The brunette was everything I would have once loved in a woman—outwardly beautiful and showy about it. Her breasts were hiked high in a low-cut dress, and her sultry eyes told me it would be easy to get her out of it. She was the type to whisk you away to a coat closet or alley and hike up her skirts. She’d let me take her from behind—impersonal, physical bliss. No commitments.
Yet the idea of it brought me no excitement at all. Damn that dark-haired enchantress for making me want something deeper than light-hearted debauchery. After just a taste of her, my senses were blind to any other.
“Do you want to see a magic trick?” I let fire dance across the back of my palms before catching it in mid-air and snuffing it out with a fist.
The brunette’s cry of delight made me feel empty. “How is it done?”
“A magician never reveals his tricks.”
A wink, a hand on the small of her back, a couple more rounds of ale. Turns out my charm had come back quickly too.
The woman hung on my every word as I tried to shake a certain dark-haired enchantress off my mind.
Then, Asterie stepped into the pub with Emmerick. Seeing her felt like having the air sucked right out of my lungs. Her hair hung clean and free of its braid, cascading over her shoulders in long waves. A simple blue linen dress hung loose from her body, which did nothing to showcase her figure but everything to excite my imagination.
The musicians played loudly from the corner stage, washing out what Asterie was saying to the boy Commander, but she made him laugh. I was grateful that he had gotten her there, at least, to eat as he’d promised. But the inn’s kitchen was likely closed by now.
When Asterie looked around the pub, she took everything in with the same wonder I’d seen that morning on the riverbank. Emmerick elbowed her playfully as the song ended to prompt her to clap, which she did unsurely. She looked overwhelmed, yet her foot was tapping below the table.
Asterie’s gaze landed on me. My arm was lazily slung around the brunette’s chair. The enchantress stilled and her back went rigid. Then something interesting overtook her features. A slant in her brow and her lips ever so slightly downturned.
Disappointment. In this context, that expression was glorious.
Feeling giddy, I tilted my glass in Asterie’s direction. She looked over the edge of her wine glass and raised one brow in response. An unspoken question.
Emmerick was going on about something. When she finally returned her attention to him, I knew that she hadn’t heard a word.
Her fingers touched her lips.Did she imagine how mine had felt against hers?
Her presence spelled failure for sleeping with any other woman that night, though I had been kidding myself to think I would have gone through with it. If there was a chance she could be disappointed for even a second or was rethinking her rejection, then I might be the luckiest man alive.
The woman beside me, whose name had already escaped me, whispered into my ear, “Do you know her?”
“Hm?”
She narrowed her eyes. “I am feeling like a change of scenery.”
“Perfect, let me walk you back to your inn.”
When we left, I made a show of tucking my arm around the woman’s waist and leading her out of the pub. In my peripheral vision, Asterie seared me with a glare. It was petty, but I soaked up every bit of her dissatisfaction.
I’d be back. In the meantime, she didn’t need to know my intentions.
Chapter16
Asterie
“Have you heard a word I’ve said?”
My attention snapped back to Emmerick with a feigned smile. My stomach groaned; it was empty and warmed with wine. The Constable had insisted we come to eat, but the service was slow since the celebration was in full swing. I didn’t know whether Icouldeat with so much anxiety twisting in my core anyway. I’d never felt so off-balance, so erratic. Emmerick had Angeline, the dagger he kept hidden in his boot, out. He spun the blade on the tabletop. It seemed he was always active—maybe that was why he slept like a bear.
“Of course,” I lied.
He didn’t look convinced, which was justified. I hadn’t heard a thing he had said. Instead, my eyes had been fixed on Fenris, who was charming the dress off of a woman across the pub. It burned a pit in my stomach to see his arm around her.
That’s silly.I tried to quell the raging feeling—I held no claim over him. In fact, earlier that evening I had rejected him so wholly that I had no right to be angry. If he should seek the warmth of someone else’s bed, then it was none of my concern. Yet envy was an ugly, unfamiliar beast rearing its head inside me in ways I hadn’t known I was capable of.
Wine.I angrily poured myself another glass.
