“No.” My voice sounded hollow. Ground down. As if he’d held a knife tomyairway instead of the other way around. “This is about duty for me. That’s all.”
“Ah. My mistake, then.” His tone was light, enough that I wondered if he was even capable of having a serious conversation. It didn’t seem that way. “Though you didn’t have to make your pointquiteso emphatically.”
“Would you have stopped, if I hadn’t?”
He scoffed. “If you’re suggesting I would ever force a woman, I would suggest you don’t know me at all.”
“Of course I don’t,” I snapped. “I just met you this morning.”
He inclined his head in apparent surrender, then flopped onto his back and laced his fingers behind his head. He slung one ankle over the other, the very picture of a man at leisure.
I blinked, perplexed. Then again, if last night’s storm hadn’t rattled his composure, why should attempted murder be any different?
“So, now what?” he said. “What do you do in this place?”
I scrambled to follow the latest of his capricious subject changes. “Do? As in...for fun?”
“Yes, for fun. Besides reading, that is. I haven’t the patience for that.”
“Whatdoyou have the patience for?” I said, then caught myself. Why was I even engaging in this?
“Not much, I’ll admit. I would’ve liked to find out what kind of noises you make when a man touches you properly, but if that’s off the table, I’m open to other suggestions. I mean, this is our life now, isn’t it? I’d rather not lie here night after night, talking about our feelings. Not if there’s something more interesting to be explored.”
“I never talk about feelings,” I growled.
“Wonderful. And I don’t have any, so that takes care of that.”
My thoughts rolled around in my skull like loose marbles. None of this made sense—not the half-naked stranger in my bed, not the quips that kept leaping from his mouth, not the many ways in which Eliana’s foreboding letter failed to match the reality.
Harlowe, he will fool even you.
She’d warned me, but still, I couldn’t escape the sense that I was one step behind this man, struggling to catch up but never actually making it. Moreover, I felt like I’d missed something. Something crucial.
“I know.” He thrust a forefinger into the air. “Why don’t we go into town?”
“To...town?”
“Yes. Oceansgate proper is only a stone’s throw away. We could go to the theatre. We could go out drinking. We could do whatever we want.”
“You want to go to the theatre,” I said flatly. There was that feeling again.
“Well, why not?”
“I don’t know, maybe because you just married someone who then tried to kill you?”
He waved an airy hand. “Oh, you didn’t actuallytry. If you had, I’d be gasping about on the floor right now.” He cinched two hands around his neck and pantomimed dying horribly.
I watched his performance to its conclusion. “You are absolutely the strangest man I’ve ever met.”
“You must have led a very boring life, then.”
Wow. That was rich—the pampered prince accusing the handmaid of being sheltered.
“Look,” I said. “You can go into Oceansgate, if you want. But I’m not. Half the people there hate me, for one, and two, I’m tired.”
“Come on, where’s the fun in that?”
“We just married each other out of obligation. This isn’t supposed to be fun.”
