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His cheeks darkened at the admission.
“Don’t go outside,” he said. Well, commanded.
“Why?”
“It’s not safe. You’ll get a tour of the town during your orientation tomorrow. If you want I can take you for a walk when I come home from work.”
Like she needed the hand-holding.
“To be honest, I’d feel safer walking without you,” she retorted because she couldn’t let him get away with saying crap like that.
His face turned a shade darker, from anger this time, and he seemed to be biting the inside of his cheek. “You’re angry.” He said it matter-of-factly.
Yeah, she was angry, but she didn’t want to waste her time talking about that.
“Where do you work?” she asked instead, changing the subject.
“My office is in the Baedden Clan’s Council building.”
He smiled.
Pleased by her interest?
“I will bring you for a visit one day.”
Yes, please.She smiled back politely and nodded. The guy was going to think she had some mental problems that she was snarling at him one minute and smiling the next. She should just stop snarling, but that was difficult when he was being such an insensitive ass.
“There are clothes for you in the bedroom. And food in the kitchen.”
She nodded and he left.
Finally alone, she went to the bedroom first to look for clothes. She still wore the fancy dress they’d forced her to put on for the wedding. Not the most comfortable sleepwear, but she’d been too exhausted to care. She needed to change if she wanted to walk around town unnoticed, and it gave her a good excuse for snooping in the bedroom if Altair happened to come right back.
Altair had made the bed in the morning. The sheets formed perfectly straight lines, and the pillows were fluffed. Personally, she would have just thrown a blanket over the whole thing and called it a day. A large closet stood on one side of the room with a dresser next to it. Along with a nightstand on either side of the bed, that was all the furniture in the room.
She searched the nightstands first. Both were completely empty. The dresser had clothes and sheets in it, all folded into very neat squares. She took it all out, careful to remember where everything went and not mess them up so Altair wouldn’t know she’d snooped. But she found nothing.
The closet was full of dresses. She picked the plainest one she could find. It was floor-length and had an intricate embroidery pattern in silver on the body, but at least it only had one skirt.
She put the dress on and left the bedroom. The next room was the bathroom, empty aside from soaps and what appeared to be shaving equipment. She crossed the living room to open a door on the other side of the room. That room was empty. Completely empty. No furniture whatsoever.
She closed it and went into the kitchen, which contained a small table with two chairs in a corner and counters along the back wall. She searched every cabinet, eating some fruit as she searched.
No wonder he didn’t mind leaving her alone, the house had no personal items in it of any kind. He must really not consider Baedden his real home.
He’d given her permission to make it her own, and she had an idea she hoped he’d hate. She spent the next half hour pushing the couch into the empty bedroom, then getting one of the nightstands from the bedroom to put next to it, and finally moving the closet from the bedroom too. That one was the hardest, but by emptying it first and then sliding one corner then the next, she managed to get it intoherroom.
There.Satisfied to have her own private space where she wouldn’t be woken up by Altair creepily staring at her, she went back to the kitchen to get some more food. She had no idea what to do with most of the stuff there, so she just ate more of the fruits she did recognize.
Finally, she didn’t care what Altair had said, she was ready to go explore.
Chapter Two
If she didn’t hate Altair already, she would now. The clothes he’d given her didn’t blend in at all. All the women she passed wore knee-length cotton dresses without any embroidery, some looking worn and like they’d been mended several times. Everyone stared at her.
“That must be Meghan,” she heard one woman whispering to her friend as she walked by. Nova smiled at them but they averted their eyes.
How the hell was she supposed to spy when she stuck out like a diamond in a handful of quarts?
