“Nice try,” he said dryly. “Now tell me the truth.”

“I just did.”

“No, you didn’t. You’re lying. I hear it in your voice.”

“You can’t hear whether I’m lying in my voice,” I scoffed. “Body language might tell you a thing or two, but—”

“Yes, I can.” He cut me off with a faintly bitter flash of that killer smile. “Literally. You lie, I hear it. And I wish I didn’t. You have no idea how often people lie. All the bloody time, about everything, even stupid things that make no sense to bother lying about. Truth between us, Mac, or nothing at all. Your choice. But don’t bother trying to fool me. You can’t.”

I began to ease off my coat, remembered my arsenal, and thought better of it, settled back in my chair, and crossed my legs, one high heel swinging. I searched his face. My God, he was serious. “You really know when people are lying?”

He nodded.

“Prove it.”

“Got a boyfriend?”

“No.”

“Is there a man you’re interested in?”

“No.”

“You’re lying.”

I stiffened. “I am not.”

“Yes, you are. He may not be a boyfriend but there’s someone you’re interested in enough that you’re thinking about having sex with him.”

I glared. “I am not. And you can’t possibly know that.”

He shrugged. “Sorry, Mac, I hear the truth even when the person isn’t admitting it to themselves.” One dark brow lifted. “I don’t suppose it might be me?”

I blushed. He’d just made me think it. Us. Naked. Wow. I was a perfectly healthy woman, and he was a gorgeous man. “No,” I said, embarrassed.

He laughed, gold eyes glittering. “Lie. A whopper. Gotta love that. Have I told you I’m a big believer in fulfilling a woman’s fantasies?”

I rolled my eyes. “I wasn’t thinking it before you said it. You put the thought in my head and then, there it was, and I was thinking it.” And that worried me, because I could think of only two other people—and I was using that term loosely about both—that I might have been thinking of having sex with before he’d made me think about having sex with him, and both were terrible choices. “This doesn’t prove anything.”

“Guess you’ll have to take me on faith then, until you get to know me. I take you on faith. I don’t ask you to prove that you see the Fae.”

”People think about having sex all the time,” I said irritably. “Are you aware of every time you’re thinking about it, and who with?”

“Bless the saints, no. I wouldn’t get anything done. Most of the time it’s just background music, you know, sex-sex-sex-find-in-it-before-more-perfectly-good-sperm-die, playing in my head, to an easy, sensuous beat, then somebody like you walks in and it ratchets up to that Nine Inch Nails song my uncle plays all the time for his wife.” He grimaced. “We leave the castle and go somewhere else when he does that.”

“Your uncle listens to Trent Reznor?” I blinked. “You live in a castle?” I didn’t know which thought was weirder.

“Big. Drafty. Not as impressive as it sounds. And not all my uncles are as cool as Dageus. Men want to be him. Women adore him. It’s irritating, actually. I never introduce my girlfriends to him.”

If he was anything like Christian, I could see why.

“Point is, Mac, don’t lie to me. I will know. And I won’t put up with it.”

I pondered his claim. I knew what it was like to be capable of doing something others would consider impossible. I decided to take him at face value, and see what came of it. Time would tell. “So, is it a gift of birth, like me being a sidhe-seer?”

“You don’t think being a sidhe-seer is a gift. Nor is my . . . little problem, and yes, much to my parents’ inconvenience, I was born this way. There are necessary lies. Or, at least, kind ones. I never got to hear any of them. I don’t get to hear them now.”

Alina had said the same thing: Necessary lies. “Well, look on the bright side of it, you don’t get to hear any lies, but nobody around you gets to tell any, either. Do you think it’s easy to be around someone that you have to tell the truth to all the—oh!” I drew up short. “You don’t have many friends, do you?” Not if he spoke his mind freely, and he looked like the kind of guy that did.

He shot me a cool look. “Why’d you cry off last night?”