“It works on you too?” Della asked, disbelief widening her eyes.
“Yes. But I need more beads these days.”
Catching her eye, Lord Kahoth smirked, and Nes’s insides tightened.Gently rolling a bead between his thumb and forefinger, he held it up to the light, studying it. “These appear to be hand-faceted, fascinating.”
“Are you testing the quality of the stone?”
With a snort, he said, “It implies they were made somewhere without elemental mages. Hand-chipped.”
She shrugged. “I never considered it, and Papa never said.”
Fatema arrived then, waving to Nes before dragging the whining children away for their afternoon activities. Enoth and Vites—the dogs, not the gods—tagged along eagerly, far more excited by the boisterous twins than by whatever their master had to offer.
“A word, when you have a moment, Miss Kiappa?”
Nesrina gathered her things, her focus split between the god-like duke hovering near the water and a desire to rush inside and climb into bed with a book. She was exhausted, in no small part from the nerves fizzling and frying her mind each time she considered spending two days trapped in a carriage with Lord Kahoth. What did he want to discuss?
He stood fifteen feet away, gazing out at the dense forest beyond the stream, seemingly unaware of the way the tips of his boots dipped into the rushing water while his heels stood on the crunchy sand.
“Are we back to Miss Kiappa?” she checked, moving closer to where he stood.
“Hmm?” He turned his head an inch in her direction, as ifshe’dinterrupted him and not the other way around.
“You called me Nesrina,” she blurted.
A blush rose to his cheeks, and he reached up to palm the back of his neck. “Ah. Is that all right? You called me Akkas first.”
Affronted, she lifted a hand to her chest. “I did not! I would never.”
“You wouldn’t? Not even when you were shouting at me through an air vent in the library?”
A hot breeze wound itself around her, tickling the hairs at the back of her neck. She scratched at it, and replied, “Perhaps it was a slip.”
“Perhaps I slipped too,” he retorted. “You know,Nesrina,I find it interesting that, despite our best efforts, we appear to be becoming friends.”
She wanted to toss herself into the stream, clothes and all. “Theykeyword there being ‘appear.’” She laughed awkwardly. The duke wasn’t wrong, per se. She’d had a similar thought a few days before. But something about his words bothered her, triggering a flutter of anxiety in her belly that had her mouth pushing out a silly response rather than agreeing with him, which would have been amenable and far more appropriate.
He was studying her behind those deep chestnut lashes. “Why do you detest me?”
Detest?She stepped back, heel sinking into the silt beside the stream. “I don’t— It’s not—”
It was complicated,confusing,of course, with him being aristocratic and her being common. The two groups didn’tmingle, everyone knew that. It wasn’t done. It was inappropriate. Inadvisable. They didn’t have anything in common: different upbringings, different moral codes, different expectations, different desires.
Finally, she found her words. Trying to conveywhytheir friendship had her all tangled in knots, she summarized, “It’s notdone, Your Grace. I’m a tutor. You’re a duke.”
His soft chuckle wound its way over to her, a low sound that for some reason made her crave hot honey on bread. Ignoring her remarks, he pulled a wad of papers from his pocket and gestured to the stump seats. “It’s Kas, by the way.”
“What?”
“Everyone calls me Kas, not Akkas. That’s for when I’m in trouble.”
“Noted.” Baffled, she followed him to sit down. Did he not care about their differences? Had he not understood her words?
“Do you have a few minutes? I thought we might go through the program, see which sessions look most interesting before we get on the road tomorrow?”
Nodding, she joined him. Perhaps a temporary friendship, for the sake of their upcoming journey, was advisable.
“Nes is fine,” she announced abruptly, and caught his quick grin.
