“So, you’re mercenaries.”
“What’s a mercenary?”
“You kill for money.”
He gave her a huffy look. “We are knights. We fight for the greater good. Even if we told them no, they’d still leave the stuff. They pile it up in front of the castle doors or lobby using catapults. One time they shot a diamond that was as big as my head. God damn near took off my head too. Not to mention it broke a perfectly good window.”
She said, “You know what amazes me the most? You’re complaining that that diamond almost hit you in the head and broke a window instead of gloating about how much it was worth.”
He said, “It’s pretty; things aren’t worth much just because they’re pretty.”
He had said something wrong. He knew it immediately. Her entire body drew inward. Her hands came up and crossed over her chest, and her fingers grabbed her elbows. Her face went pale. “You’re right. You have to be more than pretty.”
He lifted a hand and placed it on her shoulder. She flinched away. He said, “I don’t know what I said, but I think I hurt your feelings. I’m sorry.”
She kicked a small rock and then lengthened her stride. He caught up to her easily, confused by the sudden shift in her personality. She blew out a long, audible breath. “It’s not really anything you said. It’s just that when I was younger, everybody told me how pretty I was. Nobody thought I would ever amount to much, not really. They always just thought that because I was pretty, I would either end up as a model or somebody’s trophy wife. Literally, those were the expectations people had for me.”
He said, “Why would anyone display their wife?”
She roared laughter. “You need a lesson in current slang and language.”
He said, “Probably. I learned how to swear from several of the humans that came here, but we haven’t had any come in a long time. Years and years now. But why would anyone think that you were just pretty? You’re way more than that.”
His words, sincere as they were, did not loosen her shoulders or the tension on her face. “Oh, I know that. But I had to teach myself that. I don’t know. I guess because my world is obsessed with that, with beauty and youth and money and... I guess because it’s easy to use one to get the other, but if you’re born with none of them, you are pretty much out of luck.”
Just one more reason why he wasn’t too fond of her world. They reached the trail, and he looked upward. It wound steeply up the side of the mountain to the castle gates. He said, “I’ll give you a ride the rest of the way.”
She said, “I’m not even going to resist that suggestion. I don’t think my calves can take that.”
He changed and let her climb up. When her legs slid around him, he felt again the urgent press of her body against his as she had wriggled and moaned below him while he made love to her. As he lifted them back toward the castle, he had one thought rolling through his mind: he had found someone who would be the perfect mate, and he was determined to find a way to make her stay.
