so they’d let you into the business-class lounge?”
“My father paid three times that for a set of golf clubs. This is a brilliant investment by comparison.”
She pressed her lips to his and felt for his tongue until they were both out of breath. A woman on the sofa near them got up and made her husband move to a seat farther away.
Rosa felt a cool tingling inside her, glanced at her hand, and saw reptilian scales forming on her fingers. Her skin looked translucent as the transformation began under it. Startled, she pulled back, saw concern in his gaze, and knew what he had just seen in her blue eyes. Her pupils would have narrowed to slits.
Not now, she thought in alarm.
Damn hormones.
WITHOUT YOU
“HEY,” WHISPERED ALESSANDRO SOOTHINGLY, pulling Rosa down on the sofa. The partitions between the groups of seats more or less shielded them from view.
She rubbed her palms on her jeans, as if she could wipe away the metamorphosis that was just beginning. She forced herself to take a couple of deep breaths. Gradually the chill shrank to a tiny point in her heart.
His hair wasn’t dark brown anymore, but black. She was sure that if she put her hands under his shirt she could have stroked the fine down of the panther fur as it grew on his back.
“Not a good place,” she said, suppressing a nervous laugh.
His eyes flashed with mockery. “For the price we’ve paid, we ought to get more than a sandwich from the cooler.”
She took his hand and gently massaged it between her fingers. When he tried to lean forward to kiss her again, she smiled and fended him off. “You see what happens. Until we can control it—”
“Until then, no sex,” he promised, grinning.
Their attempts to sleep together would have looked odd to other people. They generally ended in chaotic transformations, sometimes funny, sometimes annoying, usually just embarrassing. The worst of it was that they seldom reacted in the same way to them. When it made him laugh, she felt like dying on the spot. As soon as she teased him about his panther coat, he began to sulk.
Strong emotions brought out something in both of them that would have inspired more than just indignation in the other passengers in the lounge. Rosa felt that she was under close observation, watched by informers from other clans and undercover police officers, and by the eyes of predators lurking beneath the mask of normality. There must certainly be other Arcadians in this room.
“Change the subject?” she suggested—it was one alternative to a cold shower.
“State of the financial markets? The weather?”
“Responsibility.” In her mouth, it sounded foreign.
His hair went back to brown at once.
“You saw those six guys back there,” she said. “They were waiting outside the airport to hand me a whole bunch of papers to sign. Construction contracts for new wind turbines. Stock options. Applications for subsidies.” Who said she couldn’t be romantic when she wanted to?
“Maybe you should go see them in the city now and then. Or ask them to come to the palazzo.”
“I’m signing something every day,” she said ruefully. “I spend hours on the phone in the mornings with obscure second and third female cousins in Milan and Rome, just because they manage companies that happen to belong to me. I don’t even know them. I’m lucky if I can remember their names.”
“Just as long as you realize that they’re lying with every word they say to you.”
In October, the body of her aunt Florinda Alcantara had been fished out of the Tyrrhenian Sea. What had upset Rosa more than the bullet wound in Florinda’s skull was the fact that she herself was next in line to be head of the clan. None of its members had wanted her, and no one had seriously expected her to accept the challenge. That was probably why she did. When the first of the new “good friends and confidential advisers,” who now came thronging to the Palazzo Alcantara, suggested that she might voluntarily decline her inheritance, she made her decision. They’d just have to learn how to get along with her.
“I’m doing my best to remember they’re lying”—it was one way of describing her lack of interest in them—“but I’m not Florinda. Or Zoe. I feel like a pilot who takes a plane thousands of feet up in the sky and then realizes he’s scared out of his wits.”