Page 94 of On Silver Winds
The moment seemed to stretch thin, ready to shatter. Mareda paused and considered her sister, frozen in her doorway with swollen lips, and hair that was even wilder and more tousled from where Kai’s hands had raked through it. Mareda took it all in with her pink, painted mouth parted in a soft gape.
And then she closed her mouth and drew her shoulders back, continuing down the hall toward her sister.
“Good morning.”
Adeline stammered some quiet greeting back at her, not meeting her eyes.
Those were the first words Mareda had said to her in weeks. Yet somehow, Adeline couldn’t quite bring herself to feel relieved.
Chapter 31
Kai
Kai was awake. The sun was spilling pale light through the rift in his heavy curtains, stretching ever more insistently across the floor. Dawn had broken, and a new day truly begun.
He had stripped off and lain in bed with his eyes closed, but sleep never came. Instead, a carousel of images whirred behind his lids, stuttering and inconstant. Iseult’s storybook with that invisible hand sketching a pendant at a white throat, pulsing with life; a young Merrow mother speaking words of hope with those dark circles beneath her eyes; women sobbing at the feet of a statue; Avette’s triumphant marble smile.
And Adeline.
Adeline watching him across the fire. Adeline arching her neck under his mouth. Adeline, dishevelled and pink and breathless, and “I want you,” she had said.
His mouth had gone dry at that. “Oh,” he’d replied, wholly incapable of further syllables.
He wasn’t completely oblivious. She’d arched into him, touched every inch of his bare skin she could reach, moaned at the barest brush of his lips at her throat. He had known she wanted him, but he had also known that with one more roll of her hips against him, with one more whisper of friction between their bodies, he would have had her skirts around her waist in the space of a breath – a thought that was as terrifying as it was intoxicating.
When his room was glowing with clear morning light, Kai finally gave up any attempt at rest and got up and dressed for the long, agonising morning ahead. Hours of sitting in close quarters with not only Adeline, but a handful of her closest family; talking about politics and trying not to look as though he’d spent the small hours of the morning with the echo of her breathless moan ringing in his ears.
He might not survive it.
Kai was early to the council rooms. Only two others sat at the long table; Mareda and her elderly aunt, Johanna.
Mareda.
He’d nearly forgotten their encounter, though it was just a few hours ago. Kai willed himself to keep moving, forced his legs not to freeze up and hold him where he stood in the doorway when Mareda glanced up at him.
“Good morning, Your Majesty,” she said, her face entirely blank. For all the world as though she had never come across him outside her sister’s bedroom with his shirt hanging open.
He mirrored her politely blank stare, leaning into a short bow.
“Good morning, Princess. Lady Johanna.”
Johanna started softly, and blinked bleary eyes up at him. She’d been dozing in her chair.
“Prince Cumhaill,” she smiled, then yawned daintily behind a small, withered hand. “Good morning.”
“He’s King Cumhaill, Aunt Johanna,” Mareda said, and Kai looked up at the slight chill to her words. Her tone held the same hint of imperiousness as the cool gaze with which she now considered him.
So she hadn’t forgotten, then.
The old woman reached out and placed a hand gingerly on Kai’s arm. “Oh, I do apologise, your Majesty,” she said.
Kai looked away from the princess, and gave Johanna a small smile and a gracious nod. “Not at all, my Lady. I have difficulty wrapping my own head around it some days.”
Johanna beamed. She tugged gently on his arm, urging him into the seat beside her as a few more council members filed in. Adeline’s father Silas was among them; Kai’s insides curdled, but he folded his hands on the table in front of him and tried to listen to what Johanna was saying about Queen's Village rental properties. Silas moved past him to sit at the other end of the table, and Kai’s chest loosened. The worst discomfort was yet to come, he knew. When the Queen arrived, he would have to look at her, speak to her, all while holding the knowledge of what had happened with her daughter in that forest. What he was certain would have happened had they not been interrupted.
But Kai was wrong. The worst discomfort came when Adeline herself slouched into the room, dragging her feet and yawning openly. It was quite plain that she hadn’t slept either. He chased his thoughts from that dark corner of his mind that wondered if she’d spent her morning the same way he had; thinking of all that had and hadn’t happened between them. Adeline rounded the table and sat beside her father, and though Kai’s eyes ached in their sockets with the need to follow her…
He could feel Mareda watching him.
