“It is?” When she gave him nothing but a curt nod in reply, he lowered his head and pinched the bridge of his nose between his fingers. “This isn’t going how I’d imagined.”
“Were you expecting me to say no?” She clenched her jaw, a flash of fury sparking in her veins. “Do you…want me to say no?”
“It’s not that. I just thought…I thought this would be a bigger deal to you.”
“Well, it’s not. You’re giving too much weight to a small matter. You didn’t need to come here, Teryn. You could have written this all in a letter?—”
“I didn’t want to write it in a letter,” he said, voice rising. “I came so there’d be no mistaking my intentions…and yet of course you’re mistaking them anyway because I’m a blundering fool…”
His words dissolved into a string of muttered curses. With a sigh, he ran a hand over his face and looked out at the meadow. Cora’s brow furrowed as she took in his tense shoulders, the fist planted on one hip, the sharp rise and fall of his chest. She wasn’t sure she’d ever seen him so flustered.
“You may be content to agree to a cold, loveless betrothal,” he said, opening and closing one hand as if he didn’t know what to do with it. “If that’s what you prefer, I’ll respect that, but I don’t want you agreeing to a thing until you understand my side of things.”
“What’s your side?” she asked, almost terrified of the answer.
Slowly, his eyes returned to hers and he held her gaze without falter. His voice came out slow, broken only by the slightest tremor. “When last we spoke, you said you’d thought my mother had meant for you to marry me when she conveyed my proposal.”
Cora shrank back, wishing she could disappear entirely. Her cheeks flooded with heat. “I…that’s not?—”
“Itwassupposed to be me. It had always been me.”
Cora’s breaths grew sharp, her pulse rioting. “I don’t understand.”
He took a step closer. “I told my mother of my idea to forge a marriage alliance between Khero and Menah, but that was all I’d said. She had no right to take my proposal and offer it to you before she fully understood—no, that’s giving her too much credit. She did understand my heart and interfered on purpose. She never should have done that. It was supposed to be you and me from the start.”
Teryn’s words did strange things to her chest, her stomach, threatening to upend the balance of the entire world. She felt a flicker of hope—one that had proven traitorous before.
Shoving aside all warm feelings, she latched onto steely logic instead. “That’s impossible,” she said, voice calm. “You couldn’t have meant to marry me from the start. Not until you found out about whatever scandal befell Mareleau and your brother. You were engaged to her. Had you rejected her without due cause?—”
He stepped even closer. “I wasn’t thinking about her. Not for a moment. I was only thinking about you. About us.”
Us. There was that word again.
A corner of his mouth quirked up. “Thankfully, my unwanted fiancée had secrets that aided my own.”
Her gaze lingered on his lips, on that crooked smile. On the mouth that just confessed he’d wanted her from the start. That he’d intended to choose her over the woman he’d been promised to.
Again, that flicker of hope tried to spark into a blaze, but she breathed it away. She crossed her arms over her chest and lifted her chin in defiance. “You’ve tricked me before. Used my own emotions against me.”
His smirk stretched wider, revealing the depths of his amusement. “Are you talking about our kiss?”
She pursed her lips. “I don’t see anything funny about it.”
“The only thing funny about it is that you think I did it to be cruel.” He stepped in closer, forcing her to take two steps back. He shadowed her retreat, but she refused to let him close?—
Her breath caught as she felt her back come up against the trunk of a tree.
He stared down at her with unbridled intensity. “Do you honestly believe my only motive for kissing you was to trick you? Had I wanted to be cruel, I could have said or done a thousand other things to hurt you. And if I’d simply wanted you to leave me behind in that dungeon cell, I could have hefted you over my shoulder and set you on the other side of the door before you knew what was happening.”
The thought of Teryn picking her up with such ease sent heat building low in her belly. But the image fled her mind as he leaned down, planted his forearm against the trunk over her head, and brought his face mere inches from hers. His voice left his lips in a whisper. “I kissed you because I wanted to. Because I wanted to feel your lips against mine before I died. Because it was my desire.”
“Desire,” she echoed. The word sent her knees quaking.
“Yes, desire.”
Mother Goddess, she was losing hold of everything. Of her anger, her logic. That spark of hope was growing, searing through her carefully constructed walls.
She forced herself to straighten, to hold his gaze and pretend every inch of her wasn’t burning from the inside. She waved her hand in a flippant gesture. “So now you want to go straight from desire to an engagement? Is there nothing missing between those two steps?”
