Page 28 of The Winner's Kiss
It was the way she felt, tucked up against the stranger’s chest, cradled by either arm. It was the way her body seemed to know him.
Her head swayed. She let herself rest against him.
It wasn’t right that her body should know this person when her mind didn’t. Hazily, she realized that he could tell her any lie he wanted.
Her memory was a mouth with the teeth torn out. She kept reaching in, probing the holes, pulling back. It hurt.
Yes, any lie.
He had saved her, but she didn’t know what he wanted from her—or what he might say to get it.
His heart beat against her spine. It lulled her even as she knew that it shouldn’t. She slept.
In the morning, she got a better look at him. Her mind was clearer, she thought, than it had been in some time. He was building a fire. He slowed, though, when he caught the way her gaze inspected him. He went still.
He was dirty all over. She had the fleeting thought that she’d seen him both dirty and clean before. Her gaze traced the long scar, quite visible now that the sulfur had rubbed away. A sort of half recognition shimmered inside her. But the scar wasn’t what made him memorable.
His gray eyes flashed to hers.
She should remember him. She went over the lines of his face again. Distrust coiled within her. It didn’t seem possible that she would have seen a person like this and not remember him.
Something was wrong with the awkward claim he’d made after their escape that they were friends. If the tentative way he’d said it hadn’t alerted her to its not being wholly true, the way he’d just let her evaluate him and now waited, breath held, for some judgment, suggested his nervousness. If they were really friends, she wouldn’t make him nervous. She felt herself harden.
Now he looked hurt, and like he was trying to hide it, as if he’d guessed her thoughts.
This, too, she didn’t like: how easily he read her.
They rode separately. She was on Javelin. He rode a mare. The next time they stopped to rest the horses, she came closer to the fire, even though this meant coming closer to him. She was achingly cold.
He offered her bread and dried meat. He apologized for it. “I know you’re used to better.”
Which was a stupid thing to say, given that he’d just rescued her from a prison.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “That was a stupid thing to say.”
When she took the canteen, she couldn’t stop herself from doing what she’d done in the morning, which was to sniff the water.
“It’s not drugged,” he told her.
“I know,” she replied, and thought from the way his face changed that he’d seen her disappointment.
He kept apologizing. He kept trying to tell her something that she wouldn’t let him finish, and when she cut him off he didn’t look remotely like the person who had pulled her across the prison yard and attacked anyone who stood in their way, using that odd, heavy ring on his finger, and then disarming a fallen guard, wielding the stolen dagger as his own, burying it in the next guard’s belly.
“Please let me explain,” he said as they rode.
Fear flickered in her lungs. Her mind felt sore. Though it was dizzying to not know so much, a shrinking thing inside her warned that it’d be much worse to remember. “Leave me alone.”
“Don’t you want to know what happened? Why you were there?”
She saw his naked misery. She suspected that any explanation he could provide was more for his sake than hers.
She wanted to shove him off his horse. Make him feel how it was to fall. She was falling, she was plunging through the black nothingness of why and how, she was terrified of what she had forgotten. She blamed him for not seeing her fear even as she was determined to hide it. “All right,” she said. “Go ahead. Tell me why.”
For all his earlier persistence, he now didn’t seem to know where to begin. “You were a spy. You were caught.”
“Your spy?”
“Not exactly.”
