Forbidden Warrior (Midsummer Knights)

Just before she’d kissed him.

“I think it is magnificent,” he said firmly.

She tipped up her chin higher and peered at his piece of wood. “What are you making? Is that a—”

He reached out and laid it in her palm, stilling the query, for he did not want to speak of what he’d been carving.

She stared at it, brow furrowed, confused by the sudden gift. “For me?”

“For you.”

She looked at it a moment longer, then reached out with her other hand and extended the carving she’d been making. His horse. Who seemed to like him.

“And you may have this,” she announced.

He closed his fingers around it, holding tight, ignoring the long, confusing slide of heat that washed through his chest.

“I think I will carve a bottle of wine next,” she announced, then yawned.

“Next, we sleep.” He tugged down the blanket and piled it and a few others up, tucked up against the log. Then he patted it.

“Fit for a princess. Lay down,” he said to her, indicating the blanket.

She moved off the log hesitantly and sat. He crossed to the other side and propped his back against a rock and pulled a blanket around him, hiding everything but his eyes.

“Sleep,” he said. “I will keep watch.”

Chapter 23

She did not sleep. Máel knew it, for he watched her sitting stiff as a board on the pile of blankets, the hood of his cloak shrouding her head as she stared wide-eyed into the fire.

A wolf howled again. She jumped.

“Easy,” he murmured.

Her gaze flew across the fire. “That was a wolf,” she informed him in a harsh whisper.

“Do you hear Fury?”

She tugged her head out of the hood and listened a moment. Her gaze sped back. “Yes. He is grazing.”

“That means we are safe. He will not let anything happen to me, and I will not let anything happen to you.”

She lowered her head. A moment later she gulped. Then she sneezed.

He pushed to his feet and crossed to her side of the fire. Sitting down, he put his spine against the log and patted his chest, then the ground between his bent knees.

“Come, rest.”

She looked at his chest, then the ground, then away, very quickly. “I do not think—”

“Good. You do too much of that.”

He folded his arms over his chest, closed his eyes, and waited.

She was a wild creature right now. Scared, in unfamiliar surroundings, hostaged to someone she did not know for reasons she did not understand.

One did not hunt wild things. One lured them.