For him, that day would never come. But for him, many days would never come. Canceled out by too many days gone wrong.
“I doona ken it, Jessica. Love, once given, is forever. It canna simply go away. Do they not love her, these men she marries?”
She shrugged, looking as baffled by it as he felt. “I don’t know. I wonder sometimes if people even know what love is anymore. Some days, when I’m watching my friends at school change lovers as unperturbedly as they change shoes, I think the world just got filled with too many people, and all our technological advances made things so easy that it cheapened our most basic, essential values somehow,” she told him. “It’s like spouses are commodities nowadays: disposable, constantly getting tossed back out for trade on the market, and everyone’s trying to trade up, up—like there is a ‘trading up’ in love.” She rolled her eyes. “No way. That’s not for me. I’m having one husband. I’m getting married once. When you know going in that you’re staying for life, it makes you think harder about it, go slower, choose really well.”
When she fell pensively silent, Cian smiled bitterly, brooding over the vagaries of fate. Jessica St. James was strong, impassioned, true of heart, funny, fierce, and sexy as hell.
She was perfect for him. Right down to his frustrating inability to deep-read her or compel her. She, alone, was forever beyond his magic, that wild talent that had always made his life so easy. Too damnably easy. Dangerously easy.
This woman had been custom-crafted for a man of his ilk.
“What about you?” she said finally. “Were you married in your century?”
He didn’t miss the shadow that flickered in her lovely sparkling eyes. She didn’t like the thought that he might have been wed. She didn’t like the thought of him loving another woman. That knowledge eased some of the pain in that twisted place in his gut. A twisted place that he knew would only grow worse again, and continue to worsen, day by day. “Nay, lass. I’d not found the woman for me before I was imprisoned in the Dark Glass.”
Her brow furrowed and she looked as if she would pursue that thought further, but then she seemed to change her mind. “God, there are so many questions I keep wanting to ask you but I never seem to get around to them! How old are you, anyway? I mean, excluding the time you’ve been in the mirror.”
“A score and ten. I’d gained a new year shortly before I was imprisoned. And you?”
“Twenty-four.”
“In my time, you would have—”
“I know, I know, I would have been an old maid, right?” She laughed. “You and my mother.”
“Nay,” he told her, “you’d not have been unwed. Like as not, you’d have been on your third or fourth husband. Beauty such as yours would have been highly sought by the richest men in the land. Unfortunately, they were often the oldest.”
Her eyes widened ever so slightly and her lips moved. “‘Beauty such as—’ ” She broke off with a blush. “Thank you,” she said softly. Then she flashed him a cheeky smile. “Ugh. Great. I get married; he dies. I get married; he dies. And it’s not like I would have been left a wealthy widow to do what I wanted, either. Some male relative would have just married me off again, wouldn’t he? Keeping me in the family so they could hold the dowry and lands?”
Cian nodded. “Though my clan was not so barbaric. Having seven sisters who could all talk at once—and very loudly when fashed—taught me a thing or two.”
Jessica laughed. They both fell silent.
Then she opened her mouth, shut it. Hesitated, then opened it again. Leaning forward, she said in a hushed voice, “How did it happen, Cian? How did you end up in the mirror?”
He drew ripples of silver around him, sliding deeper into his prison.
“Another time,” he said. Though, on occasion, some perverse part of him seemed determined to make her think the worst of him, he relished the intimacy taking root between them. He had no desire to besmirch it with tales of ancient sins. “For now sleep, sweet Jessica. We have much to do on the morrow.”
Later that night, Cian stood naked behind the silvery Unseelie veil, armed with knives and guns, watching over Jessica as she slept.
Clad in an assortment of oversized garments, she was curled on a pallet of his clothing at the foot of the mirror. Over the centuries, he’d accumulated various items of attire. As full night had fallen and the temperature dropped still more, he’d tossed out every last piece of it to her, right down to the jeans and T-shirt he’d been wearing, in an effort to warm her against the chilly October night.