“Oh? Why’s that?”
They were pressed too close for her to see his face as they swayed, but she didn’t need to; his half-breath of laughter resounded in his chest and straight through her own. The rough and elegant line of his jaw rested against her temple, shiftingwith his smile, his voice little more than a warm breath in her ear.
“Well,” he said slowly. “That happens to be the dress you wore the night of my introduction to your Court. The one you were wearing that had me so …agitated… that I could barely stand to look at you.”
She pulled back, just enough to glance up at him with a pitched brow, lips parting over a gasp.
“Isit?”
Even in the dim evening light, amusement glittered in his gaze, but he played along gamely.
“The very same.”
“My, what a memory you have, Your Majesty.”
Kai laughed again, and at the slight pressure of his hand on her back, she took the hint and dropped her head again, stomach already aflutter at whatever it was he planned to whisper in her ear. He could have said anything;anything, and she would have melted like a dish of butter in the Dhaliaan sun.
“This dress does play on my memory, Princess. Often.”
Adeline must have melted indeed, or her brain had at least. She was warm all over, and there was nothing between her ears; her tongue, numb in her mouth, with no solid thoughts to form into coherent words. Kai seemed to catch himself a little too, for he cleared his throat and briefly dropped her hand to tug at his own embroidered shirt like he might cover the flush creeping past his gills.
That sweet, familiar sight was enough to knock a few words back into her head. She even managed to smile a little as she teased him.
“I did wonder if I could still make you blush.”
“You could make me do a lot of things.”
The flush continued up his cheeks, but he didn’t look away. The open hunger in his eyes echoed within her, gnawing to the point of discomfort the longer they swayed on the spot, just looking at one another. After so many weeks of guilt and tiptoeing, it felt like the most indulgent thing in the world. Tolookat Kai, for as long as she wanted. To be greedy. To let herself want, let herself acknowledge how incredibly, devastatingly,unfairlyhandsome he really was; from the pensive crease in his dark brow to the barest twitch of his long fingers around her hand, as though it were a physical strain not to pull her close.
“We still need to talk,” Adeline said finally.
“Yes,” said Kai.
“About a lot of things,” she went on, then paused to drag her teeth over her bottom lip—deliberately, she admitted to herself, when Kai’s eyes flicked to her mouth. He drew imperceptibly closer, and a little thrill breezed over her skin, raising fine hairs up her arms despite the warmth of the night air. “But to start with, we should talk about the other night, on the balcony,”
“Yes,” Kai said again, and this time it sounded less like agreement and more like the kind of intimate plea he’d once groaned into her neck in the black of night. “Let’s talk about that.”
Adeline grinned, and with his eyes still on her lips, his answering smile was immediate.
“I really do meantalk,” she said.
He reeled back in mock offence, brow raised.
“As do I.”
She could not stop smiling now; neither of them could. Not even when Kai drew so close that she had to crane her head back to meet his eye. Not even when he leaned down, and Adeline’s breath snagged in her throat, chest stilling where the warmth of his shirt brushed over the exposed centre of her bodice. He dipped his head then and spoke in her ear, that smile still audible in every deep, quiet word.
“I’ll talk to you the whole time,” he said. “I seem to recall that you enjoy that.”
Daughters, she did. She really bloody did.
She wanted to care that they were in a public garden, in the middle of a ball thrown by her family; that her breath had shimmered away in a wave of heat and she was surely minutes from suffocating; that she’d twined her fingers in Kai’s shirt collar despite knowing, deep down, that she shouldnotturn her head and catch his lips. Not here, at least.
We’re going to talk first,she told herself.
We aregoingto talk.
Chapter Fifteen
