Page 21 of Ravished By the Revenant

I pick up a flat stone, weigh it in my palm, and send it skipping. One, two, three, four hops. Not bad. I find another.

“You are scaring the fish,” Aldric says.

“The fish should toughen up.” Skip. Five hops. “Life is hard.”

“Fortunately for us both, I caught three while you were reconnoitering the flora.” He nods at the creel beside him. “Trout. Fat ones.”

“Reconnoitering. You talk like an audiobook on Napoleon.”

“Again, I do not know what an audiobook is, but as the topic is a conqueror, I’ll take that as a compliment.”

I skip another stone. It flops, which feels like a metaphor, so I stop. Shmoo has abandoned the coat and is now parked in front of the creel, staring at it with the intensity of a customer waiting for an Apple store to open on release day.

“He’s staring at your basket.”

“He is collecting his tax.” Aldric sighs the sigh of a man who lost this argument during the reign of Maria Theresa. He flips open the creel, takes the smallest trout, and lays it on a flat stone with a bizarre kind of ceremony. “There. Extortionist.”

Shmoo descends on the fish and starts making sounds. Wet, enthusiastic, nom nom nom sounds, like a toddler with spaghetti.

“Oh my god.” I press a hand to my chest. “He’s a foodie.”

“He is a menace with fur.” But Aldric’s mouth does something. It’s not a smile, just the ghost of one, like his face is out of practice at making expressions. He watches the cat eat, and for a second, the blue shard in his eye socket catches the light off the water, and I think of a crayon drawing folded into Tolstoy, and I have to look at the lake before my heart does something stupid like skip a beat.

Not going there. The lake is circular and so are my feelings. Everything comes back to where it started.

Back at the keep, I discover a new problem, and the problem is watching Aldric cook.

He’s rolled his sleeves to the elbow, and his forearms are a whole situation—corded muscle, dark ink winding around scars, silver rings flashing as he guts and cleans the trout with an efficiency that should be gross and is instead, catastrophically, not. He built the fire in the kitchen hearth without matches, just flint and a strike so fast I missed it. Now he’s laying the fish in a pan with butter he probably churned himself, with those hands, and herbs he grew himself, with those hands, and I need to stop thinking about those hands.

He’s a seven-hundred-year-old corpse. He is my jailer. He is not a Food Network fantasy.

The butter sizzles in the hot pan, and the whole kitchen smells like heaven, and he glances over his shoulder at me with that one dark blue eye, sleeves rolled, firelight everywhere, and my ovaries file a formal complaint against my brain.

“You’re staring,” he says.

I cross my arms. “I’m supervising. Food safety is important.”

“I have not poisoned anyone since 1314, and he deserved it.”

“Comforting.” I push off the doorframe before I do something regrettable, like continue existing in his line of sight.

I raid the shelves where I find two hand-painted porcelain plates that are probably worth more than my apartment and carry them to the great hall. I set them at the head of the table, one at the completely dust-free spot, which I now realize is his, one at the corner beside it. Then I frown at the arrangement, because it’s cozy, and move mine one seat down. Then I move it back, because yelling across a table built for forty is worse.

Candles next. I plant a candelabra between the plates and light it, and okay, that was a tactical error, because now it looks like a date. In a gothic castle. With a wolf banner glaring down at us.

“Congratulations, Clara,” I mutter, folding two napkins that are older than the United States. “You’ve recreated the Beast’s dining room. Be our freaking guest. Idiot.”

The wolf on the banner judges me. Everything in this castle judges me.

Aldric brings the food but stops when he sees the table. His gaze moves over the plates, the candles, the napkins, and the expression on his half-ruined, half-stunning face makes him look somehow younger.

“You set the table,” he says.

“Don’t make it weird,” I mutter.

“I’m not making it weird.” He sets the platter down—trout with crispy golden edges, baked potatoes, a salad that looks better than mine did yesterday—and pulls out my chair, then stands there behind it like this is completely normal behavior. I blink at him before taking my seat and letting him push it forward. “It’s been… some time. Since the table was set for two,” he adds as he does.

“Well...” I clear my throat. “The candles are for lighting purposes only. Purely functional candles.”