“It bothered you,” she said, taking a chance with this topic of conversation, “to find me in that garage naked.”

His dark head dragged slowly back and forth. “You have no idea.”

“Because everyone could see me?” And here’s where she took an even greater chance: “Or because you still wanted me?”

Another sigh. “Both.”

“For a long time, I thought it was hate.”

“No.” A quick response. “Not hate. Never hate. Confusion, though. Confusion over why you were there, why you were being so hostile to me when I had no idea what was going on.” He barked out a cold laugh. “And a hell of a lot of frustration. Because you’d never left my mind in three years. Because I never expected to see you again, and suddenly there you were. Captive. Taken by one of my own behind my back. Naked and angry and all up in my face, exactly how I remembered you. I gave you my coat because I couldn’t stand looking at you. You were too much for me, for my senses, after all that time away. You instantly kick-started everything back into high gear, the way it once was. For me at least.”

Keko hadn’t realized she’d stopped washing until he finished, completely frozen by his words. When her hands resumed movement over her body, they worked slowly, as though pushing through mud.

He turned his head, giving her his profile. “And you?”

Her arm paused over her chest as she considered how to answer. “I felt vindicated at first. Seeing you proved I was right about you and your people.” She scoffed at herself. “At least in my own head, for a time. I remember being so mad at how good you looked, how you never took your eyes off me, how you made me put on the coat like you owned me or something.”

“But you did it. You put it on.”

“Because I thought that if I did, you’d continue to think you had power over me, when really it was me trying to turn the tables. And because”—oh boy—“for the first time ever I was aware of other people looking at me, and I liked your eyes on me the best. Yours were the only ones I wanted, even after the way we’d ended, and that realization made me insane. I didn’t know what to do with it, how to react.”

Slowly, gracefully, he leaned back on his hands, his triceps and lats making all sorts of gorgeous waves under the thin layer of the T-shirt. The mist above rained down sparkles in his nearly black hair.

“This is the first time we’ve talked about it,” he said. “I didn’t think we ever would.”

Beneath the water she rubbed at her legs and feet, because she didn’t know what else to do or say.

“So I understand your behavior in the garage,” he said, “but I still don’t get what happened right after. The war and all.”

Two months ago she’d been so sure he’d been finagling his way into the Senatus by capturing and using her. She’d been positive that he was orchestrating a war between Ofarians and Chimerans. Her soul had been shattered by his callousness with Makaha. Her heart had been destroyed by his coldness to her after they’d left the bonfire, and then three years later in that garage.

“I think you do get it,” she said. “I let myself want you, and when you didn’t want me in return I came back at you the only way I knew how: fighting, war. I’m not saying it was right. Standing here now, looking back at how I’d been trained to think, it feels so foolish. So dangerous. I deserved my punishment.”

“Who said I didn’t want you?” His voice rose. “I knew what I was to you in the very beginning and I didn’t care. I went into it willingly.”

“And what do you think you were to me?”

Another humorless laugh. “Come on, Keko. I’m a man. I may be horny as all fuck when I’m around you, but I still like to think I can cling to a chunk of my brain when I’m inside you. You already told me I was a challenge to you in Utah, someone for you to do to pass the time. Something forbidden. Maybe even something to secretly get back at the chief for making you watch me.”

“All that is true.”

“It was true, in the beginning. But that last night in the hotel room? I thought I might’ve become something special to you, if only for a little while.”

“You were.”

He went perfectly still, a half-drawn breath exaggerating the deep V of his torso. She’d never been so attracted to a man’s back before.

“Were?” he asked.

“Were,” she said. “I don’t know what you are now.”

It occurred to her that maybe he was baiting her as much as she was baiting him. Each trying to pry out information from the other without revealing their own hands. Maybe she should grab on tightly to that and not let other, more physical, demands try to steer her in other directions. Except that those demands were making her thighs tremble with need beneath the water, and she couldn’t resist slowly running her hands up and down them.

“What are you doing?” For someone who could transform himself into rain, his voice sounded so very dry. “To your body. Right now.”

Her hands froze halfway up her thighs, water sloshing around her chest and upper arms. “I’m washing.”

“Where?”

The urge to touch her own nipple with one hand and push the other between her legs nearly sent her underwater. For a moment she could have sworn she felt him in liquid form sliding over the part of her that was quickly going slippery. Or maybe that was just her imagination, her fantasies, breaking through the barriers of reality.

“Griffin . . .” It came out plaintive. Hot. An entirely different sound than she’d wanted to give him.

It meant the balance of control had shifted again. He’d unknowingly taken over and she was slipping. He was affecting her, turning her on, and . . . Brave Queen, she didn’t want him to stop.

He pushed off his hands and shoved them both into his hair so hard she thought he might be digging into his skull. “God, I know. I know. Don’t answer that.”

With terrible effort, she lifted her hands from the water, the dripping as it hit the surface loud and strangely sexy. She’d started this—this advanced form of flirting that got her naked within four feet of him—but now she wasn’t entirely sure how to finish it. Or even if she should.

Because no amount of sex was going to erase what she was feeling. How dumb she’d been to ever have thought that a physical release could drive away unwanted and burdensome emotion.

Cupping water in her palms, she poured it over her shoulder, trying to focus on getting her wound clean, but instead only noticing the slow, cool tease of the narrow streams as they trickled over her skin—as they made dancing paths down and around the swells of her breasts. She pressed her finger to one lazy droplet, tracing it downward, until she grazed her nipple.

A tiny moan of pleasure leaked from her throat.

A louder one rumbled from the chest of the man sitting on the rock. “Ah, fuck it. Just tell me.”

Turn around. See where my hand is. Where I want yours.

But to say it felt far too intimate, which was odd since her mouth was trained for boldness.

“I’m trying to wash my back.” She was fully aware of how dumb that sounded, how romantically manipulative, but since she’d been conditioned to own what she said, she let it hang there.

His back straightened. “Don’t strain yourself. The wound could open up again and bleed. Here, let me help.”

Yes. Her hand tightened on her breast, the nipple hard in the center of her palm. She held her breath, wanting him to turn, to strip out of those clothes, and slip into the water right in front of her. Wanting his hands on her. Her eyes drifted closed with the fantasy, with anticipation.

Then something did touch her—something cool and wet and refreshing—but it wasn’t Griffin.

Her eyes flew open to see the waterfall pulling away from the rock face, defying gravity. Scant droplets turned to a steady shower as the small waterfall poured over her spot in the center of the pool. She stood up, rising above the surface, and let the water rain down, flattening her hair down her back and sluicing over every inch of her body. It beat down upon her, cleaning her and making her feel impossibly dirty within the same second.