Pink Princess Fairytini (Fairy Files #2) by Katharine Sadler

happy. Someone grabbed my waist and pulled me close, moving his body against mine in a way I recognized at once.
    “What are you doing with that guy?” Frost asked, his lips close to my ear.
    I gave him a shove, and he moved so there was a breath of space between us. “What do you care?”
    “I care,” he said. “I don’t want to see you get hurt.”
    I laughed a little harder than I should have, some of the tension I’d been feeling with Harvey, tension about how he’d fit with my friends and what he’d think of my wings, leaving me. “I don’t get hurt.” I was the one who did the hurting.
    “You aren’t as tough as you pretend,” Frost said. “And you shouldn’t hide yourself from him. If he can’t accept it –”
    “Mind if I cut in?” Harvey asked, his jaw tight.
    Frost raised his hands and stepped back, a smirk on his face, but his body tense. “She’s all yours.”
    I hated him. I really hated him for always pushing and for sticking his nose in where it ought to get smacked off his face. Harvey wrapped his arms around me and did his best to move to the music, but his discomfort and awkwardness made me uncomfortable. Annoyance layered over the tension I’d felt since he walked in the door, and I mentally slapped myself. Harvey was doing nothing but being sweet and trying to make me happy. I couldn’t fault him for that.
    “I need a drink,” I said, when we bumped into one of my employee’s dates and almost knocked her on her ass.
    Harvey smiled his relief and led me to the kitchen.
     
    Harvey stayed until the sun had risen over our hot city and all of my guests had left. He helped me clean up and get my apartment looking as sterile and boring as it had before the party.
    “Thank you,” I said with a yawn, exhaustion making me a bit dizzy. Harvey caught me as I tripped over my own feet and pulled me against his chest.
    “You should get to bed,” he said, his hands warm against my bare skin beneath my wings. “Want me to help you take these off.” He touched the wings, petting them gently. “They’re so soft and–”
    “They’re real.”
    He laughed until his eyes met mine, then he released me like I was hot and took two steps away from me. “You’re serious.”
    “I’m fae. Half fairy and half faun.”
    He sat down on one of the stools at the kitchen counter. “Fairy and faun?” He looked a bit like I’d hit him in the face with a bat. “How did I never know this?”
    I shrugged. “I don’t have obvious characteristics. My mother hid them when I was tiny and they stayed hidden until recently.” I didn’t think he was ready to know about the faun tail that popped out in Rubalia. The one I kept hidden in the Non. “And it’s not something I talk about or that affects my life or my job.” At least it didn’t in the past, but judging by the expression on his face, he wasn’t ready to hear that my mother was a fairy queen and had named me her heir.
    “Okay,” he said. “Does this change anything?”
    “What do you mean?” I sat on the stool next to him, and he spun me around until my back was to him. He was silent for several long moments, and I almost got up and asked him to leave. I mean what the hell was he doing back there?
    “They are the most gorgeous wings I’ve ever seen,” he said, reverence in his tone.
    I spun around and faced him. “Does this change anything for you?”
    He smiled and his eyes heated as he looked at me. “It doesn’t make me want you any less. It doesn’t change that you are the toughest, smartest, most beautiful woman I’ve ever known. It doesn’t change that I want to kiss you right now.”
    What more could I ask for? I leaned in and pressed my lips to his, letting myself fall into his heat and his touch, the feel of him. He stood and pulled me with him, placing one hand on the bare skin of my back and pressing me into him. My body trilled like every nerve ending was having a party and I knew I wanted more. I needed more. I