Page 47 of Beds and Blades

These were good reasons to leave.

I stayed anyway.

Skip fell asleep. His breathing evened out beneath my cheek. His arm rested around me, heavy and warm. I did not move it.

The fire had burned low. The room was dark and quiet, and I lay awake thinking about the claiming.

A permanent empathic bond. His ring. His certainty.

I had spent years cataloging what I wanted as if desire were a research project. I had built a private inventory so specific it felt aspirational, a map of a territory I did not expect to find.

And now I was in a medieval fortress in another world, lying against a man who had made every item on that list seem not only possible but conservative.

The territory, apparently, existed.

I looked at his hand on my hip. At the ring on his finger, waiting.

Somewhere below us, the crypt door was locked and soldiers stood watch. The danger was real. None of that was insignificant.

I had seen what he was when fear had every right to own the room. I had seen him in battle, surrounded by blood and fire and the dead, and he had not fractured. He had moved. Decided. Protected. Held the line because the line had needed holding.

Now that same strength was at rest beneath me.

For the first time since waking under the wrong sky, I felt totally safe.

I closed my eyes, and I slept.

Chapter nine

Blade

Sunlight came through the window at an angle that suggested early morning. I was using Skip’s chest as a pillow. His hand was on my ass.

I lay still for a moment and took inventory.

Status: Alive.

Location: Skip’s quarters.

Current position: Draped across a man whose body I had spent the previous evening cataloging with extreme thoroughness.

His eyes were still closed. His breathing was deep. His jaw was dark with stubble. His chest rose and fell beneath my cheek.

His hand tightened slightly. Still asleep. Still certain.

Then his eyes opened.

“Your hand,” I said, “did not leave my ass once during the entire night.”

Something softened in his expression. He looked genuinely amused.

A knock came at the heavy wooden door. Three efficient beats.

Whoever stood outside had knocked on this door before and did not seem to consider the answer especially important. The door was already opening before I fully understood that permission had not been requested so much as briefly acknowledged.

I pulled the sheet up.

The woman who entered wore chain mail and carried her helmet beneath one arm. Duty had called her out before dawn, and it showed in the tension around her eyes: tired, but fully alert.