“Did you just attack him?” Ryan asked, voice low. His hand was on the hilt of his sword still in the scabbard at his side. He took a step toward me, moving slightly to the left, keeping Randall in his sights. His knights behind him looked tense.
What a fucking moron.
Which is what I called myself when I felt my heart flutter slightly in my chest.
Because what.
“Of course not,” Randall said. “Sam will tell you the same thing when he’s done being speechless. Which, I’ll admit, is a good look on him. What you witnessed was a test. And I think he passed admirably. Don’t you, Morgan?”
“You meddle too much.” Morgan sighed.
Randall cackled loudly. “I regret nothing.”
I finally found my voice. “What are you doing here?” I said to Ryan. It hit me then that this was the first time I’d actually addressed him face-to-face in weeks, and I couldn’t even begin to grasp if it calmed me or pissed me off more.
Maybe both.
“I’m training my knights,” he said, still scowling at Randall.
“Figured you’d be busy,” I said, and that caused him to look at me.
“I have priorities,” he said. “Responsibilities.”
I grinned at him because I felt like being a bit of an asshole. “Oh. I’m aware of that. Don’t worry about explaining yourself to me.”
He frowned. “Why are you letting him hurt you?”
“Does it look like I’m hurt?”
“Your clothes are burned,” he said flatly.
I looked down and he was right. There were scorch marks on my chest, and the cloth burned away, revealing reddened skin underneath. “Huh,” I said. “Look at that.”
“Are you trying to get yourself killed?” he asked.
I rolled my eyes. “Calm down. We’re training. Just like you. You don’t see me freaking out when someone comes at you with a sword.”
“You’d freak,” he said.
“Nope.”
“You’d freak,” he insisted.
“Hardly. You’re dashing and immaculate, after all.”
“That should not be a thing anymore,” he said as the knights behind him began to snicker. “I get enough grief for it already.”
“From your boys?” I asked. “Good. They should constantly give you shit. Wouldn’t want that head of yours to swell.” And, of course, since I hadn’t meant to make that dirty, it came out way dirty.
Ryan flushed slightly and said, “No. We certainly wouldn’t want that.”
“Oh my gods,” Randall muttered. “Are they always like this?”
“Constantly,” Gary said. “You don’t even know. It gets so much worse. They’ve always been like this.”
“How is it that no one told them before now?” Kevin asked. “I would have said something just to make them stop.”
“We’re standing right here,” I growled as Ryan flushed even further, causing me to feel things I didn’t want to feel toward him. Charitable things. Sexual things. I was supposed to be pissed off at him and hate him forever (okay, maybe not forever, but for at least four years until I woke up one morning between two attractive men who’d I’d had a threesome with the night before and realized that I had moved on in a spectacular fashion).