“Kinky beast.”

“Rogan!”

He smiled at me. It was the kind of smile that blazed a trail from your heart to your mind and popped into your head the next time you wondered why you put up with a man who made you want to punch things.

“You look sexy in the morning, Nevada.” His voice caressed me, his magic dancing on my skin, setting off tiny explosions of desire.

“Stop,” I warned. The magic caress vanished.

“It would be a shame to disappoint your relatives.”

“I make it a habit to disappoint them on a regular basis.” I reached over and gently touched the skin under the gash. “How did this happen?”

“Got nicked yesterday in the crowd.” His voice deepened slightly.

I was still touching him, his skin warm under my fingertips. The faint scent of sandalwood swirled around me. He held completely still, as if worried I’d take my hand away.

“I thought Olivia might have clawed you. She isn’t your biggest fan.”

He smiled. “You noticed.”

“You seemed to like Rynda. Why didn’t you marry her?”

“Because I like her too much.”

That stung. I pulled my hand back slowly. I shouldn’t have started this conversation.

Rogan sat on the floor next to me and rested his arm on his bent knee. “When I was three, my father survived his sixth assassination attempt. He was attacked by a manipulator. My mother killed the assassin, but it fueled my father’s obsession to compensate for our weakness. You can’t kill what you can’t see. If only we were telepathic and telekinetic. Then we’d feel the killers coming. He’d tried to make a telekinetic-telepath hybrid with me and failed. He was determined to succeed with my children, so he started shopping for my bride.”

“You were three.”

“He was a long-term planner. Rynda is a powerful telekinetic and an empath. My father would’ve preferred a telepath, but to get telekinesis and mind manipulation in one Prime is very rare. They almost never occur together. He feared that if I married a telepathic Prime, our child would lose telekinesis. Rynda’s father is a telekinetic, her mother is a psionic, so her set of genes was perfect for his purposes. The tentative engagement agreement between our families was reached when I was three and she was two. That was the first time she attempted to levitate an object and succeeded.”

“What did she levitate?” I asked in spite of myself.

“Her parents were arguing and she tried to put a pacifier into her mother’s mouth to make her be quiet.”

I pictured Olivia’s face with a pacifier in her lips and snickered.

“Rynda was always a peacemaker. She likes when things are calm.”

“So you knew you would marry her your entire life?”

“Yes.” He nodded. “And for most of my childhood and adolescence I was okay with it. Marriage was something that would happen far away in the future and I liked Rynda. Especially after puberty.”

Jealousy stabbed at me with sharp little needles. “Rynda is beautiful.”

“Gorgeous,” he said. “Elegant, refined, exquisite, ravishing . . .”

Now he was just baiting me. I pretended to study my fingernails.

“I get it that you’re heartbroken that she had another man’s children. That’s okay, Rogan. Don’t feel bad. I’m sure you’ll find somebody who’ll take pity on you . . . eventually.”

He laughed quietly. “You’re prickly this morning. I could get used to this.”

“Don’t. Are you going to tell me the rest of this story or should I just go home now?”

“Alright. When I was sixteen, Rynda came to a party at our house. I don’t remember now what the occasion was, but I had caused my mother some grief and she was still recovering from it. I was a difficult teenager.”

“You don’t say.” I rolled my eyes.

“I was sixteen.” Rogan shrugged.

“What did you do to make your mom mad at you?”

He sighed. “Earlier that summer my father and I had gotten into an argument, and he told me that if I didn’t like the rules of the house, I should go live in a cardboard box on the street. I did. I walked out with the clothes on my back and nothing else. It took them almost three weeks to find me.”

“Where did you go?”

“Downtown,” he said. “I didn’t think anything bad could happen to me. I slept on the street, ate at a soup kitchen, and got into a couple of fights with other homeless guys. Then I found people betting on fights under an overpass and beat up a couple of guys for money. I made fifty bucks and got my head bashed in by a guy who could magically harden his fists. A man tried to pick me up with promises of vodka and pizza. I didn’t like the look in his eyes, so I got into his car to see what would happen. Turned out he was fond of strangling. It didn’t end well for him. I never managed to find a cardboard box to sleep in. I slept in the park under some bushes until my father’s security people tasered me, pumped me full of sedatives, and delivered me back to my house.”

I just stared at him. He wasn’t lying.

“So when I woke up in my room, my mother chewed me out. She told me she’d worried. She told me I had no right to scare her like that. It was infinitely worse than sleeping on the street. By the time the party rolled around, we had resolved our family conflicts, so when Rynda asked my mother where I’d been for the past three weeks, my mother told her. Rynda started crying.”

“Why?”

“She picked up some residual traces of stress and fear from my mother. It upset her. She was sitting there, tears rolling down her cheeks, and asked my mother how she could put up with me. My mother told her that I was a gifted child and gifted children do extraordinary things. Rynda said that in that case she didn’t want gifted children. That’s when I knew I couldn’t marry her.”

“Because she didn’t want gifted children?”

Connor leaned closer and smiled again, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “No. Because I didn’t love her. Marriages among Primes are rarely based on love, but Rynda would know that I didn’t love her. It would always hurt her. And, selfishly, I realized that being with Rynda meant being alone. She wanted family, children, and stability. Safety. I didn’t know exactly what I wanted, but I knew I didn’t want that. I would take risks and it would crush her. And if I smothered my will and submitted to the marriage, I would always have to be cold to her. I could never let her feel the full extent of my anger, fear, or worry, because it would be cruel.”

Rogan’s personality was like his magic: a powerful typhoon that swept away everything in its path. I had seen the extent of his rage and the intensity of his desire. When he focused on you, he did so completely and you felt privileged to be the object of his attention in spite of yourself. A true relationship required honesty. When he was scared, or raging, or helpless, he would have to calm down and pull his feelings inward before he went home. He would have to lie to her.

Rogan had never lied to me. It hit me like a ton of bricks. Occasionally he worded his replies carefully, but he had never lied to me except for the time on the balcony, right after we watched his people being murdered. He’d lied on purpose, knowing I would react. He could’ve refused to answer my questions. Instead he always told me the truth, even when he knew I wouldn’t like the answers.