A hand came down on his shoulder.Neil flinched.
“You can put that down now,” Subhas said.
The man stood beside him in the rain.Neil wiped his sleeve over his spectacles, momentarily clearing them enough to make out his expression.It was softened with a note of grudging approval.
In the shelter of the cavern, the Adrija embraced each other with a laugh of relief.A few of them shot looks of mingled surprise and wariness at Neil.
He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket with a shaking hand, managing to wrap it around Dyrnwyn’s hilt.The sword snuffed out, plunging the camp back into thick orange shadows.
Neil’s spectacles were worse than useless.He tugged them off and shoved them into his pocket.He squinted back out at the forest, half afraid he would see the tiger staring back at him.
The trees remained dark and still.
The branch on the ground by his boots caught his eye.The length of strong green wood was as long as Neil’s arm and perhaps an inch thick in diameter, thickly covered with leaves.
The end was cut cleanly, as though severed by a razor—if razors could slice through a solid inch of strong green wood.
Strange, Neil thought with a queasy uncertainty.
“Neil,” Constance called softly.
He turned to where she waited under the overhang, holding out his scabbard.Neil joined her there and took it with a still-unsteady hand.He sheathed the blade.
Relief washed over him alongside a shaking sense of delayed terror.“It might have pounced on me.Or pushed past me into the camp.I just put myself in the way of all the men who knew what they were doing.I—”
Constance set her hand on his arm.At the warmth of her touch through the wet fabric of his shirt, Neil’s words evaporated.
“That was very well done,” she declared softly.
Neil had no idea how to respond, locked in the steady warmth of her gold-touched eyes.
As her look lingered, the tenor of it shifted in a way that sent an odd tingle dancing over Neil’s skin.
Or maybe that was just his bad vision.
Definitely his vision, Neil thought firmly.
“Back to sleep, both of you,” Subhas warned.“We have a long day ahead of us—and I expect you to keep up.”
“Yes, sir,” Neil replied automatically.
“Sir?”Subhas echoed dryly—then clapped him on the shoulder and laughed as he walked away.
?
Twenty-Seven
Dr.Neil Fairfax lookeddifferent as Constance descended the slope into the broad green valley with Subhas and the Adrija.Nothing had actually changed about Neil.He was still good old Stuffy, dressed in a slightly-worse-for-wear shirt and a brown waistcoat.The scabbard for Dyrnwyn was strapped across his back, and his spectacles were firmly in place.But Constance’s eyes hitched against the sculpted line of his forearm under the rolled-up sleeve of his shirt as he rubbed at the sweat that lightly glistened on the nape of his neck.
She vividly recalled how Neil had looked the night before, standing in the downpour with his sword burning in his hands as he confronted the most beautiful monster she’d ever seen.His soaked shirt had clung to his movements, eloquently displaying every line of his torso.His long, sensitive hands—made for lovingly turning through the pages of old books—had gripped the bone hilt of the flaming sword as his jaw tensed with both fear and a fierce determination.
The man had admittedly always been attractive.Even as Ellie’s scrawny older brother, there’d been something appealing about the perfect cut of his cheekbones and the way his over-serious eyes mingled hues of brown and forest green.
When Constance had finally run into Neil again as an adult, she’d been surprised to see how well he’d filled out.When she’d landed on him in the thieves’ tunnel in Saqqara, feeling the firm plane of his chest under his jacket had even sparked the notion that she might make use of good old Stuffy in her plan to sow a few wild oats before settling down to a respectable marriage.
Since then, Constance hadn’t been shy about making a healthy, red-blooded study of Neil’s charms when the opportunity presented itself.And why shouldn’t she take a moment to appreciate Neil’s assets when they were on display rather than buttoned up under layers of tweed?She considered herself a connoisseur of the well-formed male physique.
She might even have indulged in musing over what it might feel like to grab hold of his perpetually disheveled hair and drag him down for a kiss.
