“Through a window?” He shook his head, his eyelids briefly squeezing shut. “Lia, you can’t go dancing on ledges like a—”
“I’m hardly dancing. I’m sneaking, and I have plenty of practice at it. Some might call me accomplished.”
His jaw twitched. “I appreciate your skills, but I’d prefer that you sit tight,” he argued. “I don’t want to be peeling you off the cobblestones. My men will come. There are military strategies for this kind of situation when the odds aren’t in your favor—and then we’ll all get out of here together.”
“Strategies? Are your soldiers here, Rafe?” I asked, looking around the room. “It wouldn’t seem so. But we are. You have to accept that they may not come. This is a dangerous land, and they might have—”
“No,” he said. “I wouldn’t lead my most trusted friends into something I thought they couldn’t survive. I told you it might be a few days.” But I saw the doubt in his eyes. The reality was setting in. Four men in a foreign land. Four men among thousands of enemies. There was a good possibility they were dead already if they had stumbled into a regiment as Walther and his company had. I didn’t even bring up the dangers of the lower river that Kaden had warned me about, and the deadly creatures that inhabited it. There was a good reason that Venda had always been so isolated.
“The guards again?” I asked, returning to the subject of his lip.
He nodded, but his thoughts were still elsewhere. His gaze traveled over my new attire.
“Someone brought me my cloak. It had been wrapped in my bedroll,” I explained.
He reached out, pulling the tie at my throat loose, and slowly pushed the cloak back from my shoulders. It fell to the floor. “And … these?”
“They’re Kaden’s.”
His chest rose in a deep measured breath, and he walked away, raking his fingers through his hair. “Better his clothes than that dress, I suppose.”
No doubt the guards had wasted little time in spreading their sordid tales.
“Yes, Rafe,” I sighed. “I earned them. In a sword fight, and that is all. Kaden has a blue goose egg on his shin to prove it.”
He turned back to me, relief visible on his face. “And the kiss last night?”
My anger flared. Why wouldn’t he let it go? But I realized so much still bubbled near the surface. All the hurts and the deceptions that we hadn’t had time to address were still there.
“I didn’t come here to be interrogated,” I snapped. “What of all your attentions toward Calantha?”
His shoulders pulled back. “I suppose we’re both putting on the performances of our lives.”
His accusatory tone made my anger spark into a fire. “Performance? Is that what you call it? You lied to me. Your life’s complicated. That’s what you told me. Complicated?”
“What are you dredging up? Last night or Terravin?”
“You act as if it happened ten years ago! You have such an interesting way with words. Your life isn’t complicated. You’re the blazing crown prince of Dalbreck! You call that a complication? But you went on and on about growing melons and tending horses and how your parents were dead. You shamelessly told me you were a farmer!”
“You claimed you were a tavern maid!”
“I was! I served tables and washed dishes! Have you ever grown a melon in your life? Yet you piled on lie after lie, and it never occurred to you to tell me the truth.”
“What choice did I have? I heard you call me a princely papa’s boy behind my back! One you could never respect!”
My mouth fell open. “You spied on me?” I whirled around, shaking my head in disbelief, crossing the room, then whipping back to face him. “You spied? Your duplicities never end, do they?”
He took an intimidating step closer. “Maybe if a certain tavern maid had bothered to tell me the truth first, I wouldn’t have felt that I had to hide who I was!”
I matched him step for angry step. “Maybe if a self-important prince had bothered to come see me before the wedding as I had asked, we wouldn’t be here now at all!”
“Is that so? Well, maybe if someone had asked with an ounce of diplomacy instead of commanding like a spoiled royal bitch, I would have come!”
I shook with rage. “Maybe someone was too scared out of her wits to properly choose her words for His Royal Pompous Ass!”
We both stood there, our chests heaving with fury, becoming something neither of us had been with the other before. The royal son and the royal daughter of two kingdoms that had only warily trusted each other.
I was suddenly sick with my words. I hated every one and wanted to take them back. I felt my blood pool at my feet. “I was afraid, Rafe,” I whispered. “I asked you to come because I was never so afraid in my life.”