I frown, mirroring him. “I’m trying my best.”
“Then try harder.”
“Hey.” He starts walking along the shore and I stomp after him. “Wait. We were having a conversation.”
“Were we? I hadn’t noticed.”
“Don’t do that,” I say, my arms wrapped around the griffin egg.
“Don’t do what?”
“Shut me out. Dismiss me outright, just like when I arrived here. Why did you refuse to speak to me then?”
“I thought you were one of my hallucinations.”
Okay, that opens a whole new can of worms. “Oneof them?”
“Or a monster who escaped from a book.”
I start running to catch up with him. “Wait, you get that a lot? Monster girls escaping from books?”
“Not really.”
“Do I look like a monster?” Suddenly I want to know. I want to see his face when he replies but when I finally reach him, his gaze is blank.
“Not all monsters are monstrous in appearance,” he says softly and walks faster.
I have no reply to that. So I follow him a little further before I dig my heels in.
“Look,” I say, “I need a bath.”
That stops him in his tracks. He sweeps back around, the frown settling into his favorite dark scowl. “A bath? This isn’t a palace, princess.”
“I don’t have to be a princess to want to wash myself.”
“Well, here is the stream. Cold, as you seem to like it.” He gestures grandly at the river, his grin sharp like a knife. “Suit yourself.”
I clench my jaw. “You should bathe, too.”
“I find protecting you from monsters while standing buck-naked in the river kind of hard.”
“I don’t see any monsters lurking about,” I say while my mind is frozen, having slammed into the image of a naked Roane, long dark hair unbound, bathing in the river.
Like,whoa.
“You usually don’t see most monsters until they are on top of you,” Roane says. “So if you’re going to bathe, if it’s that urgent, hurry it up. I’ll keep watch.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CATCH ON FIRE
ADELINE
“I’ll keep watch.”
I hadn’t realized he meant it so… literally. He’s standing there, arms crossed, watching me. Like a cat watching a mouse scurrying by, interested and ready to play.
“Roane, can you turn around, please?”
