I gathered my thoughts. “Right. Then...Vick, he’s always been with you, right? Always been your attendant? Traveled with you wherever you’ve gone?”
“No.” Not a moment’s hesitation. “I’ve known him just shy of a year.”
A year. The reply punched a clean hole through the nascent theory taking shape in my head. Yet Kyven’s blunt delivery rang with significance, enough that I sensed something here, some puzzle I could click together if only I could arrange the fragments properly.
“Is that all?” Kyven’s breath fanned across my lips, warm, sweetened with apples.
I shuddered. Or shivered. Who could tell. “No. One more.”
“Yes?”
“Who are you?” I jabbed a finger into his chest. It felt like poking iron. “In here. Who are you, really?”
A parade of emotions crossed his face—alarm, resolve, triumph. “It’s as I said. Whoever I want to be. Whatever I feellike becoming in the moment. I’m a prince, and a pauper, and oftentimes a pirate. And right now, I’m also a man who wants to kiss you very, very badly.”
My breathing stuttered and died.
He zeroed in on my mouth. “That’s the thing, lioness. What I want above all else is to experience everything life has to offer. I want to go everywhere. Do everything.Beeverything. Reinvent myself like those theatre-players do, find out which shape suits me best. And right now, with you, I get to be something I’ve never been before. Something entirely new.”
“Which is?”
He leaned closer. “A husband.”
“A...husband.”
“Yes. If only for four more weeks. And husbands are generally known for kissing their wives.”
I searched for a defense and latched onto the first one I could find. “But I’m not even nice to you.”
He chuckled, low and sultry. “I don’t need you to be nice. I need you to be interesting. And gods above, are you interesting. You havelayers. Buried under thorns, maybe, but that only makes me want to see what’s there all the more. What treasures you’re guarding so jealously.”
Tingles swept up my spine. “There’re no treasures. I’m just...hard work.” Which normally worked to my advantage. Being difficult had always kept people at arm’s length.
But with him...
“Tell me.” His lids lowered, his lashes splaying across his cheeks. “After seeing me in the yard, do I strike you as a man who shies away from hard work?”
My lungs quivered. An eternity swept past, marooning us inside a swollen, aching silence. Far away, the crowd buzzed. The music rolled on. But my awareness narrowed to our mingledexhales and the way his heartbeat battered against the fingertip I hadn’t yet reclaimed from his chest.
“Well?” Kyven whispered.
“I hate you,” I whispered back.
A laugh rolled from his throat. “That doesn’t bother me in the slightest. And nothing prevents you from kissing a man you hate.”
I tried to list the myriad reasons why I shouldn’t touch him. Why this damnable attraction was inconvenient at best and catastrophic at worst. Because there were a thousand reasons to resist him. A million.
I just couldn’t think of a single one, right now.
My fingers curled around his shirtfront. And?—
Clang. The peal of a warning bell smashed the night apart. Then another.Clang.
Kyven’s eyes shot wide. He snapped upright as the crowd devolved into a scribble of panic. People fled for the exits, men shouting over one another while one woman wailed louder than a newborn.
“The Lady Amryssa,” Kyven said, low and urgent, but I was a step ahead of him, already moving.
Oh, goddess. I’d left my best friend. Sleeping and unchained, with her bedroom door locked but her window unbarred.
