I wouldn’t mind it.”

He walked to her chair, and leaning over the back of it, sent the system under discussion churning with his teeth on her ear. “Come home with me tonight.”

She shivered, couldn’t help it. There was something unspeakably erotic about the voice, the suggestion, when she couldn’t see his face. “I can’t. You know I can’t. It’d be too hard to explain to my family.”

“I don’t know when I can get another night off.”

Her vision wavered, doubled as he did something clever with his tongue behind her ear. “How about mornings?”

“It so happens all my mornings, for the foreseeable future, are free.”

“I’ll come by, the first chance I get.”

He straightened, then plucking off her cap, ran a hand down her hair in a way that made her want to stretch like a cat. And purr. “The door’s always open.”

THIRTEEN

THE MORNING WAS soft. Gentle rain pattered over flowers coming awake for spring. Fog, very thin and nearly white, skimmed along the ground and would be burned away at the first ray of sun to beam through the clouds.

Faerie Hill Cottage was quiet when Brenna stepped inside. Even faeries like to sleep, she remembered. Perhaps ghosts did as well, and chose gray and rainy dawns for their dreaming times.

For herself, she was full of energy, and she knew exactly how she planned to use it.

She sat at the base of the stairs to take off her boots, then decided it was as good a place as any to dispense with her jacket and cap as well. When she hung the cap on the newel post, she tapped a finger lightly to the little faerie pin she kept hooked there. It had outlasted a number of caps.

She wondered if anyone but Shawn would have thought to give it to her, as he had years before. Most, when they gave her gifts, chose something practical. A tool or a book, warm socks or a sturdy work shirt.

That was how most saw her, after all. How she saw herself if it came to it. A practical person with little time for the foolish or the pretty.

But from Shawn it had been a little silver faerie with slanted eyes and pointed wings.

And she wondered if someone else had given it to her, would she have worn it nearly every day since, without really thinking about it.

She didn’t know the answer to either, nor the meaning of either. So she shrugged, thinking that was just the way it was between them.

However it was, her pulse quickened as she climbed the stairs.

He was sleeping, all but buried under sheets and blankets, and dead center of the bed, like a man who was used to having the place to himself. The cat made a black circle on the foot of the covers, but opened his eyes, a cool, steady gleam, when Brenna stepped in.

“Guarding him, are you? Well, he’ll never hear it from me. Now then, unless you’re after being embarrassed, or envious, in very short order I’d take myself off somewhere else.”