Treason.He was proposing treason.
“Please, don’t say another word.” She pushed up from the sheepskins, getting to her feet. Startled, Essie woke and flapped her white wings, flying up and out of the smoke hole in the roof. Her sleepy thoughts were a confused haze in Roa’s mind. “I’ll pretend I never heard you, because you’re my friend.”Because I love you.“But if you say it again...”
He looked up. “You’ll what?”
She stopped and stared down at him. His eyes were cloaked in darkness and she couldn’t read them.
Please don’t,she thought.Do not be so reckless as to plot against my husband.
“You’re tired,” she told him instead. “You don’t know what you’re saying. We’ll talk more in the morning, when both of us are rested.”
“I know exactly what I’m—”
Roa headed for the tent entrance. She’d spent too much time alone with him in here as it was.
“Where are you going?”
“To sleep.” Roa reached for the tent flap, pulling it back.
Theo rose from the carpet of sheepskin and stepped up behind her. “Don’t go to him.”
Roa fell still as his arms slid around her waist.
“Stay here with me,” he whispered, drawing her against his chest. He smelled like honey and warm sand. “Surely, if the rumors are true, it doesn’t matter where you spend the night.”
Those words scorched her. The rumors of Dax’s dalliances... if Theo had heard them, they’d probably reached every corner of the kingdom.
Does everyone in the scrublands know? Even my parents?
It was a humiliating thought.
“I miss you,” he whispered. “I’ve missed you from the moment you left.”
She closed her eyes as he kissed the base of her neck. When she didn’t resist, he pulled off her sandskarf. The wide scoop of her collar allowed him to brush his mouth slowly across her bare shoulder, pressing his lips to the tiny scars crisscrossed there from years of Essie’s claws digging into her skin.
“I need you, Roa...”
She knew it shouldn’t, but it felt good to be touched and kissed andwanted.
But her brother’s voice was in her head, spiked with warning.
If you give the court in the capital a concrete reason to believe you’re disloyal...
“I can’t,” she said.
She’d given herself to him once, before all this started. But somuch had changed. She was married to Dax now. And, unlike her husband, she took her vows seriously.
She couldn’t give herself to Theo again.
His kisses stopped. She felt him tense against her. “How can you lie there next to him?” he demanded, his voice rough and raised. “A man who cares so little for you, he takes your dearest friend into his bed?”
What?
Roa swung to face him, taken aback.
“What did you just say?”
Theo’s eyes widened a little. “You don’t know....”
