“If we climb, we climb at first light,” Doyle told her.
“I’ll be ready,” she said and walked out.
• • •
She worked until after midnight, played with a couple of theories. Discarded them.
She wrote a long email to her parents, catching them up with where she was, how she was, asking them if they knew of any lines to tug she’d missed.
Time to shut it down for the night, she told herself. Time to get some sleep—or try to. If tomorrow was the big next step, they all needed to be ready.
Not just ready to find the star, to protect it, but to fight. The minute Nerezza got wind they had the last star, she’d come calling.
Thinking just that, she left the library, made her way to the sitting room where they stored weapons. Doyle sat quietly by a low fire, polishing his sword.
“You should get some sleep,” he told her.
“Heading that way. Same goes.”
“Soon as I’m done here. I didn’t think of the cave. I should have. I didn’t.”
“I didn’t think to ask if anywhere around here had particular meaning for you. I was hung up on the graveyard because I knew it did.”
“I thought you were right at first. I hated it.”
She sat across from him. “You’re entitled to want your family to rest in peace. I think . . . Do you want to know what I think?”
“When has that ever stopped you? Yes,” he admitted when she said nothing. “I want to hear what you think.”
“I think this is a gift. I think this is something given to you hundreds of years ago to help you resolve the rest. Every boy wants to be a hero, right? And now you are. You are,” she insisted when he shook his head. “They just gave you the choice to be one or to walk away. You didn’t walk away. You went back to the—gotta say evil—place where your brother was killed, and when Nerezza tried to use your grief against you, all of us, you kicked her ass. You didn’t want to stand in the graveyard today, and talk about your family. But you did. That’s not battle heroics, Doyle, but it’s stepping up. So—”
She got to her feet. “Like I said earlier, I’ve been working some things out.”
“On finding the island.”
“Goose egg there. I mean the personal business. We made sort of a deal, and I’m sort of reneging.”
He frowned at her. “What deal?”
“Just sex, just good, healthy sex. No sticky stuff. But things got a little turned around on me. In me.”
He set the sword aside, very carefully. “Are you pregnant?”
“No. Jesus. You’re irritating a lot of the time, and you’re moody. And pushy,” she decided.
“What does that have to do with sex?”
“It doesn’t. It has to do with the sticky part that wasn’t supposed to happen. I don’t know why it happened. I like to know why, so that’s irritating, too. I can hang some of that on you, too, as getting anything out of you is pulling teeth. Like I didn’t know until today you were twenty-six when you were cursed.”
“How do you know that?”
“I did the math, for God’s sake. How old you were when Feilim was born—nine—how old you’d said he was when he died. Seventeen. Which makes you—excluding the immortality—a couple years younger than me. That hit strange.”
Saying nothing, Doyle reached for his sword again.
“No, just hold off on that, and listen. I’m going to say that despite all that—and I could say you have qualities that balance out the bullshit, but this is already taking too long. Despite it, or maybe I’m twisted up because of it—I haven’t worked out which—I’m in love with you.”
“No, you’re not.”
Of all the responses she’d imagined, she’d never imagined a cool, calm dismissal. She’d prepared herself for hurt feelings, even a solid punch to the heart. She hadn’t prepared for insult and anger.
“Don’t tell me what I feel. Don’t tell me what I have in here.” She thumped a fist on her heart. “I’m telling you even though I’d rather not. Do I look happy about it? Am I doing the happy dance? Am I doing the cartwheel of joy?”
“You’re caught up, that’s all. We’re sleeping together, and everyone else is talking weddings and flowers. You’ve conflated them.”
“Bullshit. Insulting bullshit. Did I say anything about weddings and flowers? Do I look like somebody who can’t wait to run out and buy some big white dress and grab a bouquet?”
He felt the first trickle of alarm. “No, you really don’t.”
“I don’t like this any more than you, but it is what it is. I’m giving you the respect of telling you. You give me the respect of not accusing me of being some sentimental girl.”
He thought he should stand. “I’m saying I think we’re in a strange and intense situation. We added sex to that. We . . . respect each other, trust each other. Obviously we’re attracted to each other. You’re a smart woman, a logical woman, a rational woman. A woman who has to know—”
“I’m smart enough to know that logic and rational thinking mean dick-all when it comes to who you fall for.” Beyond pissed, she slapped her hands on her hips. “What do you think I’ve been telling myself? But I feel what I feel. God knows why.”
“I can’t give you what love asks for.”