Painted Blind Part 9

I tugged him toward the water, and he resisted.

"Give me your sandals and your cloak. I'll catch up."

I tossed him my shoes as he backed away. Then I ran toward the surf, hiked up my dress and let the waves crash into my knees. "It's warm!" I exclaimed.

"The current brings the water straight from the equator. That's why our climate is so mild." He pulled off his shoes and set them on a rock out of the water's reach.

"We aren't near the equator?"

Beside me now, he answered softly. "We are at the same longitude and lat.i.tude as we were in your world."

"Then they can't be the same world, or the landscape would be the same."

We continued walking where the water lapped at our ankles. "It's a phenomenon no one can explain. We are the same distance from the sun, the same distance from the equator."

"What about the stars?"

He slid his arm around me once again. "The stars are in the exact location here as they are in Bozeman, but where you have mountains, we have a sea. Where you have seas, we have vast continents of land. It is a mystery to even our brightest scholars."

"Who'd have thought you could grow oranges in Montana?" I mused.

"Not exactly Montana, or b.u.t.te would be somewhere out there." He pointed to the ocean.

All that showed of the moon in the overcast sky was the silver outline on the clouds. Erik stopped and tugged on my hand. We had wandered far, and I a.s.sumed he wanted to turn back. I turned, but he stood still and brought me into his arms.

"Does this bother you?"

"No," I answered honestly. He was familiar to me now, and I relished the feel of his skin on mine.

Erik brushed his lips against my temple and lingered there before dropping his chin and softly kissing my cheek.

I turned my face to him, and our lips touched feather light and warm for an instant before he pulled back.

He didn't quite push me away. It was more subtle, the way his hands dropped from my waist, and he put three or four gaping inches between us. It might as well have been a canyon, the way I felt the void open and myself falling into it.

Erik kept hold of my hand as we returned to the cove, but the intimacy of it was lost. I had overstepped the bounds, wanted too much, and the sting of his refusal rang in my ears louder than the surf. Embarra.s.sed and confused, I wished he would disappear. If he would just vanish, I could curl up on the sand, cover my head and own my shame.

His gate quickened slightly, and his posture stiffened. "It's late," he said. He wanted to be rid of me.

Storm clouds threatened the horizon. The air smelled of rain. I could see nothing of his face, but I knew what was there: a strained jaw line and tight expression, the same things I felt in my own face.

I swung onto Pixis's back without Erik's offered hand, and when we landed in the courtyard, I entered the house before he left the gra.s.s. In my cowardly retreat I felt his dismissal like needles in my back.

"Psyche." His voice softened now.

I stopped and listened. When he didn't say more, I moved on without answering.

The wooden door closed behind me with a comforting thud. I leaned against it in the solitude of my room. His footsteps pa.s.sed to his bedroom. The rooms stood too close together for the distance between us now. It had all been so fragile, the trust and the intimacy. One false step, and it was lost.

I rummaged through the dresser and found a modest nightgown, which I pulled on, then left the dress and the cloak and all of Erik's gifts on the dresser by the door.

Pain, I could handle. Failure, too, was easy to live with, and loneliness was simply a fact of life for a girl so different from her peers. But misread intentions and offering something of myself that wasn't wanted-that was unbearable. I crawled under the covers and closed my eyes. My only consolation was that I would never have to face him in the light of day.

I lay there unable to sleep and helpless to stop the silent trickle down my cheeks. Somewhere in the distance thunder bellowed, and a flash of lightning showed through the open window.

The door slid open, and Erik crept past. He closed the window and locked the latch, then turned and stood over me. I lay perfectly still and slowed my breath to convince him I was asleep. He sat on the edge of the bed with a sigh and touched my hair. When his fingers. .h.i.t on a damp spot on the pillow, he drew a sharp breath and stood. I waited for him to slink away, but he drew back the blankets. He slid his arms under my shoulders and knees and lifted me to his chest.

"What do you think you're doing?" I pushed against him, trying to wiggle out of his arms. Rain struck like hundreds of soldiers marching across the roof.

"It will storm like this for hours," he replied as he carried me toward the hall.

"I can walk."

"I know my way around the palace without looking." The hall was completely black and so was the living room. Even the foyer downstairs had been closed off with heavy doors. I could see nothing as he moved toward his bedroom. When the door opened, the blackness stretched unbroken before us. He moved through the dark and set me against a pile of pillows on the bed.

Another clap of thunder rumbled on the mountainside, closer and more fierce than before. We were in the master suite, which hung over the cliff.

"Wouldn't we be safer downstairs?" I protested.

"We're perfectly safe here." He moved to the other side of the bed and sat down, easily able to keep his distance, because the bed was huge. He waited in silence, then, "Here it comes."

Suddenly a rush of water swept overhead. "What was that?" I asked. "It sounds like we're under a river."

"A waterfall," he corrected. "All of the rooflines divert water over this room, where it runs off the balcony and falls into the valley. If you were standing in the valley, it would look like the palace disappeared completely under a wall of water." With that he fell silent again, and I wondered if he, like me, was thinking of our botched embrace on the beach and those stupid tears on my pillow.

Apparently he was, because he said, "I didn't want to hurt you."

I forced a laugh. "I'm fine. Seriously."

He touched my arm unexpectedly, and I flinched. He slammed his fist into the bed between us. "We were past this."

I folded my arms across my chest. What right did he have to be angry? He was one who drew me closer and put his lips to my face. Refusal was my right at that moment not his, but somehow the whole thing fell apart.

He moved toward me. His hand felt around where my arm had been and didn't find it there. He found my shoulder, slid his fingers down my arm and tugged on my elbow until I released my grasp. "That isn't what I meant."

"Whatever." I tried to pull away, but Erik's grip tightened.

"I kissed a mortal once," he said. "She collapsed. Unconscious." He stroked my arm. "I didn't want to hurt you." He chose his words carefully and spoke them with regret. "But this pain seems worse somehow." It was possibly all the apology he could muster. After all, he was the ruler of a kingdom, a boy who'd grown up without parents. He answered to no one.

"Was she hurt?" I muttered.

"I don't know. I fled." Then he added, "I was only thirteen."

"I'm not afraid of you," I replied, the storm nearly drowning my words.

Erik put his lips to my ear. "We both know that isn't true."

I couldn't keep my head from dipping toward him or my face from brushing against his. Carefully, he raised my chin and pressed his lips to mine. For a moment he paused, and I thought he'd pull away, but he drew me into his arms and parted my lips with his.

Something inside me burst, sending sparklers glittering through my body. His kiss overpowered me with a sense of perfect well-being and... love.

My grip on his shoulder slackened; my body grew weak. If I'd been standing, there's no doubt my knees would have buckled.

"Psyche." His voice was frightened.

I didn't lose consciousness, but I was too weak to speak. All that came from my lips was a sigh. He pulled me to his chest muttering curses, some in English and some not.

The fog in my head parted. "I'm fine."

"You nearly fainted," was his sharp reply.

"It didn't hurt."

He pulled away. "Explain," he demanded with all the irritated authority of the prince he claimed he wasn't.

I tried, honestly, I did, but I could only manage a few fl.u.s.tered sentences and a single adjective.

"May I clarify this?" he said. "You nearly fainted because it was..."

"Wonderful," I repeated, my voice stupidly dreamy. Maybe he didn't believe me, but it was true. People were overwhelmed by pain all the time; somehow he did the opposite to me.

A mischievous laugh escaped him, and he drew me to his face. "Squeeze my arm when you start to go."

I never understood the laws of attraction. Occasionally, I would do a double-take, catch a glimpse of some guy at a distance and feel the inherent need to see more of him, but on closer inspection, everyone was flawed, if not physically, in deeper, more significant ways.

Holden, for example, was the epitome of masculine beauty, but he was intolerably conceited. At our joint photo shoot, he was visibly pleased by my looks and made my skin crawl with every touch. At this he smirked, sure I was reveling in the pleasure of him, when all I wanted to do was run away.

Here in the dark, however, I came to understand that attraction had so little to do with sight. The brush of Erik's skin against my arm made me shiver. From a single deep and unrestrained kiss flowed a thrilling tide that could take us under. Since I'd never seen him, he allowed me to see with my hands, which was so much more dangerous. I lay with my head against his shoulder and traced the ridges of his chest and abdomen with my fingers. He was a varied landscape, dips and valleys between mounds of muscle. My fingers slid up to his shoulder and over the bulk of his bicep. I wrapped my hand around the bulge and couldn't make it halfway as he tightened his arm into a stone.

My fingers moved onto his collarbone and the dip of his neck, where his scent always drew me closer. When I raised my hand, he turned his chin away. "Not my face."

I dropped my hand to his chest and drew my cheek across the hollow of his shoulder.

He raised up on his elbow and dumped me onto the pillow. "Is it my turn?"

"Definitely not."

"You don't trust me," he said, more amused than offended.

I didn't trust myself. It would be too easy to let the thrill of tonight run away with me.

He laid against the pillows, stretching his long arms over his head. "It's just as well. You need to understand our marriage customs before you offer anything of yourself to me."

"I thought I was the forbidden fruit. Isn't it illegal to seduce a mortal?"

"Things are different now. You're here, and you've worn my pendant. The counsel would frown on it. They'd give me grief, but..." He chuckled. "I've made a nuisance of myself with the dust. Mortal or not, they'd happily dispose of me to any woman."

"You and your dust."

"Me and my l.u.s.t."

"Present company excluded, of course."

He snorted. "Whatever."

I yawned without meaning to.

"Are you sleepy?"

"How could I sleep through this ruckus?" The thunder and the rain still pounded an angry cacophony on the roof.

"Good, then let's talk marriage."

"Whoa, horsey."

"In general," he rea.s.sured me. "Did you notice Eudora's pendant today?"

"The crest was the same, but the stones were different from the one you gave me. And she wore it around her neck because she's married. Aeas told me."

"Do you remember what stones were in the pendant?"

The largest was a sapphire. There was a center onyx and two side stones, but I didn't remember what they were.

"One is an emerald and the other is an aquamarine. The crest represents the kingdom, and the gem cl.u.s.ter is a signature."

"The woman in the fountain is wearing a different crest," I remembered.

"It's my mother. The crest on her pendant belongs to her husband's kingdom. Every pendant in the kingdom bears the same crest, but each adult male has an individual gem signature. The signature Eudora was wearing belongs to my head shepherd. I had to purchase two hundred sheep from the neighboring kingdom to bring him here, but she wouldn't have anyone else." He rummaged around the pile of pillows and pulled down the covers. "Crawl under, it's getting cold."

"Not a good idea," I protested.

"I told you, you're safe with me."

"Oh, but are you safe with me?" I teased.

Erik pulled the blanket over us. "Molest me. I dare you, but not until I finish explaining what would happen if you did."

I faced his voice. "The pendant is a token of courtship. I get that."

"A man presents his pendant to a woman and, while she wears it, no other man will try to court her. It would be dishonorable. Courtship is a public matter."

I wasn't sure I liked the sound of that.

"Everyone in the village knows who is courting a girl by the gem signature she wears. They know the duration of the relationship by how long she's been wearing the pendant. Their courtship would not be like dating in your world-two young people going off at night to date in private. Here they spend time together with their families, because if they are to form any serious attachment, the families must love and accept the new member."

"I suppose that makes sense, but you don't want to meet my dad."

"I didn't say I wouldn't meet your dad. I just didn't offer to let him see me."