“Ah, I do believe you are beginning to understand, my dear,” he purred, meeting my gaze with those gorgeous eyes and raising a finger to run it down my cheek.
“But none of you…” I countered, shaking my head in denial.
“They are not. I am.”
“No,” I breathed, my pulse racing as I sat up all the way, dropping my legs over the side of the bed, pushing the covers back and trying to put some distance between us. “You are a fictitious character, played by an actor named Tom Hiddleston. You look just like him. If you were really Loki -”
“I would look the way you imagined me in your head when you invoked me, you silly girl."
“Excuse me?” I turned, looking back at him with wide eyes. Had he just said what I thought he said? True, all three of us had managed to draw the right cards to end up ‘ruling the world’ with our favorite champions, but I thought it was because Celeste had stacked the deck… not because we were messing around with arcane power. I cringed as I remembered a similar incident when a few friends and I were playing “pick a card” with a Tarot deck. We inadvertently condemned our friend because we didn’t take the game seriously enough.
“You should know better, mortal,” he chided me. “But obviously you don’t learn very quickly… so here I am.”
I frowned at him. “Yes, here you are, Mr. Hiddleston.”
“Wrong.” He shook his head at me and pursed his lips. “Where do you think the Norse legends come from?” he asked, raising his eyebrows. “I am a God, after all. I can take whatever form I like. And obviously, you like this one.” He moved from his reclining posture to a position beside me and held his hands out to his sides.
My eyes betrayed me by traveling all the way from his emerald eyes to his almost straight lips, to his chest in the soft tunic, rising and falling slightly with his breathing, to the skin-tight black leather pants, to his narrow bare feet. My breath hitched in my chest. Damn. He knew far too much. But fantasies are just that, fantasies. I blushed and looked down at the quilt, swearing internally never to let him see my sketchbook.
“Why are you here?” I squeaked. Not that I couldn’t guess, but I feared my guess would be correct in every detail.
“Because you called me here, my dear,” he whispered. “What, you think I am too busy to come when mere mortals call? Besides, I thought it might be interesting to see what kind of game you are playing.” He pushed my hair away from my face with his long, soft fingers, then trailed his index finger around the side of my face and down to my chin, lifting it slightly so that I would look up into his eyes.
“I’m not playing anything,” I protested softly, my voice half an octave above normal. “I just…” I couldn’t finish my sentence. His eyes practically glowed green, they were so intense. He was too close to me, and I could feel the warmth of his breath on my face. I stopped breathing and a spark ran down my spine.
He lifted my chin further and bent down so that his face was close to mine. When he spoke, I could feel the words on my lips.
“Oh, you’re playing, all right. But now you’re playing by my rules,” he breathed, then he brushed my lips with his.
