Neil regarded her with a hint of wariness.“If I join you, are you going to try to throw me onto the floor?”
“What would I do that for?”
“You have before.”
Soft moonlight glinted off his spectacles.The fine lines at the corners of his eyes were drawn with concern.
The tangled nest of emotion inside of her twisted uncomfortably.
Constance turned away from him, planting herself at the railing.
Neil rested his elbows on the stone beside her as he gazed out over the palace.“It is a bit much in there—in a perfectly lovely way, I mean.But one does occasionally feel the need to reassert one’s personal space.”
Constance absorbed the familiar lines of his profile as she plucked a piece of chenna poda from his hair.“You’re very good with them.”
“With who?”
“Children.”
Neil gave her a wary look.“I can’t say I’ve had a great deal of experience.”
“Then I suppose you’re a natural.”
The comment was light and easy, the sort of thing Constance might naturally say to her best friend’s brother.
Good old Stuffy.
Any further tease caught against the sudden tightness in her throat.
Silence stretched, itching up into tension.Constance fought to understand where it came from.She had never been tense around Neil before.
Perhaps it was because she had kissed him, wildly and with ferocious abandon.
“Have you given it any thought, then?”Neil asked awkwardly.
Given it any thought?
She thought about kissing him all the time.
“How we’re going to end this,” Neil elaborated.
It felt as though she hit the ground.
The jarring impact took her breath—not that it wasn’t a reasonable question.Their arrangement was only meant to last until the threat of a forced marriage was behind her, and the question of how they might reasonably extricate themselves from it still remained.Neil was perfectly within his rights to ask about it.
So why did the question make her feel so wretched?
She ought to tell him that her Aai had only just renewed the threat a moment before.Or she might reasonably put things off.Let’s just give it another two weeks,orperhaps we can worry about that when we leave Nandapur.
Instead, with a flare of anger and an incongruous stab of hurt, Constance gave an answer like a jab from one of her knives.“However you like, I suppose.”
Neil straightened from the railing.“HoweverIlike?I’m not the one who asked for this.”
His response added fuel to her anger—which was a far more comfortable emotion than the others roiling inside of her.
Constance embraced it.“As I recall, I very clearly told you I’d changed my mind.”
Neil’s expression shuttered as he stepped back.“Right.I made it my mess.So I’ll clean it up.”
