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His eyes narrowed again. "You don't thank your mate for bringing you pleasure."

"You have too many rules. Bye."

He watched as I drove away.

I waved over my shoulder.

Seemed like the polite thing to do, when ditching your mate in a parking lot after he bought you a bunch of stuff and got you off in the middle of the night.

As soon as I was back in my new studio, I returned to my map.

I was still awake and working when Dante got there at some point the next morning.

Sadly, I was down to the final ounce of the overly-sweet latte I'd been rationing. It hadn't been cold for hours, so the safety was questionable, but I was pretty sure those things were pumped full of both preservatives and magic.

I felt him in the entryway and knew he was there, even without looking back to make sure.

"Did you sleep at all?" he asked me.

I didn't answer, in the middle of sketching out an addition to one of the spells.

I'd finished the basic map hours earlier. Now that I had all those fun-colored sharpies, I was in the process of color-coding everything.

The orange lines were the good spells that needed to stay.

The red was the shitty magic that I needed to fix.

The purple was questionable.

And the pink was everything that needed to be added.

There was a lot of pink and red. I was about to tape another ring of paper around the outside of the map, so I had enough space to detail it all out, because more ideas had been coming to me.

"Ophelia." Dante said, and I finally looked over at him.

I got the vibe he'd repeated my name a few times.

My eyes grazed the drool-worthy male before zeroing in on the coffee cups in his hands. Two of them.

"Is that for me?"

"Did you sleep?" he repeated.

"Oh. No. I'm busy."

I reached for the coffee.

He set it down on a shelf, out of my reach. "You don't need more caffeine if you've been up all night."

"That's exactly what I need after being up all night."

Dante's disapproval didn't budge.

I eyed the coffee cup, but decided I'd rather finish my map than fight him for it.

In the blink of an eye, I tipped back the rest of my questionable bottled drink and set it back down on the floor.

Then, I reached for the tape.