Page 105 of Bound

Someday it would not feel so strange. Wouldn’t make her fidgety and uncomfortable. When it became expected and common because...

Because he was there so often. Because his presence would become a constant, and the thought of him leaving would be a distant, ridiculous sort of worry.

But today she still tugged at her hair and chewed at her inner cheek and went into the stall. The beams at the front were new, the old ones evidently beyond repair. And with them went the little etchings she’d carved when she was small, much to her mother’s horror when she’d realised what she’d been doing.

Then there was the scolding about troublemaking and Proctors and all of this could be quite temporary if they were not careful.

Then she was hugged tight when Wren’s eyes filled with tears and her mouth full of apologies, and her mother had gentled as she always did.

Her father had not given her a time, and she glanced at Braum. Would he want to stay? Hang about while the market opened? She should be setting up her wares, and yet there was the urge to make sure she would know when she’d see him next. Perhaps... to know if he meant to walk her home again.

Which was silly. He had things to do—even if it was only attending to that secret business beyond the pasture that he’d banished her from.

He glanced about the stall but did not enter. As if this was her space, and he would not presume his welcome, the same as he did at home.

“I’ve things to do,” Braum informed her, his attention at the corners of the stall. It seemed finely crafted to her, but she did not have his eye. “Would you mind if I walked you back later? Unless... is that something your father attends to?” He did glance at her then, a small smile at his mouth to suggest that things were mended between them after all. “I will not intrude, if it is.”

Perhaps it should have been, but it had never occurred to her to ask after she’d lost her mother. “No.” He grimaced. “That is, no, he... he doesn’t walk me back. And if you’ve nothing better to do, I wouldn’t mind the company.”

He breathed out a rueful sort of laugh, and shook his head. “Better to do,” he mumbled to himself. As if it was preposterous.

What was she to do with him?

Give in.

The thought came so gently, so naturally, that her heart raced. It would be easy, wouldn’t it? It wasn’t like before. Not really. Braum was steady and gentle and thoughtful and he’d be kind even... even when he crept up into the loft and into her bed. Or maybe he’d wait at the foot of it. Insist that she be the one to invite him up. As if she’d want that.

She hated the way her thoughts circled. How she didn’t trust herself any more than she trusted anyone else. For all that she had come to like him, to enjoy his company, it always came back to the parts she detested, and a mate would want that. Would want the whole of it.

Even if a wretch and a cad had come first. Spoiling what might have been...

Might have been different.

She didn’t take it back. Let him smile and nod and let their parting be temporary.

It was only after he was out of sight that she allowed herself to sink onto one of the stools—a different height than had been there before, much to her chagrin. And if it took a long while for her heart to calm and her mind to put the subject of that back into its compartment, then at least she was able to do it at all.

???

“No one is home,” Da murmured beside her. “If you’d like to go in.”

It wasn’t one of those tall spires she’d imagined when she was little. From counting the windows, she could surmise it was three storeys, but hardly enough to even be considered a tower.

It was stone, just as so much of the city was. One of the older sections, away from the outskirts and nestled in the middle. There was some prestige to that, but not enough that his family would be considered truly wealthy.

They didn’t talk about such things.

They didn’t talk about a lot of things.

The front door did not have cracks in the wood. The stones at the street level could use scrubbing, the white stones taking a grey hue where dirt and soot mingled.

It was ordinary, for the city. Nothing remarkable about it to suggest that her father lived there.

She’d thought there would be. Some sign, some evidence, that if only she had been brave enough to wander enough, she might have found him.

Wren swallowed, warring with herself. Did she want to go in? To see it all?

Or to keep to her memories. Where she could pretend that his home was hers, that their family contained only three members. That everything was as it was.