He turns the stick, glancing at Líri coiled in a luminous knot beneath a nearby tree, rumbling through her slumber. The same spot she’s been since returning from her scouting jaunt just before we fell asleep. “Didn’t even flick a tail.” He turns that gaze on me—warm.
Breathtaking.
A smile breaks across my face.
He watches me for a long beat before he lifts a hand, pointing. “Your clothes are behind you. Rinsed and dried.”
I sit up to see them stacked and folded with precision, my delicates sitting on top—alsofolded.
I arch a brow. “You folded my undergarments?”
“With honor.”
My hand comes up to cover the fresh smile that takes over my face, fingers dragging down my lips. I push the bottom one between my teeth, shaking my head as I look at him.
Marvelat him.
All those rounded muscles, pumped even when he’s relaxed. His hands … calloused and capable. And that smattering of hair that smears from his navel, down beneath the waistband of loose twill pants that hint at the mighty heft of him hanging between his spread legs—
My heart hitches.
A hungry tingle moves through me as I snap my gaze back to his lush mouth, now flicked up at the corner. “Something on your mind, Moonbeam?”
Deplorable things. Truly.
“Just wondering how, after all these phases, someone else didn’t fall on your pallet and stay there.”
Some of that smile disappears.
A beat of silence, then, “The door chains are a bit off-putting.”
Maybe for some.
“You know what I mean. You’re a good male, a good king. And I can tell you now; with these skills”—I lift up my folded delicates and wave them in his direction—“coupled withall that, I’m certain you could’ve had anyone you desired.”
His eyes darken. “The thought didn’t even cross my mind.”
I frown. “You … haven’t taken another this entire time?”
He shrugs. “True love doesn’t expire, Raeve. It clings to you like a weight, even when you’re drowning.”
The words jolt something. Like plucking a string in my chest that makes such an awful sound every part of me recoils.
I look away, not wanting to imagine existing in a world where he no longer does, though I do know how it feels to lose someone you love …
That sense of unspooling, bits coming away in bloody tendrils, tethered to that loss. Then there’s the hard scabs that form in the wake of everything that came loose. Though they feel too much like forgetting, it’s better than the raw ache of a fresh wound.
But Kaan’s talking like he never calloused. Like he’s been tending a weeping wound since Elluin died. And that—
I can’t think about that.
“Truth is,” he murmurs, “my pallet would’ve felt more empty had I shared it with another who was not you.”
Creators …
“Okay, well.” I clear my throat and thread my undergarments on. “I fear all this has really achieved is to further prove my point.”
It’s a pathetic attempt to veer the conversation toward something that doesn’t hurt so much, but he takes the bait like a famished beast, some of the warmth returning to his eyes.
