“I—No one. I—” I had to cut myself off as I still struggled to breathe.
“Are you in danger? Tellme now.”
I waved him away, still inhaling.
“Why do you smell like smoke?”
“Why do yousoundlike smoke?” I asked, half delirious.
“What?” he asked and tore his gaze from peering into the dark to glare down at me. “Answer me. Why are you breathless and floundering on the perimeter of camp? Did someone frighten you? Yes or no. Say it.”
Despite my blood racing through my veins and my heart’s frenetic scamper in my breast, I found myself irritated. I had just evaded my own doom, and now I had to deal withhim. Now I had to be bothered with the man I could not stop lusting after, but whom I did not yet entirely trust.
“I’m fine,” I spat out. “No. I am not in danger.” Perhaps I should have confessed that I was, but his insistence irked me.
“Do you—Do you have a lover?” He took a step back, his alertness decreasing for a second, and looked me over again. “Say that you have had a tryst and I will let you be,” he said, and his usual detachment had returned.
“No tryst,” I exhaled heavily, rolling my eyes, leaning into my ire. I put my hands over my heart and tried to breathe. “Why do you always—” I paused to catch my breath. “Why do you always think I am running around conducting constant seductions? It has become tiresome. You beat the same drum.”
“Robbie,” he spoke over me, his earlier concerned inflection back again. “I want an answer.Now. What are you running from?”
“I will tell you. I need a moment.” But I lied. I was not ready to speak about what had happened. I needed to come to terms in my mind with the fact that there was a plot, run by Father Starling, to have me killed and that a lord’s son and the captain of a large army were the two men assigned to it.
“Take your time,” he replied. Then he said, “Your hair is wet.”
“Yes, I had a bath in the river. Naked,” I added arbitrarily, another lie. I could be honest with myself. I knew what I did. It was simpler to be Reed’s irritable temptress than a victim of attemptedmurder. I had just escaped my killers and used fire magic for the third time in my whole life, but instead of concentrating on those things, I was flirting. I was hoping to make him adjust his jaw again.
He did. “See?” he answered me. “Constant seductions.”
I laughed, rather wildly, my fears bubbling beneath my bluster. I put my hands on my hips. “Fine! I am a seductress. You win! You already claimed victory weeks ago. Are you happy?”
“I’d be happier if I knew what transpired just now.”
“And what if I told you I did have a lover?”
That green eye, lit only by the distant campfires, looked gold in the night as he gave me a long, slow blink. In a voice a hair too paced to be called careless, he said, “Then I might ask after that man’s name. So I could congratulate him on having won such a prize as that.”
“A prize?”
“The privilege of fucking you.”
I swallowed. He had unseated me again. But again, I was tired of his constant victories. I was finding an obscure kind of comfort in this banter, a blessed distraction from the storm of thoughts in my mind. I had to remember that I was no untried girl. I breached the short steps between us and put my right hand on his chest.
“You think it a privilege?” I asked.
“I think,” he answered, still paced, “you know that I think that.”
“And why would you want to congratulate my lover?” I asked, my head tipped to the side, hoping I came off as saucy and not deranged.
He angled his head towards me, lowering it and leaning his nose into the space below my ear, just as he had done in the god tree.
His salt-and-soap smell overwhelmed me. Involuntarily, I brought my other hand to his chest and leaned into him a little, my neck arching slightly, causing his nose to run over my skin.
We both gave a shallow exhale.
Then he said, “I lied. I don’t want to congratulate him. I want to?—”
“Reed!”
