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CHAPTER 15
Anika
Once I was seated cross-legged in front of him, he let my hand go and sat down behind me, drawing me in close between parted legs, bent at the knee, so that his massive chest was against my back. He slipped his arms beneath mine, making an X over my breasts, and he pulled me closer still. I stiffened at the touch of his bare skin against mine. I knew we shouldn’t be doing this. I knew that. But that didn’t stop my wanting to be completely enveloped by him.
“Relax,” he whispered into my damp hair. “Let me warm you up.”
I exhaled deeply and eased back into him fully, succumbing to his warmth and protection. For the first time since I’d left the castle, I began to feel warm.
And safe.
Still taking deep, calming breaths, I glanced down at his arms, with their network of pronounced veins. At the missing pinky, at a long white scar that told of a jagged wound that took a long time to heal. His skin was deeply tanned, and though I had spent much time outside that summer, I never got as dark as he did. My skin looked like milk beside his.
“How did you lose your finger?” I asked.
He rested his chin on my shoulder, so we were again cheek-to-cheek, but now facing the same direction.
“Nobody ever told you about One Eyed Owen?”
I laughed. “What?”
“One Eyed Owen lives in town. He’s an upstanding citizen now, works as a blacksmith just like his father, but back when we were kids he was a bully and an asshole. Used to pick on the younger kids and make their lives hell. One day he did it when I happened to be around. That’s how he got his nickname.”
“You… You cut out someone’s eye?”
“No.” He shook his head. “It was a fight. I punched him, he punched me. He swung at me with a hammer, got my finger good, then fell and impaled his face on a red hot poker his father had left near his anvil.”
I fell silent, cringing at the image in my head of what had happened. Still, Maksim could have had him hanged for fighting with a prince, especially when he lost his finger as a result. Instead, all he did was fight back, and only then in the name of those younger and weaker. The eye thing was an accident by the sound of things.
Was that what he did? Protect people?
How was I supposed to fit that with the man I knew?
“Tell me you meant what you said,” I pleaded softly. “Tell me you don’t want to marry him. Tell me you mean it.”
I tried to turn to face him, but he had me too tightly and firmly embraced.
“I mean it. The idea…” I shuddered, this time not with cold but with disgust. “I’d probably kill him myself if I had to marry him.”
At that, Maksim actually laughed. Just a little. Nothing more than a tightening of his stomach and a quick outbreath from his nose.
“Probably. Use your crossbow. He’ll never know what hit him.”
Now I laughed a little too, grateful for the brief respite from the honey-thick tension that seemed always between us.
“That was from you, wasn’t it? The crossbow.”
After a pause, he nodded into my shoulder.
“All of it,” he said, his voice low and thick with emotion. I felt the rumble of his words through my body as much as I heard them with my ears. “It was all from me.”
I gripped his forearms and blinked, seeing but also not quite seeing the dancing flames. I knew I should thank him. I knew I should say something. But I found myself quite literally speechless, completely swept away by the realization that Maria had been right. He had been watching over me and caring for me all this time, without my ever knowing it.
“Do you know what happens, when a man and woman are married?” Very slowly, he slid his right hand out of our tangled embrace, and placed his first finger on the inside of my thigh.
My cheeks flushed hotly. His words and his touch together made me feel woozy, like I was in a dream. But this was no dream. I was in his arms. We were alone together. And his thick finger was inch-inch-inching its way toward my…
“Yes, I… I know a little.” A little was exactly right; all I really knew, for certain, was what I had gleaned from Maria’s sources at the gossip mill in the kitchens. But yet again, I may not know the words, I may not know the facts, but I knew the feelings. I knew what my body was asking for. Him.
Maksim trailed his finger further up my thigh, dragging his fingers over my flesh and tightening our embrace with his other arm. Beneath my own fingertips, his biceps bulged and I found myself mesmerized by the thick fibers of his shoulder muscles. It was all I could do not to moan out loud.
