“It is?” I asked.
“It is?” the man repeated, without knowing it.
“Yes!” Mircea told him.
“Why is it?” I demanded.
“Why is that?” the man asked.
Mircea closed his eyes.
“You don’t like me being in your head, do you?” I asked, light dawning. I’d been so freaked out about the opposite, it hadn’t occurred to me that he might feel the same. And now that it did . . . “Why don’t you?”
“You didn’t seem ple
ased when the shoe was on the other foot,” he pointed out.
“This is getting surreal,” Marlowe murmured. “Even for this place.”
“Cassie is here—mentally,” Mircea told him.
“I’d gathered that.”
“She seems to find it difficult to understand why I do not wish to have her in my head, unannounced, at any time she pleases—”
Marlowe gave a bark of a laugh. “Oh, this should be fun.”
“It isn’t fun!” I said, looking at Mircea. “And I wasn’t happy because I thought you were doing it on purpose. I didn’t do it on purpose. I didn’t know I was doing it at all!”
“Yet here we are.”
I felt my brows draw together, which was stupid because I didn’t have brows right now. But it felt like I did, and it felt like they had just knitted. “You’re blaming me for this?”
“No. I am merely pointing out that it is a security risk—”
“How? I thought we were on the same side.”
“We are on the same side—”
“Then how is it a risk for me to be in your head?”
“It’s a privacy issue—”
“A minute ago it was a security issue.”
“It is possible for it to be both!” he snapped.
I blinked.
“I’m starting to wish I had popcorn,” Marlowe murmured.
“You can leave,” Mircea informed him.
A dark eyebrow raised. “This is my office. You already threw me out of yours.”
“This really has you freaked out, doesn’t it?” I stared at Mircea in amazement. I’d been pissed, sure, when I thought he was tiptoeing through my head. But he didn’t look pissed. He looked almost . . . “What are you afraid of?” I asked, hardly believing I was saying the words.
“I am not afraid. I simply think—”