He growled softly. “Woman, you summoned me out the other eve and I did you no harm. Will you not trust me again?”

She snickered. “I thought I was sound asleep and dreaming the other night. It had nothing to do with trust.”

“I killed the man who was trying to kill you. Is that not reason enough to trust me?”

She stopped laughing. There it was. He was the one who’d snapped the blond man’s neck and left him lying dead on the commons. Though a part of her brain knew it had to have been him—whether such events had transpired in a delusional world or The Real One—his remark drew her gaze to his hands. Big hands. Neck-snapping hands.

After a moment’s hesitation, she stepped warily into the office. Another pause, then she slowly closed the door behind her.

The giggles were gone. A thousand questions were not.

Jamming her hands into the front pockets of her jeans, she stared at the mirror.

She closed her eyes. Squeezed them shut hard. Opened them. Tried it twice more for good measure.

He was still there. Oh, shit.

“I could have told you that wouldn’t work,” he said dryly.

“Am I crazy?” she whispered.

“Nay, you’re not daft. I am here. This is indeed happening. And if you wish to survive, you must credit what I tell you.”

“People can’t be inside mirrors. It’s not possible.”

“Tell that to the mirror.” He thumped his fists against the inside of the glass for emphasis.

“Funny. But not convincing.” Oh, that was weird, seeing him pound on the mirror from the inside!

“You must resolve your own mind on the matter. Best do so before another comes to kill you.”

His blasé response argued his case to her. Said he knew he was real, and if she was too dense to figure it out, it wasn’t his problem. Surely a delusion would endeavor to self-persist, wouldn’t it?

But how could he be real?

She had no precedent for dealing with the inexplicable. Fact-finding. All I can do is explore what’s happening, and reserve judgment until I know more.

Toward that end, shedding light on things, she reached for the wall switch and flipped on the overhead.

And got her first truly good look at him.

Crimeny, she thought, eyes widening as if to drink in even more of him. The two prior times she’d caught glimpses of him, they’d been briefly snatched and the room had been heavily shadowed. She’d absorbed only a general impression of him: a big, dark, intensely sexual man.

She’d not seen the details.

And what details they were!

Stunned, she looked down. Up. Down. Up again. Slowly.

“Take your time, lass,” he murmured, so softly she scarcely heard him. His next comment was deliberately beyond her audible range, a silky “I plan to with you.”

He was tall, stuffing the mirror from top to bottom of frame. Powerfully built, with wide shoulders and rippling muscles, he wore a fabric of crimson and black around his waist—an honest-to-God kilt, if she wasn’t mistaken—glittering metallic wrist cuffs, and black leather boots.

No shirt. Wicked-looking black-and-crimson tattooed runes covered the left side of his sculpted chest, from the bottom of his rib cage, up over a nipple, across his shoulder, and to the edge of his jaw. Each powerful biceps was also encircled by a band of tattooed crimson-and-black runes. A thick, silky trail of dark hair began just above the navel on his ripped abs, slid down into the plaid.

Oh, God, was it tenting? Was that a bulge lifting the tartan?

Her gaze got stuck there for an awkward moment. Her eyes widened even further. Sucking in a shallow breath, she jerked her gaze away. A flush heated her cheeks.

She’d just ogled his penis.

Stood there, blatantly eyeing it. Long enough that he had to have noticed. Something was just not right with her. Her hormones had somehow gotten seriously out of whack. She was an artifact-ogler, not a penis-ogler.

She forced her gaze up to his face. It was as sinfully gorgeous as the rest of him. He had the chiseled, proud features of an ancient Celt warrior: strong jaw and cheekbones, a straight, aristocratic nose, flaring arrogantly at the nostrils, and a mouth so sexy and kissable that her own lips instinctively puckered, then parted, just looking at it, as if sampling a kiss. She wet them, feeling strangely breathless. Dark shadow stubbled his sculpted jaw, making his firm pink lips seem even more sexual against all that rough masculinity.

His hair wasn’t black as she’d thought in the dark, but a rich gleaming mahogany shot with shimmering strands of gold and copper. Half of it was caught in dozens of narrow braids, banded at the ends with glittering metallic beadwork. His eyes were burnt-whisky, his skin tawny-velvet.