He stopped abruptly, swallowing the breath around the next word. Adeline cocked a brow at him, looking much more like herself than she had all morning.
“Me?”
Kai could feel his lips pulling, straining to form the word and against his better judgement, he let them. “You.”
Her smirk became a different kind of smile altogether, curving beneath the soft pink apples of her cheeks and setting her dimmed eyes alight once more.
Some of her jittering eased, Adeline gave a long, catlike stretch and pulled the tie from her hair, letting it loose around her shoulders. She winced as it fell and rubbed at her sore roots so her curls bounced and swayed around her face. A wispy tendril fell over her eye and Kai was halfway to brushing it behind her ear before he caught himself. She eyed his raised hand, but he gestured quickly at the weapons wall and let his arm drop to his side.
Pathetic.
“We’ll continue with swords, then?”
He was pleased at the steadiness of his voice, at least.
Adeline shook her head and her curls sprang and swung once more, dark coils of ribbon caught in a breeze. Kai didn’t wait for her answer before turning to the fireplace, pretending to warm his hands so he could stare into the flames, as had become his habit. Perhaps he was trying to burn the image from his sight. Or sear it into his memory. He wasn’t sure. He needed the distraction of a sword in his hand, something to occupy his body and mind so he wouldn’t keep falling under the thrall of her wild hair and warm eyes and… everything else. A small and very distant voice in his head whispered;She’s not Avette.
Whether this was encouragement or warning, the voice did not specify.
“No, I meant what I said. We need arealregime. It wouldn’t do for your Merrow men to be better equipped for the battlefield than their own King.”
Kai could see her from the corner of his eye where she’d moved to his side to speak to him, hands planted on the curve of her hips.
“It may surprise you to know that I do in fact have some experience of battleground strategy,” he said, smiling into the flames. “I am a King, after all.”
“I’m sorry, were you talking to me or the fireplace?”
Kai laughed then. He couldn’t help throwing her a glance.
“Must I stare at you at all times, Adeline?”
She waggled her brows suggestively.
“What’s not to like about that?”
Kai tried to speak, maybe to say something dignified and regal, but all that came out was a sort of choked laugh. Adeline rolled her eyes.
“Alright, alright, enough then. I know how you like to keep things - what was the word?Proper.”
He felt a pang of regret even as relief loosened his throat.
He’d been here before, convinced against his better judgement that it was acceptable, safe even, to want a Princess of Eisalaan – but it wasn’t true with Avette, and now… Well.
Now he didn’t know. But it was a risk he was unwilling to take.
So he let Adeline cast him as the upstanding,properKing who would never dream of compromising her virtue, when the truth was that all too often, he found himself lost in thoughts of doing just that. Even now, he stood staring deep into the fierce orange glow of the fire until his eyes ached. All so that he wouldn’t see the loose spill of her dark hair and imagine knotting his fingers into the curls at the nape of her long neck, backing her into the wall, tilting her head so he could press his lips to her throat and–
Beside him, Adeline moved her hands to the small of her back and arched so that her spine made a series of clicks. Her moan made his jaw tighten, but mercifully the sound was swallowed up by a yawn.
“Look, I know it’s my own fault, but I’m exhausted. I don’t think I have it in me to swing a sword around today. Let me just show you what I’ve been reading, and maybe you can tell me about your training. That’s probably where we should have started in the first place, isn’t it?”
She spoke over her shoulder to him as she walked, beckoning him to the windowsill where she’d piled a stack of books beside her mug. Kai followed and reached past her to take the thick tome atop the pile;Adversaries and Allies: A History of Eisalaan. He flicked through the first few pages, wondering how far back the histories spanned and whether he would find any familiar names.
“That’s a good place to start for some context, things you might have missed while you were… Well…”
“Frozen,” he finished, closing the book and tucking it under his arm.
She nodded. Then her lips parted, but whatever words had been poised to fall from them, Adeline seemed to decide not to speak. She closed her mouth, and Kai was glad for it. He thought he knew what she wanted to ask him, and he really did not want to talk about his years beneath the ice. Not now. Instead, Adeline hoisted herself onto the windowsill and clapped her hands together briskly.
