Lupi 04 - Night Season

you don’t want to talk to me,” he said, moving up beside her, “but you can damned well listen.”
    He could talk. Didn’t mean she’d listen. She kept her gaze fixed on the invisible shoreline.
    â€œI didn’t have sex with her.”
    Cynna practiced breathing. She was pretty good at breathing, and it paid to concentrate on your pluses.
    Out of the corner of her eye she saw him run a hand through his hair. “I told you why she was in my room.”
    Yeah. Elf-woman could do the language spell. For Cullen, spellcasting topped pretty much everything else. “I believe you,” she said without looking at him. “You wanted her spell, so you agreed to give her what she wanted.”
    â€œYou didn’t hear anything I said earlier, did you? She didn’t agree to trade the spell for sex.” His lips quirked. “I’m good, but I’m not that good.”
    It took Cynna a moment to suppress the urge to bloody that amused smile, but she’d been humiliated enough by her impulses for one day. “You’re beautiful and you’re new to her. Her first lupus. I imagine she doesn’t get a ‘first’ very often.”
    He shook his head. “Let me be more specific. I did not agree to have sex with her.”
    â€œThen you were leading her on something awful.”
    â€œShe agreed to give me the Common Tongue. To receive it, I had to lower my shields. When I did, she glammed me.”
    â€œShe what?” Cynna’s lips twisted on the question, but it was too late. Dammit, she was listening to him. “That’s not a word.”
    â€œYou’ve heard of faerie glamour.”
    She looked directly at him, disgusted. “Why do you think I was aiming for her, not you?”
    His mouth opened. Nothing came out.
    She found room among the emotional bruises for a thread of satisfaction. It wasn’t often she’d rendered Cullen speechless. “What did you think, that I’d blame her and not you for consensual hanky-panky? The door opened. You didn’t react. You saw me and still didn’t react. You’re an idiot, but not that much of an idiot. Just what were you supposed to give her if it didn’t involve your cock?”
    â€œInformation,” he said dryly. “Theera is a spy, so that’s what she trades in.”
    â€œThat’s the elf-woman’s name? Theera?”
    â€œHer use-name.” He shook his head, rueful. “I didn’t think she could glam me. She’s only half-elven, and I thought…Well, I was wrong, wasn’t I? Anyway, she acts as agent for her half sister—business agent at times, but the double-O type as well.”
    He’d learned quite a bit about the lovely Theera, hadn’t he? “You’d better tell Ruben about her, then.”
    â€œI did. You were busy avoiding me.”
    The sorry lump of feeling in Cynna’s gut reminded her of when she was twenty. She’d had an abscessed tooth and no money. Rather than borrow from her aunt, who didn’t have much, either, she’d tried to ride it out.
    You could do that with some things. Not with an abscessed tooth, it turned out. She didn’t know how it would work with the muddled ache inside her, but since there weren’t any emotional dentists, she guessed she’d find out. “What kind of information did you give her?”
    â€œShe wanted to know what we’d agreed to do, what the gnomes had offered, how we planned to locate the medallion. I gave her two out of three.”
    â€œMeaning?”
    â€œI didn’t see any harm in her knowing what we’d agreed to, since that’s basically nothing, aside from hunting the medallion. Or what the gnomes are offering—also nothing. We find their medallion and we get to survive and maybe go home. She made me an offer on behalf of her sister.”
    And what might that have been—a threesome? The words almost slipped out, but Cynna caught them in time. Her priorities sucked. She had to get her damned unruly mind to pay attention to the life-or-death stuff. “What kind of offer?”
    â€œShe claims the medallion doesn’t have to be held by the gnomes to keep Edge stable. The gnomes warned us we might hear that, of course, but their warning doesn’t make it automatically false. Theera’s argument boils down to the inherent superiority of the sidhe at everything, especially all things