Wicked Like a Wildfire (Hibiscus Daughter #1)(48)

“That’s true,” I whispered, suddenly near tears. It was the oddest combination, wanting him so much while also wanting to nest my face into his shoulder and cry into it. “I don’t get very much of that.”

He traced his fingers over my profile, over my forehead and down the straight line of my nose, dipping above and below the crests of my lips. He even fanned his fingertip through my spiky lashes. “I think you might need some now.”

I kissed him again, slower this time, lingering and long. His lips felt so soft against the stubble that surrounded them. “It’s not fair,” I whispered. “I’ve already given you more than the allotted two.”

“I have been known to be a very wily son of a bitch,” he teased. “Maybe all this tenderness is entirely to my benefit.”

“Maybe. But thank you anyway. It’s been . . . I don’t know how to feel anymore. With everything that’s happened with my mother. And then my sister upset me tonight, made me so angry at her.” I paused. “I could tell you what happened, if you want.”

“Doesn’t matter what it was. It brought you to me. And if this is what comes of such upset, could be I’ll write her a thank-you note.”

“I don’t think she’d appreciate any kind of note from you,” I admitted. “She doesn’t seem to like you very much.”

“She doesn’t need to,” he said simply. “I happen to like you lots more than her. She seems nothing like you at all.”

That shouldn’t have made me so happy—she was still my sister, and usually a very good one—but I’d never had this, someone who would so clearly rather have me. Someone who looked at me as if I blazed against the night, like a trailing comet. Like I was blinding.

“And what do I seem like?”

“Like wildfire. Like beauty that dies as soon as it’s curbed.”

“I guess we know what you’ll need to do with me, then.”

He ran his fingers down the ridges of my spine. “And what’s that?”

I rested my temple against his. “Don’t curb me, and you can watch as long as you want.”





SEVENTEEN




LINA WAS STILL AWAKE WHEN I CREPT BACK THROUGH THE window—I was really getting to be an expert at avoiding doors—my tunic clinging to my damp bra and panties. She’d turned a lamp on, one of ?i?a Jovan’s whimsies, its base a bottle with a schooner trapped inside it and the shade in the shape of a mast and sails.

In its faint light, her cheek was striped with dried tears, and with her lips still trembling she looked like a lost and desperate little girl. I found that I just couldn’t be angry with her anymore, as if it had become physically impossible to summon that much spleen. Fjolar had bled it out of me with tenderness. Instead I felt a smooth, vast sense of peace, like a windless desert at twilight—anything unruly had burrowed deep underground, an expanse unruffled by living things.

Her eyes narrowed as I sat down on her side of the bed, her thick lashes nearly meshing. “I think you’re not mad at me anymore,” she said, each word blunt and careful, like a child picking out marbles.

“No,” I agreed. “I’m done with that, for now.”

Her brow wrinkled. “Why?”

“Does it matter why? We could just agree to be okay.”

“But you never just stop this way, Riss. Not without hashing things out, not without a fight. It’s not like you.”

The digging should have irritated me, but I couldn’t find any residual embers to fan, nothing that even threatened to grow into a flame. “I’m just feeling peaceful, is all. Can you let me have that, after everything we’ve been through for the past few days? It’s not that I’ve forgotten about you and Niko. I just don’t have it in me to care at this very moment.”

“That’s what I mean.” She scraped at her lower lip with her teeth. “I wanted to tell you that you were right, before. I shouldn’t have told her—especially not without asking you first. She’s my best friend. But you’re my sister. I should have been protecting you. I’m selfish like that sometimes, you’re right. Being sorry doesn’t always fix everything, and I know that I—that sometimes I use it like a patch.”

I stood and peeled the tunic and underwear off, shivering a little as the air hit my still-damp skin. “So, we’re good then.”

She was still frowning as I slipped back into bed, the heavier cotton of my borrowed nightgown wicking the last of the wet from my skin. “I just . . .” Her voice sharpened. “Did you go see that boy, Riss? Is that where you went?”

She wouldn’t like it, but I couldn’t be bothered with a lie. “Yes,” I said simply. “I smoked with him out on the beach. Then I made the water bloom for him, and then I kissed him on the pier stairs, and then I slept with him. See that? That’s honesty, right there. You could take notes.”

“But you only just met him!”

“So what? I wanted to. And we were safe.”

“Fine, okay, you always do what you want. Everybody knows that. But you made the water bloom, and he could see it? You don’t think that’s something to talk about?”

“Not at this moment, no.”

Her mouth went slack with incredulity. “He shows up out of nowhere right before Mama’s attacked, right before she goes missing, and you don’t even think twice about him? How do you know he doesn’t have something to do with this?”