“Where on earth did you find this?”
SIGNS THAT BURN
LIKE SHOOTING STARS
Torrance James & Demetria Andreadis
Her fingers played slowly over the subtle leaf carvings in the wooden box and then her green eyes rose to find his face. He leaned in the doorway to the bathroom, his hair damp and his shirt open. They hadn’t long climbed back out of the shower after tumbling in together, tangled in one another’s arms. Her hair hung down the length of her spine and it had soaked through the back of her silk robe.
“What’s this?” she asked, her voice quiet, her accent no less pronounced for the muted volume. Tor simply smiled at her in response but when her brows arched upward in a prompt for him to actually answer the question he sighed good-naturedly.
“Tradition,” he said to her, balling up the towel he had been using to scrub over his hair and tossing it back into the bathroom before he flicked off the light and abandoned the doorway to step forward and into the hotel’s bedroom properly. He had told her to pull the box out of his bag and after a pause to regard him with a mixture of suspicion and curiosity she had done so. “People in relationships give each other gifts on Valentine’s Day.” Coming to a stop near the foot of the bed he looked down at her with a smile.
“We’re in a relationship?” There went her eyebrows again, creeping upward to perfectly illustrate her amusement and Tor felt a flicker of pride as he recognised the trace of surprise in her carefully guarded expression. Demetria wasn’t in the habit of letting others see what she did not want them to see. It was only because she and Tor had been meeting like this for months now and sharing time together so intimately and openly that he could spot the little tells no one else knew about.
“We’re not?” he countered in a bold challenge that had her narrowing her eyes. They were both Alpha personalities, two dominant wolves so used to getting their own way that neither of them could just back down. Cutting her off before she could argue, he waved at the box and said, very pointedly, “Just open it.”
“What is it?”
His laugh was free and quick and he shook his head, wagging a finger at her as though he was scolding a cheeky child. “That would be telling.”
She sighed and he smiled at the sound of it, so clear and crisp. It was Demetria’s turn to shake her head but then, obediently -- or perhaps just curiously -- she was focusing on the box, opening the catch deftly with her long fingers and peeling back the lid. Her eyes came up and found his and his cocky smile softened when he saw the surprise on the surface, plain to see and no longer hidden behind a mask of confidence. There was amusement in her eyes after a moment and she lifted the gift from the box, holding it carefully in one hand. “Where on earth did you find this?”
Coming to sit on the foot of the bed beside her, brown eyes switching between Demetria’s face and the jade dragon in her grasp, he shrugged his shoulders beneath his open shirt. “I have my ways,” he told her, almost conspiratorially, smile becoming a smirk and then a grin before he leaned in to brush a kiss against the hinge of her jaw, whispering to her fondly in her own tongue, “Happy Valentine’s Day.”