His eyes, diamond-blue and flickering with something other than fury or mockery, were on her face. She turned away before she could figure out what it was that was shaping a crooked line between his eyebrows.
“You have helped me prepare for the past month.” And if it weren’t for him, she wouldn’t be in a situation where she even had to prepare.
“You need to study the castle layout, the floor plans, the exits.” Nehelon didn’t raise his voice but spoke with quiet urgency as he followed her down the stairs past a row of stained glass windows in crimson and blue. “I am not going to send you in there without knowing you’ll find your way out.”
Gandrett turned the last corner and walked up to her chamber doors, nodding at Kyle, who smiled back, before she stepped inside, not bothering to close the doors behind her. People came and went in her room as they pleased, it seemed, and there was no door strong enough to keep the Fae male out.
Eugina had left dinner on the table. A meal that wasn’t fish, judging by the delicious smell of it.
When she turned around, Nehelon had shut the doors and was sauntering toward her with lazy strides.
“I haven’t bought you out of Everrun to let you recklessly throw away your life at Eedwood.” He planted himself before her at arm’s length, staring her down.
“You were just a messenger, delivering the goods.” Gandrett waited. Waited for the fury to take over his face, for the anger to flare in his eyes, for his temper to take him over.
All he did was look at her, eyes probing. Until he finally said, “We don’t have much time left. I don’t want to waste it slandering each other.”
His words—
Gandrett loosed a breath, the tight bodice of her dress letting it rush from her lungs the second she freed it. If she hadn’t known better, she would have said the Fae male was concerned.
“Wasting time is nothing I enjoy,” she eventually said after a pause that let her wonder if this was the same male before her who had mercilessly battered his sword down on her a couple of days ago. “What do you suggest we do?”
His features suddenly softened, and his glamour slowly faded as they eyed each other, both cautious, both careful, as if that sudden truce between them might burst into thin air if they as much as blinked.
Nehelon’s face changed, and it wasn’t only the hardness of his features that slipped but the glamour, too, allowing Gandrett to see it, all of it. The flawlessness of his skin, a sun-kissed, golden tan, glowed from up close as he took a step forward. His eyes, all facets of blue shone in the depth of diamonds. His eyebrows arched in two dark lines, leading her gaze to the side, to the waves of his hair, to what was hidden beneath it.
Gandrett held her breath as she lifted a shaky hand and reached for what she had seen and still had difficulties believing. But when he stood before her, un-glamoured, a Fae, a real Fae, and for once not growling at her—
He didn’t move as her fingers brushed aside his hair, exposing a pointed ear, and let the tip of her index finger graze along the miraculous arch that was evidence he truly was a different species. And she could swear his heart was pounding in the silence that filled the space between them.
Nehelon didn’t back away as she explored the tip of his ear. He didn’t speak—
But the look in his eyes gave away that it took him everything he had not to attack her, not to scold her—or run away.
“How—?” Gandrett breathed as she studied Nehelon’s face, her fingers moving down the angle of his cheekbone. His skin was like silk, like flower petals, yet rough from the wind and dirt he was exposed to every day in those training rings. From the many years he had been walking this earth. She didn’t even know how old he was. In his human glamour, he looked in the prime of his years. But in his Fae form—
Gandrett had no words that could describe what she saw, what she tried to understand. His eyes held the wisdom of centuries and yet—yet his face was as youthful as if the goddess herself had blessed him with eternal spring.
As her fingers reached the end of his cheekbone and traced down toward his strong jaw, Nehelon’s hand caught hers as if he had suddenly awoken from a trance. It hurt as he pulled her hand away with a rough grasp. “This,” he noted, eyes solidifying as he spoke, “is exactly what I call a waste of time.”
Then, he dropped her hand as if it burned him and headed for the door, hair swooshing back over his ear as he spun away from her.
Gandrett couldn’t even take a steadying breath before he reached the threshold and said over his shoulder, “I should know better, Gandrett Brayton, than to try to change the course of history.”
And then he was out the door.
Chapter Twenty
Touch him. He had let her touch him. What had gotten into him? If it weren’t for his promise to Lord Tyrem, to save his son, Gandrett’s door wouldn’t be the only one he’d shut behind him. What was he thinking, allowing to let her glimpse even a hint of him? To let her break that glamour over and over again? He should have killed her that first day she had seen his ears, when she had realized what he was. The horror in her eyes—
And yet… he needed her. He needed her to safely retrieve Joshua. To get to Eedwood and back in one piece. To return so he could prove she was who he thought she was.
His hands shook as he ripped all maps of Eedwood he owned from the shelves of his study and dumped them in a heap at the center of the room. He didn’t bother to light a candle, Fae eyes allowing him to see just as well as in bright daylight, his fingers already sorting through everything that would help Gandrett prepare her escape routes. He knew she would know what to do with the maps and plans. She had been trained by the best—
Nehelon didn’t show up for training the next day, leaving Gandrett’s nerves to lay bare as she kept staring at the door he emerged from like a clockwork every morning at first light.
Instead, Mckenzie met her with her arms full of scrolls of parchment.
“He says it’s best you take some time to look at those on your own,” she said by way of greeting, a half-hearted smile tugging on her lips.
Gandrett didn’t feel like taking a look at anything. Or smiling, for that matter.
Sleep had eluded her all night, and the meager breakfast Eugina had brought didn’t change much about her energy levels, nor did the fact that it would be hours before she would force down some fish dish she’d rather never have known existed.
“He is going to great lengths to make sure you are prepared,” Mckenzie noted, beckoning with her chin for Gandrett to follow her to the small bench near the training ring where Nehelon sometimes sat when he had her try movements.
Gandrett shrugged, the leathers on her shoulder shifting up to her ears. “He went to great lengths to get me from Everrun,” she pointed out. “Why would he not make sure his prize pony lives up to his promises?”
Mckenzie gave her a sideways glance as she flattened one of the scrolls between them on the bench. “You are not his prize pony,” she said and picked up another scroll, opening it just enough to peek inside. “He really wants you to succeed.” She dropped the scroll she was holding and looked at Gandrett instead. “He cares.”