Plum sailed down from his nest in the rafters to land in her outstretched hands. Pointy jaws unhinged as he yawned right in her face with the terrible morning breath she’d come to be fond of if only for its regularity.
“Let’s go check on Sir Sleepyhead’s horse, shall we?”
Plum croaked and took off, sailing ahead to perch on a candelabra beside the doors in the temple’s antechamber. She grabbed a carrot from the basket Ima’riel had given them and pushed outside with some effort, a chilly breeze meeting her. There was a bright swatch of something on the edge of the temple’s portico, colorful against the stark, white stone steps. Plum half-scurried, half-flew to it, snuffling hard when he came upon a ruby-colored feather stuck to the fabric. The wyvern pounced and lifted the bundle by a knot, flapping hard to bring it to hover just before her face, the parcel hanging from his talons.
It had the heft and shape of a book, tied in a colorful silk that Celeste recognized from the mess that was Geezer’s illusion-filled home. Plum remained flapping before her when she accepted it, black eyes wide and hopeful. “Yes, good job.” She gave him a tickle along his throat. “You certainly helped deliver this, didn’t you?”
Adequately praised, the wyvern swooped away to stretch his wings in the morning air.
Celeste blinked out into the courtyard, and though things were still a mess, in the streams of gentle morning light, it was pleasant enough. A bird twittered in one of the trees beyond the fence, and the air smelled fresher than it had the day before, as if flowers were beginning to bloom in the mud’s stead.
Reeve’s horse was helpfully eating a patch of something overgrown, his blond tail swishing and no worse for the extra day in the stables. Earlylyte was an imposing creature, bigger and more thickly muscled than most horses, though he had a splash of white across his chest, down his front legs, and all over his muzzle like he’d been dunked in a barrel of milk. That was an amusing enough thought to make his gargantuanness a little less daunting, but she was still nervous about approaching him—horses were often skittish around noxscura even if it was locked away inside an arcane vessel.
She tucked the package into the crook of one arm and brought the carrot over her head with the other, winding back to chuck it at the animal in offering and run back inside. But as she measured the distance, her plan was brought to a halt when her last sweeping gaze over the courtyard fell on the figure of Sir Reeve.
Perhaps it shouldn’t have been a surprise she missed him, he was holding that still, but when she let her gaze linger, she wondered how overlooking him had been possible at all. Under the rosy lights of early morning, he was sitting cross-legged on the earth just at the center of the courtyard. Eyes closed and face tipped up into the sun’s rays, sweat glinted on the bare skin of his shoulders and chest, both broad and solid with finely detailed muscle. Celeste squeezed the wrapped up package from Geezer against her, and her grip tightened painfully on the thickness of the carrot. Reeve had…well, he had nice skin, that was for certain.
Gods, that is a ghoulish observation, she thought, one she was embarrassed of without even saying it aloud. It was only that having the normal kind of lewd thoughts about men usually led to disappointment, which was perfectly fine and expected, but having those same kind of thoughts about Sir Reeve, Holy Knight of Valcord, would lead to much more awful things.
She’d decided this the night before while lying on her cot and indulging in some of those dangerous thoughts, the pleasantness of cleaning Ima’riel’s greenhouse alongside him, how he had proposed the work would be fun as he smiled in his careless way and showed off that dimple of his, and the…well, yes, thesweat. Because he’d done just the right amount of it to not really need to remove his tunic, a thing she’d lamented while she lay alone in the dark, but she hadn’t minded the removal of his surcoat, or the looseness to his neckline, or the rolled-up sleeves.
Dark gods, the rolled-up sleeves.
And that evoked image had done it, pushing her to take care of the tingle between her legs or else she’d never sleep. He wasn’t a holy knight when he wasn’t wearing that symbol, he was just a man, and maybe it was pathetic, but she was lonely, and no one wouldknowbecause it wasn’t like she were some character being written about in a book.
But while basking in the relief of her frustration—because after always came with embarrassing clarity—she’d decided that even the smallest bit of pining after Sir Reeve wasn’t just a waste but a danger. Even if he didn’t hate her for desecrating his god’s temple, he would never look at her like she was a woman. A witch? Yes. Some disgusting creature hiding its true nature under a person’s skin? For certain. But not just a woman. The few men who did look at Celeste like that always had ulterior motives anyway—a desire for control, a desire to get to her sister, or simply because she paid them to have desire at all.
Yet as she was staring at just the thing she’d imagined, a bare-chested Reeve who appeared righteously satisfied, she couldnotlook away despite admonishments running through her head, telling her disaster loomed just behind his broad shoulders and repudiation boiled beneath his tanned skin. It was one thing to find a man handsome who would never be interested—that she was used to—but when he intended to vanquish her, it would be lethal. One too-long glance could find her impaled in the exact wrong kind of way.
She squeezed her eyes shut, hoping that when she opened them again, he would look somehow unappealing, or at least would have put on a shirt.
But he didn’t, and he hadn’t.
Reeve was facing the temple and consequently her, powerful shoulders rising and falling, a swirl of mist before his face with each deep breath, but he was lost in whatever was going on behind closed eyelids. If she sneaked backward and slipped inside, he wouldn’t know she had been doing so much staring, and so she placed one foot behind the other and began to creep away like the little wretch she was. But because she was trying to be quiet and apparently the gods hated her, the temple decided to make a racket as she backed directly into the visiting bell.
“Really, Valcord?” she hissed, hands already full as she tried to silence the ringing fracas with an elbow.
One of Reeve’s eyes popped open and found her like a homing raven. She froze, but a holy knight was not a dragon, it saw you even if you didn’t move, and he inclined his chin in greeting, rose from the ground, and strode over to her in all of his sweaty, shirtless, smiling splendor.
Oh, that stupid smile! Why did it make her feel like honey on a steaming tea cake?
He stopped at the foot of the temple and stared blankly up at her. Crickets, had he…had he said something? Surely!
“Here!” She unceremoniously shoved the carrot at him.
“Uh.” He looked down to it then back up. “Thank you?”
“It’s for your horse,” she said quickly, wiggling it about so that he would take it.
Reeve’s confusion easily slipped right back into that too-pleased grin, and he clicked his tongue against his teeth so that Earlylyte would come trotting over.
Expectantly, the horse’s ears flicked when it arrived, and though she stood on the lifted portico of the temple, Earlylyte still towered from his spot on the ground. Reeve hadn’t taken the carrot, and Celeste could feel a whine wanting to break out of her throat, but she fought the urge to lob the vegetable across the courtyard and send the animal chasing after it and away from her.
Celeste extended her arm but leaned away. The horse tipped its head dubiously, and for fear the knight would see the animal shun her, she quickly turned back to Reeve and distracted him. “You’re up early,” she observed, voice cracking.
“I train each morning and then sit in prayer and greet the sun.”
Lucky sun.“And, uh, only half dressed?” Her eyes flicked down the muscled length of him to his taut stomach. Even the old linens from her sister’s bed would come clean washed againstthat. But so much closer, she could see his skin, still glowing andnice, was covered in a fair number of scars raised in silver against his tan.
