Page 57 of Ravished By the Revenant

My first thought is she does not leave the keep again. I will bar the gate. I will walk the walls. I will find this Marco and introduce him to my great sword, and the forest will keep the secret as it always has, and Clara will be safe inside these walls where nothing can…

I bite my tongue.

Because I know this woman. I know that if I say you are confined to the castle, she will be in the Porsche by noon, driving to town out of pure spite, purchasing fruit directly in front of the man hunting her while maintaining eye contact. Her defiance is not a flaw to be managed. It is the very thing that broke a seven-hundred-year curse. But by all the saints, it makes strategy delicate.

“Tell me everything,” I say instead of imprisoning her outright, and my voice comes out level. Mostly level.

She tells me what happened. Her hiding behind a statue. Marco seemingly searching for her for weeks. Two ruffians by his side.

“He’s not looking for me because he misses me,” she finishes. “He’s looking because I embarrassed him. I walked off the shelf, and now he has a reputation problem.”

“Then he is more dangerous than a man in love,” I say. “A man in love can be reasoned with, bought, or broken. A man defending his pride will work himself into ruin first.”

“Comforting,” my little intruder deadpans. “Thank you. Great pillow talk.”

I choose my next words carefully.

“Clara. I am going to say something, and I want you to hear all of it before your spine straightens.” Her spine straightens. I press on. “I am not commanding you. I am asking you, as a man who has studied siege craft longer than most nations have existed, to consider the tactical picture. He does not know where you are. He will not come here. The keep is on no map yet, and the road is new. The one place he can find you is out there. Every trip to town is a throw of the dice. I am asking you to let the dice rest for a while. Stay on the grounds. Let him exhaust himself hunting a ghost.”

Silence. I count her breaths. Four. Five.

“That was really hard for you, wasn’t it?” she says. “I could hear the gears grinding. You wanted to say ‘I forbid it’ so bad.”

“The word forbid did present itself. I declined its services.”

“Look at you. Growth.” She props herself up and studies my face, and whatever she finds there softens her expression. “Okay.”

I blink. “Okay?”

“Don’t look so shocked. It’s insulting. I’m stubborn, not stupid. I saw his face, Aldric. I hid behind a bronze mustache man and shook.” She settles back against me, tucking her head beneath my chin. “Staying home for a few weeks is fine. It’s not even a hardship anymore. I’ll just use Amazon Prime for everything.”

“I don’t know what that is,” I say. In fact, I feel like I’ve been saying that daily for weeks now.

“You’ll find out.” I feel her grin against my throat. It is almost as unsettling as Marco’s presence. “Once the packages start piling up, you’ll know exactly what it is. Fair warning, I have your treasury and unresolved trauma, and those two things should never share a shopping cart.”

“How many packages, Clara?”

“You have a whole barn, you’ll be fine.”

“Clara. How many packages?”

She’s already pretending to be asleep, the fraud, her breathing now theatrically deep while her mouth fights a smile. I pull her closer, press my lips to her hair, and stare at the vaulted ceiling while I think about the threat of man and package.

30

CLARA

It’s been a week since I saw Marco in town, and I’m starting to think that maybe it was the last time I saw him. I mean, he has shady businesses to run—surely he won’t idle around the Black Forest for too long?

Aldric is on his knees in the potato field when I lace up my boots at the garden door. He has dirt up to his elbows, his sleeves rolled, and he’s muttering ancient threats at a mole that has apparently declared war on his crop. Shmoo is upstairs, dead asleep in the exact center of our bed, doing that thing where he’s somehow both a liquid and a starfish. I tried to recruit him for a walk. He opened one eye, judged my entire lineage, and went back to sleep.

“I’m going around the lake,” I call across the beds to my undead lover. Or, as far as the Grundbuch is concerned, my tenant.

Aldric lifts his head. “Stay on the grounds.”

“The lake is the grounds, my lord. I read the deed. I own that lake. I’m going to go stare at my lake like a Bond villain.”

“Dinner will be ready in two hours,” he says instead of stating that he doesn’t know what a Bond villain is. I still need to expand his horizons regarding entertainment media. “Trout.”