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He didn’t think such talk was suitable for ballrooms, but he was hardly one to correct her.
Should he respond to her sally? As he didn’t often speak and avoided the chore if he could help it, he hadn’t heard his human voice enough himself to compare and judge.
“Is that a good thing?” he wondered. Perhaps he should have disguised his voice as well, if his real one displeased.
She nodded fervently, her smile spreading wider.
“I absolutely adore your voice. It suits you very well. I couldn’t have imagined it if I tried.”
Her voice deepened at the end of her sentence, like a purr of her own that emanated from her chest.
He cocked his head a little to consider her.
She had just paid him a compliment, he deduced. Manners dictated that he return the favor.
“Your eyes are…very round,” he said.
Her eyes grew even rounder as he spoke, filling with shimmering mirth. Why was she laughing at him?
So, he added for good measure, “Your cheeks as well. Like apples.”
He suddenly had a notion to bite them. Just a little bit. To see if they were crisp and sweet like the fruit.
She lifted a hand to smother a chortle, her “round” eyes squeezed into half-moons.
“Why thank you, Your Grace,” she said when she collected herself.
“Or should I say Your Highness?”
He swung her into a particularly difficult spin, her weight light as rain in his arms. She followed his lead so beautifully. It was as if they’d always danced together.
But that couldn’t possibly be. For this was the first time he had ever danced on two feet.
“Your Excellency?” she offered, gazing up at him with a singular focus, as if he was the only vision worth looking at.
“How should I address such overwhelming magnificence?”
There was something about her tone that contained barely suppressed humor. Had he mis-stepped already? Had she somehow seen through his disguise to the imposter inside?
He decided to answer her with a truth. If she were truly fae, she would be able to smell a lie a mile away. Faerie Kind detested lies.
“In the east, they call me Saiyan,” he revealed.
“You may call me Sai.”
“Prince Saiyan?” she asked.
“Just Sai,” he said firmly.
It felt good to say his name, a name he had all but forgotten in the endless millennia of his imprisonment.
“Sai,” she breathed, smiling only with her eyes at him.
They were the most beguiling feature about her. Part warm brown, part translucent green. They reminded him of tropical lagoons that formed at the edge of the ocean, surrounded by sunbaked sands. They beckoned creatures of the deep to venture ashore.
Creatures like him, who did not belong in her world.
There was that feeling again. That she was the hunter; and he, the prey.
