Page 75 of Wicked Curses
“Get to work,” she told him.
“You’re no fun.”
When she gave him a mischievous smile, everything in him tensed as his body tingled with awareness. He was ravenous, and she was a delectable fruit that refused to be plucked.
It had to be soon, or his hunger would win, and he’d have to find someone else. He wouldn’t give up on her after, but he’d consider it a bit of a personal loss, and he didn’t lose.Nope, it’s never going to happen. She’ll cave first.
With that thought firmly in mind, he joined her at the river’s edge. They didn’t speak as they scrubbed their clothes with soap and beat them against the rocks jutting out of the water.
CHAPTERFIFTY-TWO
Sahira worea resolute expression and didn’t complain, but the set of her jaw told Orin how much she disliked doing this. It served her right for not magically washing their clothes.
They could be lying on the riverbank, soaking up the sun, while watching their clothes wash themselves. Instead, his magnificent hands were getting pruned.
After about twenty minutes, she spoke again. “I didn’t expect you to know how to do this.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because you’re a dark fae prince who I’m sure never worked a day in your life. You grew up having servants do this for you.”
“You don’t consider training for war, and fighting in wars, work?”
“It is, but not the domestic kind and certainly not the kind royalty does. Even before the Lord attacked the human realm, when I had a working washer and dryer and all the electricity required to run it, I still hated doing laundry, but I didn’t have servants to do it for me. I doubt your father ever made you wash your clothes.”
“It would mortify him to see any of his sons doing such a thing, but I became an outcast who hid away in a prison on an outer realm. I may have had followers, but I had to fend for myself. Besides,no onein this realm cares about my royalty status or that I could make them very wealthy if we ever escaped. They’ve all given up.”
“True.”
His dire words put a damper on the conversation, and they didn’t speak again for a few more minutes. Eventually, his curiosity about her won out over the reminder that immortals who had been here far longer than them had given up hope of leaving.
“Did your father expect you to do your laundry?” he asked.
“From the time I was ten, I would take my laundry to the lake and wash it while he and Del did theirs.”
“Del didn’t try to make you do his laundry for him?”
She laughed as she used the back of her arm to wipe the sweat from her brow. “He tried but failed miserably.” A far-off look came over her face as she gazed across the water. “We beat the shit out of each other that day.”
“Siblings—you can’t help loving them even when trying to kill them.”
“So true. We didn’t fight often. That was one of the rare times we did, and my father stopped it. He was determined that we get along and love each other.”
“He succeeded.”
“He did.”
Orin draped his freshly rinsed shirt over a nearby tree. “How did you come to be, Sahira?”
He’d been curious about it since learning of her heritage but never asked. Most would probably consider it rude, but he didn’t care.
* * *
Sahira kept scrubbingher nightgown while refusing to look at him. She gave him credit, he’d asked whatnooneelse had before, but she knew everyone who learned of her improbable existence was dying to learn the answer.
All the others whispered about it behind her back. They speculated, guessed, and made answers up, but none of them knew the truth.
How could they when she didn’t either?
