“Why not? I’m well able for him. I’ve got several inches over him. You don’t think I’d relish the opportunity to beat that condescending smirk clean off his head?”
His hand fisted at his side like he was imagining doing just that, a muscle ticking beneath the stubble on his jaw. Adeline thought she should probably not feel such a dizzying wave of heat at the sight of his obvious bloodlust; concerning, but something to scold herself over later. She shook it off.
“And if you went to my mother and offered to fight in my place, then what? How would that look?”
“Chivalry may be rare in this day and age, but surely not altogether extinct.”
“But chivalry towardmeand me alone. It would look like you fear for my safety well beyond the scope of inter-territory relations. There would be no coming back from that, not after all that Mareda has implied about us.”
The silence throbbed.
Kai’s brows pinched.
“What has she implied?”
Bollocks.
She’d left that part out. In her retelling of the moment that she’d declared her campaign, it hadn’t really seemed appropriate to add;By the way, my sister told the entire royal family that I took you to bed.
“I – she just – she voiced a suspicion about our feelings for one another.”
Bollocks, bollocks.The way he was looking at her – somewhere between quiet alarm and like someone had doused him in ice water – made her wish she could swallow the words back down. Why had she phrased it that way? After weeks of blowing hot and cold, and flat out avoiding being alone with her, perhaps his feelings weren’t something that needed calling into question.
A handful of heated kisses and she’d let herself lose sight of the very thing Kai Cumhaill was known for. The Drowned Prince and the Last Sorceress; a tale as old as the Silver Kingdom itself. Her whole country, her wholelife, had risen from the ashes of his doomed love story.
Our feelings for one another– it implied so much that he’d never outright said, and she’d been a damned fool to presume.
“I mean, my feelings for you.”
But that was somehow worse. She winced, barely bothering to hide it.
Kai was unreadable, so carefully blank but for the slight bob of his throat before he quietly murmured; “And what feelings are they?”
She recognised the tight, fleeting frown that followed; he wished he could take it back, un-ask the question. Very well then. She didn’t much feel like answering it, either.
She shook her head.
“It doesn’t matter. My point is, you’d be playing right into Mareda’s hands –”
“It does matter.”
She threw her hands up, exasperated.Fine, it seemed they were going to do this after all.
“Well, what are your feelings for me, then?”
He shot her an incredulous look that bordered on concern. Kai looked at her like she’d feverishly asked him the colour of the sunlit sky, like she was raving nonsense, a danger to herself. When he spoke, it was slow and pronounced, with painful clarity.
“Adeline, I have never imagined –”
A pounding at the door drowned him out. “Aren’t you done yet?”
Adeline shut her eyes. She was going to smother Ger in his sleep.
“Why are you hovering at the door Gerard?” she yelled.
“The King told us to wait outside! Hurry up, we need to strategise.”
When she opened her eyes, Kai was glaring at the door with similar intent written all over his face. He sighed and scrubbed a hand across his brow like he’d wipe away the scowl there.
