Page 53 of The Forsaken

The tenderness in his words threatened to crush her under a weight of guilt.

The click of the door closing was soft, erasing yesterday’s anger, as he closed the distance between them with slow, deliberate steps.

Andromena pinned her hands behind her back, her fingers locking until the trembling stopped. “What are you doing here?”

He gave a slight smile. “You wound me, darling. I might start to think you don’t want me around.”

Andromena stood; her skirts swishing softly about them. “And if you aren’t careful, I might start to think you do.”

I would rather dash my eyes out.

I prefer a face-to-face with Medusa.

These were the expected Edgar-responses, followed by her own sharp retorts. But when he dropped to one knee, her breath caught. He wasn’t reaching for a witty comeback; he was picking up her dropped sketchpad. As she stared at the open page, she tensed, knowing what was coming next.

As he stared at her rendering of the honeybee, she tensed and relaxed her fists at her sides, grinding her teeth as she waited for his inevitable mockery and patronage.

What was worse…

He would lift his thick, dark hair with a careless grace, flashing that same wicked half-smile that always rendered her breathless. It pulled her mind right back to a distant Christmas, when she first fell secretly in love with him.

Still, nothing prepared her for the breathtaking gravity of his gaze when he finally did.

“You did this?” he asked.

Her breath stopped.

He did not touch her, but the raw adoration in his dark eyes stripped away every defense, creating an intimacy deeper than the embrace that had upended her world.

Panic spiked sharp and icy beneath her ribs.

This was too much, too naked. Her heart beat a frantic warning against her chest. It was just another one of his games.

She held her hand out, palm up, bracing for a trick. “You know I did,” she said, her voice biting with a sudden, unwanted edge.

Andromena stared at the space between them, her own hand still frozen.

Edgar didn’t look up; his eyes fastened on her drawing.

She let her arm drop.

No one had paid her drawings much attention. None, to be exact.

Over the years, people praised Cassia and the other McQuoid lasses who tried sketching, no matter how poorly they did it.

That by the time all their parents got to the youngest, herself, no one had really looked.

The pages she turned had received only a cursory look and automatic praise—praise so haphazardly given that she finally understood why: there was nothing special about what she did. But Edgar lingered. His attention, the way he so softly turned the page as if the actual treasure lay in the parchment itself rather than the physical item on the table that inspired her art, changed everything.

Maybe she was silly. No, she was definitely silly. He had only spoken a handful of words, a question. Andromena read something into nothing. But it was the way in which he spoke them.

A faint swish of the page pierced the awkward silence.

Filled with panic, she spoke fast.

“It is wrong, is it not?”

She succeeded in seizing his attention.