Fox patted her chest and smiled up at him.
When had he learned how to greet her and ask after her?I wondered.
“Here to collect his nighttime companion,” Dermid said and elbowed Ilsit next to him. She and Tessa burst into laughter.
I stood up, quelling the eagerness in me, trying not to show how I had craved his company over the last few days. I had hoped for his arrival and had my rolled quilt ready next to me. “It is the same joke they tell every night,” I said to Dermid. “It grows old.”
“But you are always laughing with each other,” Evangeline pointed out. “Just like us. You have such banter. Howdidyou all meet?”
Mischief in her features, Ilsit took her pipe out and said, “Jade and Robbie were both deflowered by the same tinker.”
Jade snickered into her tea, avoiding Keir’s curious look.
“Not true,” I corrected Ilsit. “I gave my maidenhead to Micah.”
“A fine-looking man,” Tessa said. “And that’s me talking.”
Fox made her wheeze laugh while Ilsit cackled.
“Either way,” I pronounced. “Ilsit makes the same joke every night, and it does grow old.”
“No it doesn’t,” Keir disagreed, grinning. “Someone is threatening your life, and Reed insists on you sleeping with him. The joke is, Madam Robbie, that he can only get women in peril to join him in bed.”
“How incredibly funny,” Reed said dryly and extended his hand towards me, the palm facing downward, the fingers relaxed but expectant.
I laced my fingers with his, and he pulled me next to him. “Let’s go,” he whispered and led me away from our camp.
“I don’t want to jest about dear Robbie’s threatened life,” I heard Dermid say from behind me, “for it is a terrible thing, but it is important to note also that Reed used to tell girls he liked that he wished he had two eyes to better see their beauty. So all this trouble is to his advantage as he clearly has wanted to bed Robbie all this time but hasn’t the talent for wooing. At all. I swear it, really and truly,at all. No talent. No wooing.”
Keir and Evangeline started to howl with laughter, and the rest of them soon joined.
Next to me, Reed’s shoulders shook and he called out, “I was nineteen and it was one time.”
“It’s a very good line though,” I assured him, trying not to smile at how his reply only increased the hilarity felt by his brothers. “May have worked on me.”
“You be quiet,” was his reply, but it was said with humor.
79
NOW: WARM
Our fingers were still laced together as we walked. With my other hand, I carried my quilt, holding it to my side with my elbow.
“Shouldn’t you have waited until later?” I asked. “It’s not yet night, and someone might see me on my way to share your tent.”
“We’re less than two days from Skow. And I’ve had it with this journey. If any man tries to interrupt my pleasure or report me to an army officer, I’ll become violent.”
“You once claimed you were ‘handy’ with your fists but ‘even better at avoiding a skirmish with words.’ Where is that man now?”
Reed smiled, and I saw it out of the corner of my eye. “He’s been worn down by a long road and the tireless seductions of a beautiful midwife.”
It was not quite dark out. Though it was shot through with the fading rays of a sun that had only come out from the clouds in time for it to recede, the sky was a pale, shimmering gray, like the inside of a mussel shell. It made me think of the sea, something I had never seen, only read about in my books.
“What’s the ocean like?” I asked.
“You would love the sea,” was his answer. “It’s a wild, frothing thing made of salt and fury, and I miss it, if I am honest. I miss it terribly.”
“Will you return once this is all over? Once the war is done?”
