I looked at her. “Has he fucked you?”
She looked right back at me. “No.”
I crossed the yard toward the weapons rack and began selecting a different practice blade, an activity that required nothing of me and allowed me to keep my face at an angle she couldn’t read entirely. “He sat with you at dinner.”
“He did.”
“Why?”
She was quiet for a moment. I heard her shift her weight. “You’d have to ask him that.” A pause. “And I assume you already have.”
“I’m asking you.”
“I don’t know why he sat with me.”
“Do you believe he wants to fuck you?”
“How the hell should I know?”
“You’re a beautiful woman, and beautiful women know these things.”
She frowned. “Well, I don’t know, Arthur.” Another pause. “Do you think he wants to fuck me?”
“Yes,” I answered quickly. “Just as all men who see you want to fuck you.”
“Do you want to fuck me?”
I turned to look at her then. “We aren’t talking about me.” I took a breath. She took one too. “I want to know about Tristan.”
“Then ask him what you want to know.”
“Why did you choose to sit with him at dinner?”
“Was I supposed to get up and walk away?”
I frowned. “Did you enjoy yourself then?”
“Yes,” she answered. “He’s... easy to talk to.”
“What does that mean?”
“Exactly what I just said.” She breathed out a sigh of frustration. “You are relentless.”
I paused. “Answer the fucking question.”
A smile almost lit her mouth. “Tristan doesn’t seem to require anything of me beyond the conversation itself, and... I like that.”
I set the blade back against the rack with more deliberation than was necessary.
“What did you talk about while you ate dinner with him?” The question landed flat, informational, the sort of question a man asks when he’s building a picture of enemy movements, of possible networks, of foreign connections he hasn’t mapped yet.
“His home, mostly.” Her voice shifted fractionally, something warming in it at the memory, and my jaw set against the feeling that registered in my chest when I heard that warmth. “The harbor. The way the water looks there. The heat.” She stopped. “It was nothing of consequence.”
“And yet you remember it.”
“I remember most things people tell me.”
I turned back to her. She was watching me with that patient, measuring expression that I was beginning to understand wasn’t calm, but rather something she wore over whatever was actually moving beneath it.
