As he watched, Adam and Ellie were shoved to the ground at the edge of Borthwick’s camp.Worry for his sister and his friend twisted through him.
Constance flopped down beside him, and Neil’s worry mingled with an electric awareness of her proximity.
Cutting their way out of prison in the stepwell had been relatively uncomplicated, if nerve-wracking.Neil had managed to carve off part of the stone slab that blocked their way without dropping any of it on his toes, which he considered rather an accomplishment.The sheer terror of using Dyrnwyn now that he knew the sword could cleave him in two had even managed to distract him from thinking too hard about the fact that he had kissed Constance.
Thoroughly.
And she had liked it.
Neil wasn’t used to being an object of amorous interest—or at least, not that he’d ever noticed.Adam had occasionally tried to point out that a bar maid was flirting with him, but Neil had never had the courage to do anything about it.
He supposed knowing that he inspired Constance’s sensual instincts should have put him on top of the world.Instead, he felt wretched.
Before he had plunged into a mythical forest with Constance, everything had been fine.Yes, he’d been tormented by occasional fantasies of doing utterly improper things with her, but he could manage that.He’d known they were only that—wild, unrealistic fantasies.He could box them away in a corner of his disobedient brain and go on acting like he and Constance were simply very good friends.
But then she had to go and look at him like the last bonbon in a chocolate box.Put her hands on him and open up her lips and melt into him like she wanted everything.
Only Constance didn’t want everything.She wanted a lark.And Neil was convenient—someone reasonably attractive that she felt comfortable with.
In another life, Neil might have been fine with that.He hardly abounded with sexual experience himself.They might have explored that together, and then cheerfully gone their separate ways when they were done.
That wasn’t an option anymore—not for Neil.He wanted Constance too much to have her and then watch her walk away.
Which meant that he needed to make certain that he never had her at all.
This had to stop.Neil shouldn’t have indulged Constance’s experiment at all, but there was nothing he could do about that now.He would simply have to make it clear to her that there couldn’t be anyagain.They had to go back to the way things had always been, where he was just Ellie’s stick-in-the-mud older brother and she was the danger gnome who enjoyed subjecting him to the odd torment.
And they would—just as soon as Neil was no longer pretending to be her fiancé.
Constance wriggled closer, her hip bumping against his side as she angled for a better view of the gorge.
Neil closed his eyes and prayed for strength.
“There are only two guards, and they aren’t really looking,” she whispered, pitching her voice just loud enough to be heard over the constant rush of the nearby waterfall.“It shouldn’t be any trouble to sneak down there, cut Ellie and Adam loose, and make a run for it.”
Neil dragged his thoughts from their fake engagement, his deeply conflicted emotions, and the brush of her sleeve against his side.He needed to fix his full attention on the task that lay before them—if he didn’t want someone to end up getting hurt.
“How would we get there without being seen?”Neil pressed.
“We’ll just sneak through the bones.”
“Sneak through the bones,” Neil muttered unhappily.“Why not?”
“The more important question is where we go once we’ve done that.”Constance punctuated the remark with a significant look.
She was uncomfortably close.Her hair was still loose, as there hadn’t been a hope of finding her pins in the stepwell, even with the light of the sword.Little bits of grass were caught in her thick black curls.
Neil wanted to pick them out.He was rather afraid that if he did, he was going to start kissing her again.
“What do you mean—where we go?”he whispered back.
“We have to find the astra, Stuffy.We can’t let Borthwick get it.”Constance waved at the dark openings that pockmarked the walls of the ravine.“And we can’t run about searching all of these caves without being seen.”
Neil’s stomach dropped.“You want me to do it again.Use my…”
He trailed off.He still didn’t know what to call the impossible, inconvenient, irrational ability that lurked inside of him.
“You are going to have to think up a name for it at some point,” Constance warned.
