A slow, sexy smile quirked up the edges of his lips, and Rose had to clutch the edge of the table to keep herself from leaping over it at him.
“That’s kind of personal, don’t you think?”
She rolled her eyes. “No. Well, yes, but you don’t understand. That’s my gift, and I don’t feel you.”
“You want to feel me? This is kind of sudden, Rose, but I have to admit I’m not opposed to the idea,” he said, grinning wickedly.
She blushed, but it only made his eyes light up with glee. This was bad. Really bad. Hot guys with great senses of humor had always been her weakness. And this hot guy—oh, boy. He pushed all her buttons.
Distraction again. Darn it.
“No, stop distracting me with your . . . argh. No. Listen. My gift is that I can sense a person’s deepest desire within a few minutes of meeting him. Or her. Or, um, you. Except, not,” she said. Eloquently.
Except, not.
Alejandro stared at her for a few seconds, and then he pushed away from the table and walked over to the coffee pot. He looked really, really good walking away.
He poured himself another cup, raised the pot and one eyebrow to ask silently if she wanted more, which she just as silently declined, and then he leaned back against her counter before answering.
“Ah, English is not my first language, so perhaps I don’t understand the nuances of what you’re trying to say to me,” he said, in perfectly fluent English.
Rose blew out a sigh and then laughed. “Hey, I don’t think anybody would understand what I was saying. Okay, let me try again. My gift doesn’t work on you. Your partner, I could read almost before he got out of the car. Connor, the guy who was here earlier? Took under a minute, the first time I met him. But you? I’ve been around you for hours, and I still don’t have a clue.”
Alejandro looked intrigued. “What does Mac want? No. Don’t answer that. It’s none of my business. Which, to the point, is also true of you. Don’t you feel like a spy? Listening in on other people’s thoughts and desires without giving them back any truth about yourself? It seems unfair to me, Rose.”
She looked down at the table, chagrined. Of course it was unfair. She often had felt like a spy, eavesdropping on the privacy of others. But she’d been so intent on Alejandro that she’d broken her own number one rule: never to let anyone know about her gift.
“I never wanted this,” she blurted out, shame and humiliation burning a path through her stomach up to her throat. “I didn’t ask for it. I have tried all my life to be able to block it—to give people the privacy they deserve—but there’s no way to stop it. I just know. The way you know my eyes are blue. It just pops out at me.”
“Your eyes are very, very blue,” he murmured, and she glanced up at him and was immediately caught in his gaze. His intense, heated gaze.
“But I don’t get anything from you,” she said, desperate to clarify. “So, your secrets are safe. Either you’re witch-proof, or you don’t have a deepest desire.”
Alejandro put his mug down on the counter and then turned back to face her, his face suddenly drawn in bleak lines. “I wanted something once. Someone. She waited all of three months after I left for the P-Ops Academy before she married one of my friends. So I learned not to want anything too deeply, ever again.”
Rose caught her breath at the reflection of remembered pain that vibrated through the air—she could almost taste it, rusty and jagged in the back of her throat. Even a far less powerful witch would be able to tell that here was a man who did feel—and feel deeply. She swallowed the lump in her throat.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—I’m sorry,” she repeated, knowing that she had to keep her distance.#p#分页标题#e#
A totally hot guy who was all surface and no depth was easy to resist. Alejandro . . . he was something else altogether, and she didn’t want to get tangled up in the net of emotional entanglement. She’d seen what that had done to her mother, after they’d lost Rose’s dad.
“It was for the better,” he said, shrugging. “For the best, as you say. Maria was afraid of the supernatural, with good reason. Vampires fed on our village for a long time. It wasn’t until the Atlanteans came that we finally defeated them. My job would have terrified her, but I was done with simply surviving. I needed to fight.”
“And so you became a P-Ops agent.” Rose understood more than he was saying. For a long time after her father died, she’d thought she wanted to become a doctor so she could save people.
So she could save other little girls’ dads.