“Lance notices a great many things.” His eyes hadn’t left my face. “I’m curious what it is about you specifically that keeps drawing his attention.”
“Him noticing my being thin doesn’t mean Ikeepdrawing his attention,” I said, even as I wondered what Arthur was getting at. This was the first I’d heard that Lance noticed me at all.
“Yes,” Arthur agreed, and something in his tone said he found that answer perfectly reasonable and also completely insufficient.
He studied me for a long moment. I let him look. I’d had practice by then at letting him look at me without flinching, at keeping my face the kind of blank that gave him nothing to work with. What I couldn’t entirely control was what my body did under that scrutiny: the slight steadying of my breath, the conscious stillness I had to impose on my hands.
If he noticed, he didn’t say so.
“He watched you,” Arthur said at last. “In the yard. When you weren’t looking at him.” He paused. “I noticed it before you were taken to Galahad.”
I blinked once, slowly, the way I might have reacted to being told something mildly interesting about the weather. “Men watch women. I wouldn’t read much into it.”
Something moved across his face, something that lived beside amusement.
“No,” he said quietly. “I don’t suppose you would.” Then he cleared his throat like this conversation was over and now he was turning to the next one. He looked over at me and his eyebrows reached for the ceiling. “Why are you so cold this morning?”
I frowned, as I wasn’t aware I was being cold. “I’m a prisoner: would you expect me to be warm?”
“You were warmer with the guard who brought you here.”
I frowned deeper. “How would you know that when you weren’t even there when the guard escorted me?”
He shrugged. “Call it a guess.”
I frowned. “If I was warmer to the guard, it’s simply because I hate him less than I hate you.”
“Ah,” he said with a quick nod and started further into the room. “Are we still at the stage of hatred of one another then?”
“Call it whatever you want to call it.”
He leaned his shapely ass against the windowsill at the far end of the room and extended his long legs out in front of him, crossing them at the ankle. “I don’t hate you.”
“I wish I could say the same.”
His lips took on a slight smile. “I don’t understand why you would hate me,” he continued with a shrug. “I’ve allowed you to do what you enjoy most: training alongside my men. And you dine at my tables and have repeatedly.”
“You do me no favors, Arthur.”
He crossed the room, not quickly. Arthur never moved quickly unless he meant violence. This was the other kind of movement, the controlled kind that was almost more threatening because it gave you time to decide how afraid you were going to be or how afraid you should be. He stopped close enough that I had to tilt my chin up slightly to hold his gaze.
“That’s not what this is,” he said, and I strained my neck to keep looking up at him, but there was no way I was going to show submission by breaking his gaze first. “I know the difference between a prisoner’s resentment and whatever this is.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“You’re jealous.”
My jaw tightened. “In order to be jealous, I’d have to care about you, and I don’t.” I paused. “I harbor the opposite of care for you.”
Something moved across his face: amusement and something harder underneath it.
“Is that so?”
“Yes, that’s so.”
“Then you won’t care, and it won’t upset you to learn,” he started, “that I’m courting Lady Isolde.”
The words landed like a blade dropped flat. They didn’t cut, but just struck and did so thoroughly. I felt it in my chest and immediately organized my expression around not feeling it.
