“You arenother,” I mumbled, my voice a mix of frustration and exhaustion.
“I am your Valahant. Sleep.”
I pressed my lips together, forcing myself into silence. With my eyes shut tight, I struggled to quiet my mind. Images of fish swimming upstream flickered through my thoughts. I counted them over and over, then when that didn’t work, I repeated words in a futile attempt to exhaust myself.
Don’t move. Sainte is holding me. Don’t move.
“This isn’t the same!” I hissed, trying to scoot away.
He tightened his grip, pulling me closer. “Tell me of Landing’s End.”
I frowned, stilling against him. “Pardon?”
“Talk. It will help to get your thoughts out.”
“That’s not what I’m thinking about.”
“What are you thinking about?”
My heart pounded, cheeks burning in the darkness as I focused on the heat of his body against mine. Safe. Secure. In his embrace, I felt undeniably feminine, an unfamiliar yet welcome sensation.
No, I wasn’t sharing those thoughts with him.
“How terribly uncomfortable this must be for you,” I lied, clearing my throat. “I warn you, I kick in my sleep.”
“Lyana seems to manage just fine.”
“She kicks back.”
“I’m sure I can handle it.”
“Share a bed with many women, have you?”
I cringed, slapping a hand over my mouth. This wasn’t the question to ask the man I had crushed on as a teenager, especially while he held me tight.
In a bed.
In the dark.
Alone.
Sainte stiffened, the silence stretching between us. I bit my finger, torn between hoping he would stay and wishing he would return to the floor.
His sigh tickled my neck, and he relaxed, settling deeper into the mattress. “Can’t say that I have,” he murmured.
“Really? A dashing man such as yourself?” I asked, thankful for the darkness that concealed my blushing cheeks.
“No.”
Oh, don’t do it. Elspeth! No–
“Surely, there was a maid in the past. Someone you swooned over.”
Thrice-curse it and dunk me in a pit of pig dung.
“Swoon?” He chuckled, his chest rumbling against my back. “No, I can’t say I’ve ever swooned.”
“Never?” I pressed, surprised. How could any maid resist him? “You’re a simple man, perhaps a tavern wench or two?”
