He flashes me one of his smiles, this one stained slightly purple. “Or I could live, and you would have your berries for breakfast.”
As pleasant as that sounds, his life isn’t worth risking over a few bloody berries.
“You can’t go around eating things to test if they’re poisonous.” I plant both my hands on his chest, shoving him away. “I won’t survive without you. That was reckless and foolish.”
He stumbles back a step, his smile fading. “I am sorry. Frightening you was not my intention.”
“I know that. You just . . .” I rake my fingers through my tangled hair. “You need to take better care of yourself—and that means not letting me hog all the fish.” It took me until this evening to realize that he lets me dine first and then picks at the scraps when I’m through. The man is a giant; the little he’s eating cannot be enough to sustain him for long.
He nudges the withered berries that have fallen on the ground with the toe of his boot. “I do not wish for you to go hungry.”
“Well, I don’t want you to go hungry either! If anything happened to you, I’d be devastated, all right?” There. I said it out loud. Clearly, the man doesn’t realize how important he is. Maybe it’s time I tell him. “Just promise me that you won’t eat anything else unless I can be sure it won’t harm you, all right?”
“This I promise you, Nia Quill.”
Again with the “Quill.” Maybe it’s exhaustion. Maybe it’s fear. Maybe it’s both, I don’t bloody well know. The truth is on the tip of my tongue, and I no longer feel like holding back. “I hate it when you call me that.”
He turns to me with wide eyes, adjusting the leather pack on his back.
“Why do you insist on tacking ‘Quill’ onto the end of my name every time you say it?”
“This is a sign of respect,” he says quietly. “You are an unmated female, and I have no claim on you.”
True, but that explanation only incenses me more. I whirl back toward the bushes and take out my frustration on the innocent branches, shoving them out of my way, snapping them clean off. “You don’t use Amber’s surname.” Does that mean he has a claim to her?
The thought makes me want to stuff a bunch of berries down her short throat.
He catches one of the larger branches, holding it back and allowing me to pass. “Who?”
“Amber. The woman from the quarry that we met again at the café.” He still doesn’t look as if he knows who I’m speaking about. “The one with red hair.”
We continue moving forward, slower than before, Maddox holding the branches aside like he’s opening a door, and me stomping through the gap, seething.
“Ah, yes. Now I know the one you mean.”
It’s about bloody time . . .
“I do not use her surname because she did not give it to me.”
Wonderful. Now I feel silly for being jealous and thinking about killing her with poisonous berries. Oh well. It’s not as if I would actually kill her. I’ll probably never see the woman again. Unless Maddox decides to marry her. The thought makes me sick to my stomach, and I can’t even blame it on the berries.
“We’re friends, so I don’t think you should use mine either.”
He comes to a halt in front of a snarly tree with gray bark that only has leaves on half of its branches. “You and I are not friends.”
Not this tired argument again. “Yes, we are.”
“No.” He twists on his heel and stalks off.
Has a more obstinate man ever existed? “Why are you being like this? If I can forgive you for lying to me about Gia Gill, why can’t you find it in your heart to forgive me for saying I wanted nothing to do with you?”
“I have forgiven you.”
“Then why won’t you be my friend?”
He stuffs his hand into his pocket and drags it back out again, clutching a folded piece of parchment. “Because this list was never meant for Gia Gill. It was for you.”
I suspected that, didn’t I? Even without Kerris’s confirmation, I thought he was far more enamored with me than he ever said aloud. But I never put two and two together.
