“Not the milk and honey you’re used to from the priory, is it?” Nehelon commented, his voice authentically amused.
The sound alone was enough to make Gandrett look up.
It was probably the first real emotion she had seen on his features. His lips, tugging upwards on the sides, gave away that there was something deep down in the Fae male that wasn’t designed to destroy, but to live. It was enough to give her the courage to ask, anyway, “How do you know so much about the order?”
She had considered asking before, during the hours of riding in silence. But whenever she had glanced at him, ready to speak, his cold glare had made her reconsider. Not that she backed down easily, but with a ticking Fae male time bomb as a conversation partner, she found it better to not take any risks.
The amusement remained—superficially. Behind the hard blue diamond of his eyes, a hint of nostalgia broke through. “Everything in time, Miss Brayton,” he said formally, the mention of her last name like a private joke to him curling his lips a little more. He lifted his mug again to drain it. And that was that.
Gandrett ate in silence, the vegetable stew a welcome heat in her empty stomach. What she would have given for Nahir’s rice-and-spice dishes, for Kaleb’s smiling face across the table, Surel’s elbow in her ribs for every grin she drew from the boy.
When dinner was done, Nehelon drained his ale, pushed away from the table, and got to his feet. He flashed a feral smile at the men who were still eyeballing Gandrett as she rose with him and followed him to the counter where the barmaid held out an iron key and instructed them to take the stairs and follow the hall to the very end.
The darkness didn’t hide anything from him, but he felt Gandrett stumbling and cursing lowly behind in the lightless stairwell. He found their room and shoved the key into the lock, clicking it open with one swift turn before he stepped into the candlelit room.
Gandrett stopped on the threshold, taking in the same thing he did—
One bed. Wide enough for both of them to lay without noticing much of the other. But still, one bed.
“Come in, and close the door,” he said, keeping his voice low. All kinds of people came to a trader settlement like this, and not only the noble ones. He had seen enough scum on the streets, scanning the new arrivals—especially Gandrett’s curves—and potentially already plotting to ambush her if he let her out of his sight for even a minute. Thus, he’d insisted on one bedroom to host both of them, even if he’d much rather prefer a night of solitude. He had even paid the barmaid handsomely to give them a room with an integrated bathing chamber—overpaid, he now realized when he looked around the small space adjacent to the sleeping area. He hoped that she would do better at the second task he had paid her for.
Gandrett was beside him a breath after the door closed, her eyes weary at the sight of the bed.
“Take a bath,” he ordered and sniffed. Days of riding through the heat and dust, nights sleeping on the ground had left their odor on her, and now that the constant wind was no longer scattering the smell, or the scent that bread and ale and stew wasn’t covering, it pooled in his nose.
Not unsurprisingly, Gandrett walked right to the bathing room and locked the door behind her.
Bastard. Gandrett couldn’t think anything else for a long minute until she took a whiff herself and had to admit he was right. She reeked of sweat. And if his senses were truly more sensitive than human ones, she even pitied him. Still, he had no right…
Fueled by anger, she half ripped her satchel and clothes off, her sword clanking on the stone floor as she dropped everything in a heap, then turned on the water and stared into the bubbly flow until the small bathtub was filled enough to soak and scrape down her whole body.
With one hand, she tested the temperature while the other reached for the soap on the rim of the tub. Milk and Honey, she read the label and chuckled as she slid into the water, hair and all, and released a groan of comfort at the heat enclosing her sore body.
She could hate Nehelon all she wanted, but he had given her something no one else had in a decade—a private bathing room. She tuned out every thought that threatened to push to the front of her mind and closed her eyes.
Chapter Eleven
How long could a human girl bathe? It wasn’t a rhetorical question. He had seen the women at court disappear into their bathing chambers and remain for hours and hours, servants scrubbing down their bodies with soft sponges and massaging their scalps with fine soaps and oils.
But this was a shabby tavern with a couple of rooms for shady travelers. Money paid—no questions asked. How long could a human girl remain in a sub-standard tub?
And why, by the gods, did it bother him that she still hadn’t come out?
A knock on the door interrupted his pacing, making him leap across the bed to quickly reach the entrance.
It was the barmaid herself, a bundle of cloth in her hands and a knowing smile on her lips as she scanned the room behind him, her eyes not finding the girl. Her glance returned to his face, and her eyelids shuttered before she flashed him a tentative grin.
“In case she returns.” She handed him the bundle, rough skin brushing his hand. “And if she doesn’t…” She let him finish the thought as she turned around looking at him from under her lashes.
Nehelon nodded his thanks—for the clothes, not the offer of a warm bed—and shut the door behind the woman. It wasn’t that he hadn’t noticed her supple body, her assets plainly displayed with her low-cut blouse. And it wasn’t because of the mild lines on her face. He’d had them all—young, old, pretty, mousy, the shy, the bold, the rich, the poor… All of them had their advantages and disadvantages. On his journey south, he might have even considered taking her offer, but then something had happened—
Gandrett had happened.
And she had broken open something in him that had been sealed for a long, long time.
She had seen him. Seen him. And it had shaken him. Deeply. All that cunning, careless, audacious self he had been displaying these past years—decades. And no one had gotten a glimpse of what he was. He had traveled the lands, never stopping until Ackwood. Until he had met a broken man and sworn an oath to help him.
He unfolded the bundle, extracting a simple gown and fresh underthings from it—the size seemed about right—then laid out the clothes on the bed before he pulled out his own set of fresh garments from the pack he had brought and put them on the chair by the window.
Outside, the town—town was too much of a word for it, the village—of Elste was still full of life, people starting the Fest of Blossoms early—Vernal Equinox. The holiday of Vala. Tomorrow there would be celebrations all over Neredyn, and for the first time in ten years, he would feel the guilt ease off his shoulders.
The click of the bathing room door saved him from a journey down the pain of memory lane.
The girl padded into the room on bare feet, her body wrapped in a thick, generous towel, wet hair hanging over her shoulders and her back, down to her waist. He stifled a cough at the sight and turned around to pick up the clothes he’d procured for her, tossing them at her before she could say anything. Then, he crossed the room, avoiding the desire to let his eyes wander to the seam of her breasts visible above the towel, grabbed his bundle from the chair, and slid through the half-open bathroom door behind her.