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“Read it to me.”
“No!”
“Juliana, I demand you read me that book, right now, or else I shall—”
“Do what, talk me to death?”
Hawthorn turned to his bedside table, necked back every available potion and the remainder of a goblet of wine, and cleared his throat. ”What, here, in the carriage?′” he said, in as high a voice as he could manage. “Lady Viola cried. ‘Oh no, Sir Bryant, we mustn’t! If my father catches us, he’ll have your head!’′He can have my head,′the gruff knight replied,‘but he cannot have my heart. Nor my—’”
“Stop, stop!” Jules begged, although her face was creased with laughter. A deeply unusual look on her. Had he ever,everheard Jules laugh before?
He kept speaking until his voice was hoarse, making her cackle, kept going even though his chest hurt to speak and he was coughing every other word.
“Stop,” said Jules, “that’s enough. I don’t care how sick you are. I will throw this book at you.”
“Cruel woman,” he said, reaching for his goblet. It was empty. He stretched towards the jug, half tumbling out of bed, but Juliana reached out to steady him, holding him as his body raked through another coughing fit.
“You’re over-exerting yourself,” she told him. “That’ll teach you to make me laugh.”
“Worth it,” he said, through his groaning.
Jules froze.
“What? What is it?”
“Nothing,” she said, refilling his goblet and handing it to him. “Don’t worry about it.”
It was only after he drank he realised that he shouldn’t have been able to say that, that pain should not have been worth her laughter.
And yet, for him, it had been.
And now she knew it.
He prayed she put it down to the effects of the fever, that he simply wasn’t thinking clearly.
She took away his goblet and forced him back down, then returned to her seat beside the fire. “I will read,” she told him, “but don’t do that again.”
“No such promises,” he said.
Despite the lack of his word, she read. She read for hours, her cheeks prickling at certain parts, her eyes jumping over sections where things became a little more heated between Princess Lavinia and the lowly hunter, Reginald.
“You’re skipping over the good parts,” he remarked at one point.
“This book is too long.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“This book will, if you force me to read those parts.”
“Is ‘anywhere’ my face?”
“Poor, sick, baby prince, the first time you were ever right about anything and only I was here to bear witness.”
You are witness enough.
“You are mocking me again.”
“Only because you enjoy it.”
