“Terran,” she warned.
A warning I didn’t heed.
“But since you’ve been given the captain’s quarters, perhaps I can visit you this eve instead?”
Lyra tugged her hair to the side and began to braid it.
“Don’t,” I said, the word coming out more like a command. There was a time and a place for that, and this was neither. “Or rather, I’d prefer you not braid your hair.”
“Why?” she asked, Lyra’s question without censure.
“I like to watch it catch in the wind.”
The admission did not put me at ease. Though Lyra and I were bound together until Aetheria, we were far from allies. I would do well to remember that.
“You once told me my hair reminded you of the river mist at Elydor’s edge.”
She remembered.
Lyra had attended the Rite of Stone and Soil with her parents. They had been given a seat of honor in the hall after her father negotiated safe passage for Aetherian travelers. I’d caught her looking at me, but instead of acknowledging it, she lifted her chin and refused to glance my way for the remainder of the meal. Her haughtiness had irritated me, hence the insult.
“I lied.”
“A particular habit of yours?”
“Of mine?” Ironic, Lyra asking such a question.
“You lied also, insisting you weren’t watching me during negotiations. Do you remember that?”
“I remember everything, as I told you. Including the way your body responded to me in my bedchamber.” My gaze dropped to her lips. “How your mouth fit perfectly with mine. Even now, they part, begging me to slip my tongue between them.”
I was warming to the topic.
The sea breeze. Open ocean and calm waters lulling us into forgetting, if just temporarily, the chaos we’d left behind and one we sailed toward.
“I don’t beg.”
It was the gauntlet I hoped she’d throw down.
“Do you remember me telling you that you would? Beg for me?”
“Aye.” She breathed in the salty air, ignoring my presence and looking out to the horizon as if completely unaffected.
I knew otherwise.
“You said, ‘I don’t have a deferential bone in my body.’ Do you remember that?”
She could pretend all she wanted.
“I remember something of the sort.”
“Then you will also remember obeying me when I told you to turn around. Or does that not meet your definition of deferential?”
I tried not to smile as Lyra rolled her eyes.
“An innocuous enough command.”
I had no doubt Lyra goaded me on purpose.
