“Because you’re stronger than you give yourself credit for. I hope you see it.”
“Maybe,” I mutter once I find my voice.
“Does Jrue know?”
My fiancé’s name jolts through me and I stare up at Grayson wide eyed. My lips work but nothing comes out.
His brows have narrowed down and his eyes go steely. “He doesn’t. Does he?”
“No. He has no idea. We’ve kept it from everyone. My sister doesn’t even know. My parents keep thinking the next miracle we try will be the one to unlock me.”
It never works.
Grayson sighs, the sound raspy and scraping against my nerves. “Don’t you think it’s time you start living for yourself, Mandi? At the very least you deserve to be with a guy who isgoing to see you for who you are and appreciate you. Even if it’s working the trapeze at a damn circus.”
Why does he sound angry about it? So personally insulted?
The pressure in my chest increases.
“There are expectations.” My excuse is flimsy and my voice falsely cheerful. “Dad arranged the match. I have no choice but to go through with it. It’s for the best.”
Somehow, we’d taken a hard right turn into deep water. I’m not sure how we got there or how to get out of it without drowning.
“If we survive the madness, if we get the cure, you’re not going to live. You’re going to shrink,” Grayson replies. “You’ll wither away into nothing. There has to be something you want. Something you crave.”
You.
“Sure. I mean—” My eyes go big when he pulls my chin up, his look serious, his touch narrowing my attention.
“What do you want, Mandi?”
Those lips, his eyes, the control threatening to snap. His gaze drops to my lips and he leans, the start of something between us dizzying my head.
I forget all about the cheese curls and my hunger. “Why does it matter?”
He closes down, a mask sliding over his features and erasing any connection we might have won. Dropping his hold, he clenches the bag of pretzels hard enough to break them all to chocolate covered dust and heads back to the room.
It’s not a storm. Yet an electrical haze of disappointment lingers when he walks away and I can’t shake it off. Not when he’d been so close to kissing me.
Chapter
Fourteen
The second the sun hits the horizon, the vamps wake.
Lacey sits up in bed with a yawn like someone plugged her in, while Colt takes his time rising from his nest of blankets on the other side.
We’re on the road again by full dark and the tension stringing between me and Grayson thickens.
Impossible to ignore.
Despite what happened at the vending machine, he refuses to look at me and sets his sight on the blur of trees and buildings we pass at a whopping forty-five miles an hour.
I rub my hand over my thigh, uncomfortable in my skin, tucking my chin down to my chest.
Lacey turns in her seat. “So, what are we going to do when we get there? Break down the door? Demand access like we’re prying into the secrets of some cult?”
Her senses are spot on. Her gaze flicks knowingly between me and Grayson but her attempts to erase this discomfort with humor doesn’t work. How can it?