“Sure, buddy.” I walked around him in a wide circle and started to light lamps around the room, so he didn’t have to hold an open flame in my living room.
It made me uncomfortable in ways that I didn’t quite understand. After a moment, I realized that feeling wasn’t mine. It belonged to the plants around me. They quaked in the presence of an open flame.
I paused and reached up to the nearest hanging plant to comfort it.
Rhoan
What a day.
I hadn’t had this much excitement in my life since the fall of the Seelie Court. All right, I wouldn’t call that excitement. Still, the concept was similar. Perhaps I should have called it adrenaline. That’s all I was running on anymore.
Now that we were safely trapped inside Cerri’s apartment, the adrenaline faded. I couldn’t support myself anymore. If Delphine crashed through the thin wood panels over those windows, we were done for.
But those panels weren’t thin anymore. Cerri had turned them into something more than just wood. They gleamed in the light like thick sheets of metal. The way Cerri rose, her spine stiff with solid resolve, I could see where the wood learned it.
Cerri paused and reached up to a shaking plant. She spoke softly to it until the thing stopped trembling like a cornered animal. In her presence, the plants had taken on a kind of sentience that I’d never seen before.
Her wild curls had escaped their binding. The tenderness in her face stole my breath away, but that look vanished the moment she turned her attention on me. I almost laughed at the sudden change in her demeanor.
I didn’t deserve the same kind of love, not even while I was actively dying. Or…was it passively dying? I wasn’t sure. I just knew that my body was not happy to have two more doses of Delphine’s damn poison. My heart struggled to beat around the bolt through it—which made all the more worse when Cerri turned her green eyes on me and made my stomach do backflips.
My body couldn’t handle this.
I would die here, just from the sexy anger on the princess’s face. Though, her expression softened when her gaze dropped to the bolt in my chest. I gave her a tight smile and accepted my fate. Head falling back, it hit the wall behind me, but I couldn’t be bothered to care.
Cerri crouched in front of me, grabbed my chin, and yanked so that I had to look at her. “No dying on me.”
Her firm voice was laced with the soft break of someone truly terrified. I reached up and touched her arm. Her hand shook. She jerked away from me and closed her hand into a fist to hide the tremble in it.
I let my head fall back again. “Fine. I won’t die.”
She laughed, barely a soft huff of air with the tension this thick between us. “Is it that easy? Are you telling me I don’t even have to brew an antidote?”
For her? Anything was possible.
How the hell had she created that explosive on the fly? It wasn’t something that I’d had in the house. She’d made it and used the empty vial from the antidote I’d taken earlier. There was a reason she’d survived this long.
I admired her resolve. She’d been terrified. I’d seen it in her eyes and in the way she’d moved. Yet, nothing stopped her. This woman was like her parents in some ways, and completely unlike them in others.
Her mother would have stood in the face of danger and faced it without flinching, but the woman wouldn’t have been able to overcome those same obstacles with quick thinking. Cerridwen had been shaking in her boots while brewing a potion that could explode on contact.
That was the difference between honor and duty. Few considered the two as separate entities. Honor was an idea. It infused your being and pushed you into situations that called for duty. That was when action happened. Duty called upon us to do things that we would never have considered before.
I wished I could have spared Cerridwen from her duty. I knew that she was trying her hardest to escape it. There wasn’t much either of us could do to stop fate from bearing down on us. Eventually, she would have to accept her duty. When that happened, I would be there beside her.
I wasn’t going to die today. This poison could try its hardest. The bolt was barely in the way.
At least, that’s what I told myself as I watched the princess move about her kitchen. She had a purpose in her step, and it made her movements precise. She poured a certain amount of herbs into her cauldron before quickly placing the jars back onto the shelf.
Everything about her was beautiful. Women were out of my reach. I was not allowed to marry. My line ended with me. Yet, I could still love.
And I was pretty sure that this feeling was the beginning of that.
Now, if only I could get the damned woman to listen to me. Would she trust me after this? I wasn’t sure that I even deserved trust. If she knew what’d I’d done and how I’d failed her parents, she might never love me the way I loved her.
Damn these feelings. It had to be infatuation. This was far too quick. No one fell in love like this. I had no idea what love felt like. Devotion? Sure. That came as part of my vow package. Loyalty? Absolutely. My court deserved everything I could give, my blood, my life, everything.
This couldn’t be love.