Glow (Glimmer and Glow #2)(47)

“And?”

“And what?”

“Why are you so protective of me? If you can’t stop doing it, you at least have to tell me why. It isn’t twenty years ago, Dylan.”

“Not now,” he whispered tensely. She felt his hands tighten on her shoulders and sensed he was peering into the darkness around them, searching the shadows. He really was paranoid. Wasn’t he? “All right, we’ll talk,” he said finally. “But not here. Up at the house.”

They were silent for the rest of the trip to the castle. Once they’d arrived at the terrace doors, he quietly told her to use her key to make sure it worked. It did. She disarmed the security system, too. When they reached the kitchen, he told her to go on upstairs and he’d bring them something to drink.

In Dylan’s suite, she strategically sat on the couch in the sitting area before the fireplace. She wanted to talk to him, and didn’t need the distraction of the great luxurious bed or the smoking memories of what they’d done in it on previous occasions.

Dylan entered a few minutes later. He wore a dark red plain T-shirt and jeans that emphasized his body in the exact right places. She ate up the vision of him, all big lean male, a man who was supremely confident in his physicality, who knew his power and strength, and precisely how to use it. He carried two glasses. She guessed the one with the dark brown liquid was Dr Pepper. A strange giddy feeling went through her at this evidence of mundane familiarity on his part. His favored drink was club soda with a lime twist—which he carried right now—or expensive French brandy, when he wanted alcohol. He’d never blinked once early on when she’d named her favorite unsophisticated, sugary beverage.

He set their glasses on the coffee table before the couch, reached into his back jean pocket, and plopped a box of Sweet Adelaides on the table next to her drink.

She grinned unabashedly and reached for the box. “Thanks.”

Sweet Adelaides were a Durand bestseller. Along with Jingdots, they were Alice’s longtime favorite sweets. Alice had recently learned that Marie, Dylan’s cook, kept a huge jar filled with various Durand candies on the counter in the castle kitchen. She felt shy but happy, too at Dylan’s little gift. Which was stupid, of course. She opened the box and poured a few of the caramel, peanut, and chocolate candies into her hand, giving Dylan a sideways smile.

“You really must love me if you’re willing to feed my chocolate addiction.”

He sat down on the cushion next to her and leaned back, draping one arm across the back of the couch. Alice paused in the process of popping the candies in her mouth, her hand stilling several inches below her chin. His T-shirt stretched over his wide muscular chest and lean torso. His strong, jean-covered spread thighs were a distraction, too, but it was what she read in his dark eyes that snagged her attention.

“I do.”

She’d been attempting to be light, but suddenly everything seemed dead serious. She felt her cheeks warming.

He smiled. “I know you come by the love of chocolate honestly. It’s in your genes.”

A tingling sensation went through her forearms. Slowly, she opened her palm and stared at the chocolates she held there. She’d looked at similar candies hundreds of times.

She’d never seen them until now.

A shiver tore through her. “Oh my God,” she whispered, shuddering.

“What?”

“Sweet Adelaides. Alan Durand named them after his daughter.”

“Yes,” Dylan said with the air of someone confirming she did indeed have a cobra poised at the back of her neck. “I thought you realized it the day we told you about Addie. Sidney mentioned that Alan used to tease that his daughter was usually a Sweet Adelaide but could occasionally be a Sour Citrus—” He broke off when she just stared at him blankly. He leaned toward her. “Alice?” he asked tensely.

“It’s okay,” she mumbled. Why hadn’t she made that incredible charged connection until now? Yes, Sidney had made that statement, but it’d bounced right off her like many things had that fateful afternoon.

To a casual observer of the facts, the truth must have been obvious. But Alice was no casual witness. She was so deeply immersed in this situation, she was blinded. Defenseless. That truth now rang in her ears and pulsed in her blood. It was like two electrical circuits had abruptly joined, sizzling with power and lighting up her brain, fusing together a small part of her—Alice’s—childhood to Addie Durand’s.

All this, from the seemingly innocuous stimulus of a common drugstore candy.

Slowly, deliberately, she raised her hand to her mouth and placed a chocolate on her tongue. One. She didn’t toss all of them in there at once, chew, and reach for the next handful even before she swallowed, like she usually did. She closed her mouth and eyelids, letting the sweet flavor and velvety consistency of the chocolate fill her.

Her life didn’t flash before her eyes, like they said of drowning victims. That would be far too dramatic of a representation of what happened to her in that moment. But because she allowed it, because she squeezed every ounce of meaning out of that little piece of candy that she possibly could, threads from her life that she’d formally thought of as inconsequential background noise, suddenly knitted together with the Present-Day Alice.

She swallowed.

“Alice?” Dylan repeated.

She blinked, coming out of her trance. It finally hit her how anxious he looked.