Page 14 of Stolen Threadwitch Bride
For tonight, at least, I was stuck here.
Still, I shuddered and squeezed the brooch, its rounded edges biting into my palm.
He lay with his back to me, broad shoulders peeking out from under the blankets. The soft glow of the fae lights softened the lines of his muscles, but they were still painfully obvious.
As was the fact he was onthisside of the bed, meaning I’d need to climb over him.
“Can you—uh—move over?”
“I can.” He didn’t bother to look at me. “But I won’t. You’re sleeping here.” He patted the empty side of the mattress. “That way, if you do something foolish like try to run away, I’ll wake up.”
Wild Hunt damn him. Maybe later Iwouldpunch him in his pretty face and pretend I was asleep and having a terrible nightmare. Suddenly I saw the appeal of learning to fight as Rose had.
“It was only a joke. I’d be stupid to try to escape when I don’t even know where I am.”
“You would.”
He didn’t move.
Grumbling, I went to the foot of the bed and climbed around him. My knees sank into the mattress. Wild Hunt, not only was his tent bigger than my cottage, but his camp bed was more comfortable than anything I’d ever slept on.
I refused to look at him or think about how hard it was to breathe as I lay at the very edge of the bed and pulled the blankets up to my neck. I was as far from him as possible, but when the fae lights lowered, my heart pounded against my ribcage.
Despite the weariness in my bones, every muscle in my body pulled taut. My hand trembled as I fiddled with the brooch. It felt like an age before I managed to unclasp it and stick the pin between my middle and ring fingers, forming a spiked fist.
Yes, he was impossibly handsome, and looking at him did strange things to my stomach. But when he touched me, it wouldn’t be my choice.Nothingabout this was my choice.
“You can relax.” His murmur was soft, but it still made me flinch. I snuck a glance at him. His eyes were shut, his face relaxed. “I have no interest in forcing myself upon you, human”—he gave a half-smile—“however pretty you may be.”
Thatdid strange things to my stomach, like a pathetic, fluttering bird was trapped inside. Still, my limbs and throat loosened.
Unless that was what he wanted—my guard lowered. But hewasfae and the stories all agreed on one thing about the fair folk. “And your kind can’t lie?”
“No, not exactly. I can omit details or be vague, but I can’t outright say something I know is untrue.” He made a low sound, not quite a chuckle, and it thrummed through the mattress into my back. “We’ve turned deceit without lies into something of an art form.”
In the quiet, I turned that over in my head as well as everything else he’d said. “I have no interest in forcing myself upon you”—that had to be true. I closed the brooch and slid it under the pillow.
And “however pretty you may be”—did that mean he thought—?
“Hmm. You know, all the humans of your town look the same.”
My breath caught when I found his eyes on me. In the low light they were black and unfathomable. Did we all look the same to his kind? Then again, could I tell the difference between one ewe and another on the hills around Briarbridge?
His dark brows drew together as his gaze drifted over my hair. “Except for you.”
Cheeks burning, I scowled at the ceiling. Sothatwas what he meant. Like I needed the reminder.
Growing up in sleepy little Briarbridge, the fawn brown of my skin, like Mama’s, had marked me as foreign, which was enough to be teased and for some to treat our family differently. But I’d had Mama and Papa, Rose, a handful of friends, and, later, Callum. With them, it hadn’t mattered what anyone else thought, because they loved me.
Then, when I was seventeen, my gift had awoken and my hair had leeched of colour.
I wasn’t the only fae-touched person in town, but what was a reason to celebrate them was an extra layer of otherness in me. All the more reason to keep me at a distance. With a fae mark as obvious as my white hair, it wasn’t as though I could hide it.
It didn’t bother Rose. Kind, fierce Rose who spent her childhood bloodying the noses of anyone who dared to hurt me. Callum, though? It had bothered him.
I sighed, the weight of it all pushing the air from my lungs. Here I was in the fae lands and I still stood out for all the wrong reasons. “Yes, I look different from them.”
Another low noise from him, one I couldn’t decipher. “No, you misunderstand. It’s not that you are different: it’s that they are all the same.”
