“Hell yes.” I gave him a kiss and turned us toward the road. “Now get your cute ass in that cart and let’s go home.”
We still had a lot of work to do.
Chapter 9
Hydris flew home ahead of me as we approached the palace because neither of us knew if anyone was missing either of us. Plus, we hadn’t really talked about how we were going to make our relationship work—the prince and the laborer—and I thought maybe we’d avoided that discussion on purpose. Were there laws against commoners dating royals? Was it scandalous? And even though I didn’t want to consider it, could me being human be a problem?
I wasn’t even sure if same-sex marriage was allowed here.
Not that I was thinking of marriage! At all. That would be crazy.
Sarosh was right there waiting with his hands on his hips as I steered Mason toward the stable. “I refuse to let you blame the horse,” he said, “for why an eight-hour trip took you twenty-eight hours.”
I chuckled at him as I got down from the cart. “Did you miss me?”
He glared. “I was about to send a search party.”
Aww, he’d been worried. I gave him a sideways hug before going to get a wheelbarrow to unload the grass bundles from the cart.
“Oh,” he said. “I see. Well, I’ll allow it then.”
“Allow what?”
Sarosh twirled his finger at me and grinned. “You’ve had sex.”
I felt my face heat with embarrassment as I laughed.
“And that confirms it,” he said with a haughty grin.
I shrugged. “Maybe I did.”
He started unhooking everything on Mason. “Did you at least get your questions answered at the barrier?”
“Some of them.”
I told him about the lake, Milo, and… Well, I went ahead and told him that Hydris had shown up, too. Sarosh hadn’t been surprised since he assumed Hydris had an extremely boring life, so following me around would’ve been an adventure.
“No one missed him?” I had to ask.
“Not like ‘sound the alarm’ kind of missing him. I assume someone noticed, though.”
That it hadn’t been some kind of emergency was a good thing, of course, but I kind of wanted it to be a much bigger deal that their prince had been gone for a whole day. I hadn’t asked if he’d left a note or something, but who didn’t react when the prince took off, note or not?
“Hold on.” Sarosh squinted at me as Silver Sparkle, the unicorn, ate a long, thick blade of grass from his hand like she was slurping up a spaghetti noodle.
I looked at Sarosh and could see that he was maybe about to connect the?—
“Did the prince join you at the inn?”
“Uh, yes.”
“For more than dinner?”
“We had dinner in…our room.”
He gasped all the air out of the stable, but then came over and gave me a hug. “Well done, my friend. Very well done.”
I chuckled, not sure if I should bow or maybe defend Hydris’s honor.
