Page 49 of Skinwalker's Bane
Adam’s smile was just as small as hers. “I don’t mind.” He frowned. “I reallydon’tmind,” he said slowly, wonderingly.
Devin tried to pummel down the giddy relief and happiness that sprouted inside her at his response. She gripped her hands together and glanced at them.
“Devin.”
She looked up again.
“There’s something else,” he added.
Here it comes. She braced herself and nodded.
“The other reason I thought twice about giving you this,” and he touched the databall once more. “I don’t want to presume and probably I am, way too much, only it occurred to me that if I give you this, then you might think it natural to ask me to go to the soiree with you.”
Something jerked inside her. A thousand prevarications and provisos and qualifications. Excuses, all of them, really. Then she looked properly at his face and his expression. “You don’t want to go with me,” she breathed.
“Do you want me to go?” he asked. “I mean, not your heart, Devin. Your gut. Your professional instincts. You really want to be sitting at the Chairman’s table with me next to you?”
She breathed in a slow breath. “I suppose…I hadn’t really thought of it. Just getting to the Chairman’s table at all has been a major battle.”
“You told me. Enough for me to figure out the rest, anyway,” Adam said. “Thing is, you’re trying to woo the Dreamhawks into sponsoring you and they’ve already got two other hot contenders, right?”
She nodded.
“I’m not a Dreamhawks fan, Devin. I’m Capitol, through and through. Even living in the Beehive was a compromise for me. They’re going to know that. They’re going to guess that about me, even if I wear one of those fancy suits. Everyone knows I’m a skinwalker. They’re going to assume that if I’m with you, that’s the way you lean, too.”
She swallowed. “You’re right, of course,” she admitted. “I don’t know that I like it, yet it is true.”
“I don’t want to fuck up your chances with the Dreamhawks,” he added gently.
She nodded. Hewasright. She couldn’t dispute him on a single point, only she wanted to. She wanted to be able to say the Dreamhawks could spin in their tanks if they didn’t like it.
The unpleasant truth gnawed at her. Faced with the fact that taking Adam to the soiree with her would be political suicide, now all she could think of was how wonderful it would be to go with him.
Adam seemed to be reading all of it in her face, for he was watching her with narrowed eyes. “Look at me for a second,” he said sharply.
“What?” she asked, the alarm building all over again. There had been a note in his voice that put her on alert all over again.
He reached out, as if he would touch her face. “Look at me, just as you did then, with your big eyes wide open.”
Devin stared at him, flummoxed. “I don’t know what you mean. I was just looking.”
He dropped his hand. “I’ve seen you before…” Then his gaze shifted inward, as if he was thinking deeply. Then his eyes widened, as he had just accused her of doing. “Idoknow you!” He lurched to his feet and backed up, until his back was against the counter. “You’re her. The girl who lived in the Field.”
Devin flinched. She hadn’t heard that name for many, many years.
Adam was staring at her, his lips parted a little. “Irememberyou! The day they pulled you out of the Field. I watched it happen.”
Devin gripped her hands together even more tightly. “That was a long time ago,” she said quietly. There was no point in denying it. Adam only had to check archives on the Forum and he’d find the news items and the gossip and the heated discussions that had lasted for months afterward.
Adam gripped the counter, his knuckles whitening. “I was just a kid myself—not a lot older than you. What were you, five?”
She nodded.
“I was in the marketplace with my dad that day. It took four of them to haul you out of the Field. You were kicking and screaming and so, so dirty…it was hard to see you were a girl at all. Even your hair was all matted and wild.”
Devin swallowed. “I had been alone for two years,” she said. It was an excuse. A feeble one.
Adam nodded. “That was you…and here you are. I haven’t thought of you for years. Not even to wonder what had happened to you. My dad tried to explain to me that your parents had died in a fire that an asteroid started in the Capitol, when it smashed through the gas pipes. They figured you had died, too. When they couldn’t find a child’s body in the apartment with your parents, they figured your remains had been charred to ashes. No one looked for you after that.”
