He was completely silent for the first few hours of our travels, which was fine considering I’d been trying to avoid conversation with him, anyway. But in all honesty, I was starting to get bored. And bored Maeve trumped angry Maeve.
“Doyouthink Beaumont’s alive?” I breached the barriers of silence we had put in place.
“Dunno,” Sebastian grunted, pulling our mare’s reins to steer her through a sharp turn.
“There was nothing about that in your mother’s journal?”
“You read the journal. Did you see anything about that?”
“No, but for all I know you ripped a page out and are hiding it from everyone.”
Sebastian’s gaze soared over his shoulder, nostrils flaring. “Gods, Maeve. Are you going to pick a fight with me every time we talk?”
I didn’twantto fight with him—I still loved him. But I was also so unbelievably hurt by him, and the two feelings seemed to contradict each other.
I evicted a sympathetic sigh. “No. I’m sorry.”
“When we get back, we need to sit down and have arealconversation about everything. Because having your body pressed against mine and not being able to put my mouth all over you might quite literally kill me,” he groaned under his breath, putting his attention back on the trail.
My blood pooled in my chest. I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t still want him in more ways than one. Just because I was hurt, didn’t mean that I had stopped craving his touch. But I had morals. And trusting the person I was sleeping with was one of them.
“And the fact that Sawyer got to sleep next to you last night and I didn’t, pisses me the fuck off,” he lowly grumbled, ensuring only I could hear.
“Is Sebastian Hawthorne…jealous?” I bit back a satisfied smirk.
“Fuck yes, I’m jealous.”
The blunt honesty made my smile crack wide open.
“Until you tell me otherwise, you're still mine,” he over-confidently added.
My smile shattered.
Around the halfway point of day two, everything inside of me regretted making this journey. My body felt like a wet towel being wrung out and I was beginning to go stir crazy.
“This sucks,” I mumbled a few times until Sebastian answered.
“I know. If my calculations are correct, that's the fifty-seventh time you've said that today.”
My lips parted to counter, but Kade’s loud, “Shh!” quieted me. His horse came to a sudden halt and he held a silencing finger in the air.
My heart assaulted the walls of my chest as Sebastian tugged back on the reins of our horse, bringing us to cessation in the middle of a rocky path.
“Did anyone hear that?” Kade whispered, his flaxen eyes darting in all directions of the endless forest surrounding us.
“It sounded like metal,” Jensen stated, swinging his legs over the side of his mustang and landing on the ground. He pulled his sword free from his thigh sheath.
“Maybe it was a bear,” I suggested, preferring that to pretty muchanyother alternative. Except for a bunny—a bunny would be nice right about now.
“Do you know of any bears that have metal claws?” Kade sneered as if my idea was completely implausible. “And there are things far worse than bears in these woods.”
“Yeah, like snakes.” Sawyer noticeably shuddered.
“Snakes?” Kade arched a thick brow. “You’re an experienced and professionally-trained soldier, and you're scared of…snakes?”
“Fuck yeah, I’m scared of snakes! Some of them are big enough to swallow you whole! And anything that eats dead mice is on my list of dislikes,” Sawyer riposted without stutter.
“How about cats?” I chirped, trying to disguise the teasing tone of my voice.
