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Wiping away my smile once again, I try to be annoyed with the severe waste of time this is turning out to be.
“I’ll deal with the land dispute now, Your Grace,” Polly tells her.
Ella continues laughing hysterically, and Polly seems to be straining to understand.
“I think our princess is saying she handled the dispute while you were playing dolly with me,” Dice bites out.
Damn it. She went back into that forest?
That pisses me off. She was supposed to simply fucking sit still for three hours. It’s like I can’t leave her unattended.
Polly bows, still grinning, and disappears from sight. Ella is rolling around on the ground, still laughing so hard that it makes it hard to focus on anything else. Even the dolled up incubus.
“Get it all out of your system,” he tells her sourly.
“Wh-wh-what did you do for three hours?” she asks, barely managing the words.
“I’ll give you a ten minute demonstration as a summary recap, if you swear we’ll never speak of this again, and that includes never telling the others,” he says, as though he’s been preparing that speech and desperately wants her to accept the offer.
Her laughter tapers off, and she weirdly seems to put a lot of thought into this decision. I roll my eyes and scrub a hand over my face, clueless as to why I don’t just leave.
It’s not like she’s in any danger.
Tapping her chin while lost in deep thought, a huge grin spreads across her face, and I just stare like an idiot at how happy she looks in a random moment like this.
“Fifteen minutes,” she counters.
He narrows his eyes, and the blue lashes look twice as ridiculous on him with that movement.
“Fine,” he bites out. “Then you swear you’ll never tell the others.”
She crosses her heart with her index finger, still grinning, and he sighs before putting one hand in the air, and one hand on his hip.
Then the daft cunt starts singing. “I’m a little teapot short and stout—”
Ella bursts out laughing, but the incubus continues to sing and do some weird little dance. Then moves on to some song that has him kicking his legs and holding his arms out in front of him.
From there, it certainly gets odder. I’m not sure why this is embarrassing for him, considering it’s not much different from his usual behavior—only he’s dressed like Polly.
But like there’s a magnetic force, my eyes bounce back to Ella, the way she doesn’t even care how silly she looks as she howls with uncontrollable laughter. The incubus doesn’t seem to find her laughter as mesmerizing as I do, since he looks like he’s never hated anything more than this.
Memories of the few short years I’ve been watching her on repeat for centuries topple to the forefront of my mind. I’ve seen her laugh like this so many times in various, seemingly unfunny situations, but without the sound until now.
It’s far more captivating with the sound on.
I can’t ever even remember laughing that hard even once during my very long, exhausting existence.
She stands up and begins dancing alongside him, and he seems to forget he’s angry as they start arguing about who’s the better dancer.
Her head tips back as she laughs again, and the incubus heatedly argues something that I don’t really hear. My vision has tunneled, and I have to force myself to rip my gaze away as I close my eyes, finding peace and darkness in her presence, instead of being haunted by the sight of her.
But I can sure as hell hear her better now that I’ve closed off one of my senses. And I can smell her.
My hands fist at my sides, and I growl low in my throat, finding my anger renewed. Sometimes it’s easy to forget how much her visions taunted me for so many centuries with something I wanted so much but knew I’d never have.
Dematerializing away from her, I land in the middle of that damn forest, ready for a fight to take the edge off.
I pop off several rounds of magic, baiting the damn forest until the first wave of attack beetles shoot out of the trees.
