a Bloodrunner. Stuck-up and snide, she’d had a mountainous chip on her shoulder, always acting as if she thought she was better than everyone around her. Disgusting, but embarrassingly true. She’d been so different then, thinking the world revolved around her and her problems, when she couldn’t have been further from the truth.
It’d taken countless months of therapy after her attack to come to the understanding that she’d formed her spiteful attitude and narcissistic self-obsession as a defense mechanism for dealing with her misogynistic father. And she’d done a damn good job of building those defenses. So much so that it’d taken a night of living hell to break her down, taking her to pieces, until there was nothing left of her to offer a man like Wyatt. The feminine part of her that longed for an emotional connection with a man, as well as a physical one, no longer worked the way that it should—and though she struggled each day to be strong, Elise knew there was nothing that could ever repair the damage. No therapeutic Band-Aid that could heal her soul.
Wyatt stared down at her with a curious look on his striking face, then quietly asked, “Are you going to keep quizzing me about the women in my life, or are we finally going to talk about it?”
“Talk about what?” she whispered, painfully aware that her panic and fear were bleeding through, loud and clear. With his heightened senses, he could probably scent her unease with every breath he took, and she fought not to cringe.
He didn’t offer any inane platitudes to ease her nerves. He just smiled down at her with that slow, sensual twisting of his lips, the shape of his mouth firm, masculine and yet impossibly beautiful. There was a nick on his chin, where he’d obviously cut himself shaving, and Elise found herself wanting to lift onto her toes and press a tender kiss against the small wound. A strange compulsion, considering she hadn’t kissed anyone in years—hadn’t wanted to kiss anyone in years—but then this entire night was turning out to be one stunning dose of bizarre.
She swallowed against the lump in her throat, suddenly terrified that he wanted to talk about the way she’d been watching him throughout the night, stealing as many desperate glances as she could. Embarrassed, she looked away. She could feel the heat burning in her face, the dark, curious weight of his gaze as he stared down at her only making it
