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Rig snuggled closer as Anrid and Jael studied one another. The rune shards cast very little light, just enough to highlight his strong cheekbones and put a glint in his eyes. He seemed other-worldly, a creature of another place and time made of light and shadows rather than flesh and bone. She found herself unable to look away, unable to think of anything but the goblin prince leaning over her. She’d never been this close to a man before. Shades, she’d never kissed a man before.
As if he read her thoughts, Jael’s focus drifted to her mouth and lingered.
She yanked her head back with a started gasp and smashed into the wall behind her. “Oh, ow,” she cried as confusion barreled through her.
His expression shuttered as if she’d slapped him. Through a sting of fresh tears, she couldn’t miss the pained expression on his face before he masked it away. But what did he expect? He couldn’t just kiss her again. She couldn’t let him, not when she was supposed to marry someone else. Whatever had just happened, whatever weakness or desperation had caused them to let down their guard, it must never, never happen again.
Surely he knew that.
Rig snuggled closer, and she turned her focus to him. It was cowardly, but she couldn’t look at Jael without feeling confused. Betrayed, even. What had possessed him to kiss her in the first place?
“Are either of you injured?” Jael’s voice became dry with a slight edge to it.
She couldn’t blame him. She felt rather edgy herself. “I’m all right.” She tilted her head to try to catch Rig’s eye. “Are you hurt?”
He moaned. “I hurt all over.”
Jael shifted once again and reached for the goblin boy. Rig resisted as the goblin prince slid him off Anrid’s lap and proceeded to examine him from head to toe, running his large hands over the boy’s arms and legs as if searching for broken bones.
“He isn’t bleeding, is he?” Anrid whispered, her voice breathless.
Jael grunted in response. “No. Nothing broken, either. I expect you’ll live.” He ruffled Rig’s hair and quirked a shadowed smile with, dare she say, fondness?
Her heart warmed and twisted in turn.
Men who loved children were terribly attractive. She’d always thought so. Dagmar used to joke that Anrid was doomed to marry a widower with half a dozen children.
What about a goblin prince with three dozen orphans?
The thought sprang unbidden to her mind. A slow, burning heat filled her cheeks and caused uneasiness to roil in her belly. She mustn’t think such things. She mustn’t.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t get here sooner,” Jael said, breaking through her mortified musings. “I was downstairs when this…started...”
“It didn’t work!” She blurted the words as she rested a hand on Rig’s knee. She flicked her eyes toward the goblin boy, hoping Jael would understand her meaning without her having to spell it out in front of Rig.
Jael let his gaze drift between them both before he offered a pained nod. “Still. The event appeared to be contained to…your room.” He cleared his throat. “You and I are still the epicenter, but we still haven’t quite resolved the—aftershocks.” His eyes roamed over Rig, to indicate he was one of those unavoidable ripples.
Rig leaned to scoop up one of the glowing runestone shards. “Why is it still glowing?” he asked, oblivious to the true meaning in their conversation.
He held the splintered bit of rock up to examine it. The light reflected in his eyes and made him appear so much younger.
Jael also reached for a shard and rolled it between his fingers, causing light to refract across them at erratic intervals. “I don’t know. It shouldn’t be.”
“Do you think it has something to do with the Bifrost?” Anrid searched his face, light and shadow flickering as he tumbled the shard around in his fingers.
He studied the splintered rock more closely, but when he lifted his heated gaze to meet hers, she suspected he’d been doing that to avoid looking at her. Her breath caught in her throat as she sank beneath the weight of everything he didn’t say. How could a man say so much just by looking at a girl? But what did it mean? What was he saying that he wasn’t saying?
“I think,” he began at length, as Rig crawled across the floor on hands and knees to collect more shards, “it had more to do with us.”
“Us?” Shades, why was her voice squeaking? She cleared her throat and blinked furiously to maintain her composure.
She hadn’t thought it possible that his expression could grow even more heated. He moistened his lower lip with his tongue, brow twisted as if he were considering his next words with infinite care. At that exact moment, however, footsteps approached in the tunnel outside her room. Someone cleared their throat.
Anrid gasped and squinted at Trap in the doorway. The housekeeper crossed her arms over her chest and eyed them with a disapproving frown.
“This does not look like sleeping. You should all be resting,” she scolded. Then she glared at Rig. “And you should be in your own room, you little scamp.”
Rig grinned at her and held up his shimmering trove of runestone shards. “Aren’t they pretty?”
