“She tried to bed you, didn’t she?”
“What? No!” Reeve started, eyes pinging across the room. The suggestion sparked a thought, one of her knocking coyly on his chamber’s door, but he dashed the vision away. “Why? Did she…did you see…something?”
“I don’t know,” the sword murmured. “Did I?”
Reeve often had difficulty picking up on those cues. There had been a woman once he thought had just been a pickpocket. When he threatened her with the city guard, she’d called him anidioticwaste of fine musclebefore storming away. It took rehashing the tale with both Flint and Gable for him to understand it was not his coins she was after.
If Celeste reached into his breeches in the same way, he had no idea what he’d do, but she didn’t seem like the type to call him cruel names to his face if he misinterpreted things. Nor to his back, if he really thought about it.
The sword shed no light on what he’d observed and only sighed heavily.
“You’re right—it’s a bad idea.” Reeve picked back up his whittling knife and the dried-out thorn and tried to not think of Celeste, but it was impossible. How would he know if he were accidentally slighting her without Gable and Flint around? They had tried to teach him how to flirt with women, but now he couldn’t recall a word of what they’d said about confidence and eye contact and smiling versus smirking. Would she give him another chance if he got it all wrong? Gods, hewasgoing to get it all wrong even if he did ferret out the signs because he had never—
Reeve nicked his thumb with his knife and grunted. Why was he even concerned about reciprocating? He should be preparing to reject her if she…well, what would she do? He placed down the knife again and stuck his bleeding thumb in his mouth. Celeste wasn’t terribly forward, but what if she surprised him with one of those actions in that book—the very book she’d left for him?
A metallic taste coated his tongue as his mind wandered wickedly. What if she placed her hands on his…on his chest? Or climbed atop him while he was praying in the grass and sat on his…his lap? And what if she pressed her lips to his—
“I’m going for a bath.”
He would have sheathed the sword before leaving, but he didn’t want Sid to know what he planned to do while he was locked up in the bathing chamber with thoughts of Celeste trying to pickpocket him in his mind.
Reeve woke before the dawn the following day, as always, rigorously worked out, and then sat. It was usually easy, emptying his mind. Frankly, it was one of the easiest things he ever did, and after a short prayer to Valcord, he set to it, but no emptying happened, unlike the night before.
Instead, Reeve was filled with anticipation. He popped open one eye and set it on the temple door. There were beams of sunlight coming from behind the building as a new day dawned, but the door was not yet open. Of course it wasn’t, Celeste never appeared quite this early, but he still thought to check.
He closed his eye again and sighed.Nothing. Think of nothing.Not the sound of the temple door creaking open, not the way the breeze would catch the hem of her dress, not the figure that would be standing there to greet him and begin his day. He popped his other eye open this time.
“Damn it.” Reeve groaned. “Apologies, Valcord.” Swearing wasn’t disallowed, but of all the times to do it, morning reverence was probably the worst.
With eyes closed again, the nothing still wouldn’t come. Instead, it was only thoughts of her. Her lovely face, her lovely hair, the lovely way she’d climbed atop him and—well, that hadn’t happened, but he’d imagined it in detail so many times now that he could barely imagine anything else. Even as he sat in what should have been prayer, he could only think of what he would do if Celeste were suddenly there, crawling into his lap.
And what he would do was stiffen right up because he had no idea what he wassupposedto do.
“Crickets,” he muttered, and there again, a reminder of her.
So Reeve fidgeted, he scratched at his shoulder, he wiggled his toes. The breeze gave him a chill, yet the rising sun felt too warm, and time passed at such an interminable pace that he wondered if he were being punished by Empyrea for his debaucherous thoughts by trapping him in eternity.
The holy knight eventually gave up, resigned to being forsaken by his god, but when he opened his eyes a final time, there was Celeste, standing out on the portico and looking even lovelier than he’d imagined. She was wearing another of those dresses, a pink one that hugged her waist and danced around her knees in the breeze, and her hair was pushed back behind her ears so that her wide smile went unhidden. He swallowed thickly and was glad he’d left Sid in the antechamber that morning.
Perhaps he had not fallen from Valcord’s good graces just yet.
The day went on in much the same way as the others, though he was keener to look for signs she might be trying to seduce him, for nefarious reasons, of course. Each day grew warmer, so he could not decide whether the way she lifted her hair off the back of her neck was meant to be as sensual as he found it. And they were doing manual labor, but he was especially confused when she bent over or reached upward and exposed more leg than he ought to see, because Celeste might not have been showing him, she naturally just had long legs.Verylong legs. Legs that would take an awfully long time running his hands up before reaching—by all the gods of light, what was wrong with him?
He came to the conclusion that he could not really come to a conclusion, both because it was confusing and because his brain was clearly not working at full capacity when his manhood demanded so much attention. By late afternoon, he attempted to put some space between them by clearing brambles from the fencing on his own. If nothing else, being pricked by unruly thorns calmed things down in his trousers.
When his mind refused to let him not think about Celeste despite that she was only a few yards away, once again bent over and humming sweetly, he focused on the arcana inside him, requesting Valcord assist in cleansing his mind. It would be weaker without Sid to help him focus, but instead of his own magic, he was hit with a disturbance beyond the bounds of the temple. The traces of divine blood inside him allowed him to arcanely feel the places that the sun touched, which was much less helpful when he tried to find something in the shadows of a forest, but a murkiness moved amongst the trees beyond the fence.
“What is it?” Celeste was suddenly at his side, peering into the forest, her shoulder grazing his arm. He must have been standing there longer than he realized.
His arcana felt her too since she’d come close. It could sense the noxscura she kept in that locket of hers, but it wasn’t as heavy as before. In fact, it almost felt friendly—or, at least, familiar.
“A disturbance,” he told her, “out there.”
“Syphon?”
He grunted. “I’m not sure, but there’s something dark.”
“I’ll get the apotrope!” Celeste fled over the courtyard and into the temple too quickly to be stopped on those too-long legs of hers. He followed, but lost sight of her, and his nerves tensed.The temple is a safe place, he told himself and slung his baldric and Sid over his shoulder. Celeste reappeared only slightly out of breath with her own bag strapped to her chest. “Let’s go.”
