As the door creaked open, she felt his fingers toy with a strand of her loose hair. "Tess--"
She pivoted to tell him good night, to tell him that this would be the last time that she would go out with him as a couple, but as soon as she was facing him, Ben's mouth came down on hers in an impulsive kiss.
Tess drew back just as abruptly, too startled to couch her reaction. She didn't miss the wounded look in his eyes. The flash of bitter understanding reflected there as she lifted her hand to her lips and shook her head.
"Ben, I'm sorry, but I can't... "
He exhaled sharply, running a hand through his golden hair. "Nah, forget it. My mistake."
"I just... " Tess struggled for the right words. "We can't keep doing this, you know. I want to be your friend, but--" "I said forget it." His voice was curt, stinging. "You've told me how you feel, Doc. I guess I'm just a little slow on the uptake."
"This is my fault, Ben. I shouldn't have gone with you tonight. I didn't mean for you to think that--"
He gave her a tight smile. "I don't think anything. Anyway, I've got to go. Things to do, places to be."
He started moving back toward the stairs. Tess came out into the hallway, feeling terrible for the way things were going. "Ben, don't leave like this. Why don't you come in for a while? Let's talk."
He didn't even answer, just looked at her for a long moment, then pivoted around and jogged down the steps. A few seconds later, the door of her apartment building banged shut. Tess went back inside, locked her door behind her, then drifted over to watch from her front window as Ben climbed into his van and sped away into the dark.
Behind the cover of dark sunglasses and the flickering light of strobes in the dance club, Dante scanned the crowd of flailing, gyrating humans. Since picking Chase up from his Darkhaven residence a couple of hours earlier, they'd run across only one Rogue, a rangy-looking male who'd been sniffing out prey among the homeless. Dante had given Harvard a quick lesson in the miracle of titanium when it meets a Rogue's corrupted blood system, smoking the suckhead on the spot.>It sounded ridiculous and she knew it. Ben had no claim over her, and even if they were still dating, she wouldn't let herself be dominated so much that she couldn't even talk with another man. That was all she was doing here with Dante, yet it felt intensely intimate. It felt illicit.
It felt dangerous, because despite everything she'd learned about protecting herself, about keeping her guard up, she was intrigued by this man, this stranger. She was attracted to him. More than attracted, she felt connected to him in some inexplicable way.
He smiled at her, then began a slow prowl around the Cornacchini display. "Sleeping Endymion," he said, reading the placard for the sculpture of the mythical shepherd boy. "What do you think he dreams about, Tess?"
"You don't know the story?" At the subtle shake of his head, Tess drifted toward him, almost unaware that she was moving. Unable to stop herself until she was standing right beside Dante, their arms brushing against each other as she looked into the Plexiglas with him. "Endymion dreams of Selene."
"The Greek moon goddess," Dante murmured next to her, his deep voice vibrating in her bones. "And are they lovers, Tess?"
Lovers.
Warmth stirred somewhere deep inside her just to hear him speak the word. He'd said it casually enough, yet Tess heard the question as if he'd meant it for her ears alone. The low, ticklish hum in the side of her neck intensified again, pulsing in time to the sudden rise of her heartbeat. She cleared her throat, feeling strange and unsettled, all her senses sharpening.
"Endymion was a handsome shepherd boy," she said finally, drawing on recollections of what she'd learned in a college mythology course. "Selene, as you said, was the goddess of the moon." "A human and an immortal," Dante remarked. She could feel his eyes on her now, that whiskey-colored gaze watching her. "Not the ideal combination, is it? Someone usually ends up dead."
Tess glanced at him. "This is one of the few times things worked out." She stared hard at the sculpture in order to avoid looking Dante's way again and confirming that he was still watching her, so close she could feel the heat of his body. She started talking again, needing to fill the space with something other than the awareness that was crackling around her. "Selene could only be with Endymion at night. She wanted to be with him forever, so she begged Zeus to grant her lover eternal life. The god agreed and put the shepherd into an endless sleep, where he waits each night for his beloved Selene to visit him."
"Happily ever after," Dante drawled, a note of cynicism in his voice. "Only in myths and fairy tales."
"You don't believe in love?"
"Do you, Tess?"
She glanced up at him, into a penetrating, probing gaze that felt as intimate as a caress. "I'd like to believe in it," she said, not sure why she was admitting this now, to him. The fact that she had said so to him confused her. Anxious suddenly, she strolled over to a neighboring case of Rodin pieces. "So, what's your interest in sculpture, Dante? Are you an artist or an enthusiast?"
"Neither."
"Oh." Dante kept pace with her, pausing beside her at the kiosk. Tess had dismissed him as out of place when she first saw him, but hearing him speak, seeing him up close, she had to admit that despite the fact that he looked like something out of a Wachowski brothers' action movie, there was an unmistakable level of sophistication about him. Beneath the leather and muscle, he had a worldly wiseness that intrigued her. Probably more than it should. "What then? Are you a patron of the museum? "
He gave a mild shake of his dark head.
"Working security for the exhibit?" she guessed.
It would certainly explain his lack of formal wear and the laser-sharp intensity that radiated around him. Maybe he was from one of those high-end insurance units that museums often hired to protect their collections while on public display.
"There was something here I wanted to see," he replied, his mesmerizing eyes unflinching on her. "That 's the only reason I came."
Something about the way he looked at her as he said it--the way he seemed to look right through her --gave her pulse a little jolt of electricity. She'd been hit on enough in the past to know when a guy was working some kind of angle, but this was different.