“You were so angry at me that night.”
“I’m not accustomed to…” He didn’t even know what to call it. Whatever this was.
“Friendship?”
Friendship.He turned the idea over in his mind, and felt that it fit the situation uncomfortably.
And yet, it was possibly closer than many other things. He had shared things with her that he had otherwise never shared with anyone.
He felt compassion for her. Even sadness when she shared some of her life in Cape Blanco.
“Friendship,” he said again.
“Yes. Or maybe we’re moving toward something like it. Is that so absurd?”
“Not absurd,” he said. “Just…unexpected.”
“If you let me, if you stop resisting, it really would help you.”
“I still don’t wish to tell my life story to strangers in a ballroom.”
“You don’t have to. But it would perhaps be good to have an easy version of events that you can share.”
“Ah yes. For my place in the history books.”
“You don’t care about that, do you?”
“No. All I wanted was to survive for this moment. For this task.”
“And do you know what to do now that you have survived?”
The question was pointed. And he still didn’t have a shirt on. He wanted to move closer to her, and put her hand right at the center of his chest, where her eyes kept dipping. But he supposed that wouldn’t be the act of a friend.
Part of him rebelled against that word. He was a warrior, a conqueror, and he should behave in that way, not like this.
And yet her words, the revelations that she had given him about her life, the way she had been treated, the lack of choice, made him…
Care.
He was used to caring about causes, not about people.
But perhaps it was the next step. What came after survival.
Living, in some capacity.
“We would be having cake at the ball?”
Cake seemed easier than whatever was happening now.
“Yes,” she said, scrunching her nose up. “There will be. I noticed that you liked it.”
“Oh. That is… Thank you.”
Chapter Eight
HE HAD THANKED HER. He had thanked her for the cake.
She had been thinking about that ever since, along with the vision of his body, covered only by those tight black boxer briefs that he’d been wearing.
