I caught my breath. Thane rarely let his princely carriage break.
This was more than my bedding someone new. He saw Avery as a threat. And perhaps those waters were muddied, but he was also my oldest friend as well as my first love. Thane had known me better than anyone save Magda. And so, I now saw it too. Averywasa threat to Thane. Thane saw him as a possible mate for me. Thane saw, before I could admit it to myself, Avery was a worthy contender. He really could be more than a man I daydreamed about having rut into me. He was worth more than twilight lust.
I suddenly felt a pang of guilt at having ever played with his heart.
“I am deadly serious, man,” Avery said and mimicked Thane by crossing his arms, his feet planted firmly beneath him despite the glaze of liquor in his eyes. “I mean to make that woman mine. However she will have me. I’ll be her dog if that is what she wants. I’ll take what table scraps she flings myway.”
“You don’t think that the least bit pathetic?”
Avery smiled.
The two men were ten paces from each other, but from where I stood in the dark, the tension in their exchange made it seem like they were within striking distance, as if one’s fist was about to hit the other’s jaw.
“For what do you smile?” Thane demanded.
“I know what you see when you look at her,” answered Avery.
“What I see?”
“What you see. I have asked around, you know. Or rather, instead of answering folk when they ask what I am about in pursuit of the Miller girl, I listen.” Avery paused to bring his right hand to his now-trimmer beard and scratch. “For they don’t really want to know. And my answer is simple. I want her. I want to bed her, bed her thoroughly. Then wed her and pleasure her and only her until I am too old to stay hard any longer.”
Thane scoffed, taken aback by the frankness in this speech.
I found my fingers at my lips, taken aback myself.
“You see,” Avery continued, “folk ask me what I am about, and I smile or wink at them. But what they really want, after I have confirmed their suspicions, is to tell me whattheythink, whattheyknow. The judgmental sort wants me to know that she has all but renounced the church, to warn me. But I am Ecclestonian and godless, so I like that about her. The gossiping sort tell me how they believe, though they are not sure, that you once pursued the darker-haired twin before marrying the sunny-haired one.”
“You know not of what you?—”
“I know you almost had her, but never truly did,” Avery cut in. “I know it without anything but rumor in my ear. I can tell by the way you scent her out in the town square. If she is close enough, you practically try and breathe her in. If she is not? Your eyes follow her hips’ sway in the same way mine do. But you’ve no right to that view, little lord.”
There was a grinding noise as Thane’s boot scudded against thestony road. He had pushed himself from his lean against the wall. “Be careful how you address me, commoner.”
I gasped again. I had never heard Thane invoke his birthright like that, never heard him so clearly draw a line between his blood and another’s.
Avery let out a chuckle. “You don’t like that name, do you?”
“Iama lord’s son. My father pays your wage. You would do well to remember that.”
Avery merely continued to smile. And then he asked, “Why do you follow me into the alleyway, my lord? Surely you cannot be that concerned for my feelings? Ask what you wish to ask.”
Thane did not reply.
“Perhaps you want to know if she has let me have her yet. Perhaps you want to ask what she feels like beneath a man when he is inside her. You want to know, because—and here I guess—you do not know.” Cocking his head, Avery said, “I repeat. I know what you see when you look at her.”
“And what is that?” Thane asked, almost in spite of himself.
“A mouth meant for biting. Breasts meant to be palmed. Thighs made for parting. I hate to reduce a woman to merely being a man’s satisfaction, but if gods exist, they crafted that frame for fucking.”
Avery was deliberate, taunting, laying a trap for Thane.
“Watch your tongue.”
“I will watch it.” Avery spoke so quickly he spoke over Thane’s speech. “I will watch the effect it has on her when I put it between her pretty legs.”
My hands were clamped over my mouth. He may have shocked both me and Thane, but I was truly surprised at myself. Appalled me, he had. Offended me? Yes, I was furious at his assumption that he thought he could have and would have access to my body like that, but another part of my mind was full of wanton imaginings, of his tongue truly where he had just claimed he would put it, of my sliding down the stable’s wall where I stood, skirts lifted while he knelt before me and suckled.
“You say such filth,” Thane said finally, his voice thin and cold. “Roberta may not be a lady, but she deserves better than you.”
