“You,” I said to Trent, gripping my bag tightly, “are anything but aboveboard with me. You ask me to trust you, but even now you’re not telling me everything. You must think I filled a prescription for stupid pills if you think I’m going to get you out to the West Coast in two days for ‘personal business.’ God, Trent, you told the coven I was a demon!” I could bear to say it now that Ivy, Jenks, and Quen weren’t in the car, but my face still burned.

I pulled on the handle, but nothing happened. Damn it, the thing had child locks.

“I need your help,” Trent said as I leaned over the front seat and unlocked the doors from the passenger panel. I flopped back in the seat and reached for my handle, shocked when Trent touched my arm. “I need your help,” he said again, letting go. “Please.”

Oh crap. He’d said please. Gut clenching, I covered my arm where he’d touched me. His eyes were pinched, and I wondered if I was really seeing that whisper of desperate need in the back of his eyes, or if this was all a trick to get me to do what he wanted. “Why?” I asked, letting go of my arm. It felt like he was touching me still.

At the question, the tight press of his lips eased. Outside the car, Quen, Jenks, and Ivy were talking in a small huddle, but the drama was inside the car. Trent wasn’t faking. He needed me—and he wouldn’t tell me why.

Exhaling, I closed my eyes in a long blink. Crap, I was a sucker for helpless males, especially when they looked as good as Trent. A quiver rose through me, and I felt my resolve start to fall apart. He was powerful, he was suave, and he needed my help. He’d asked for it.

Damn it, damn it, damn it! I suddenly realized that no matter how much I complained and argued, I was going to do exactly what Trent wanted. Again. And it irritated me that he was right. If the coven was going to take a shot at me en route, they would think twice if Trent was with me. I didn’t trust Trent, but I trusted the coven even less.

“I desperately need to get to the West Coast before Sunday night,” he said, and my eyes opened. “It’s a private matter. This is the most important thing in my life. Please help me.”

The faint scent from his boots of stables was winding its way into me now that the car wasn’t moving and the air was still. His clothes, the sun in his hair, everything combined to remind me of a summer afternoon when I was twelve and he had found me crying in the stables at summer camp, thinking I’d alienated my best friend. The thrill I’d felt, the power he’d given me when we took a fence together on his horse twined through me. Then a mere two months ago when we had pounded over his fields under the moonlight, believing the lie that the scream we had heard was a fox and not the man who had tried to kill me. Remembering it all, I quivered, feeling myself pulled to him. Shit. Maybe I was a demon.