Page 36 of Bound

His frown turned to a scowl. “You might have drowned.”

She suppressed the urge to roll her eyes. “Hardly. It’s only a pond.”

He snorted, shaking his head at her. He meant to say more, she could tell. To scold or... she did not know what else.

But Thorn interrupted, nosing at the back of Braum’s head as he sniffed.

Then over his shoulder to look at her.

She held up a hand, and he lowered it enough that she could rub between his eyes. “I’m all right,” she repeated. “Got your baby back in one piece. That’s what matters.”

He snuffled a little, nuzzling her palm before he stalked back to his favoured spot to dry.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” Wren asked Braum, a little cross that the entire episode had been witnessed.

“Why am I looking at you as if I almost witnessed your demise?”

She did not much appreciate his tone or the accusation she found within it.

“I slipped,” she insisted. As if it was his business. As if he should care about anything more than the fence he had almost begged to fix. “Perhaps that is something beyond your comprehension since you have a fully formed pair of wings, but for someone like me, it’s just one of those things.”

She regretted it. Regretted the bitterness that had seeped into her every word, the anger that festered and bubbled when she should have been thanking him for intervening at all.

But the wounds were old ones, and she prickled and her eyes burned as fiercely as her throat, and she wriggled upward. Because she was fine and he was being dramatic and...

Her hands clenched.

Manners.

“I should not have said that,” she managed, trying to be calm. For it to form with a measure of sincerity, but sounded like a grouse, even to her own ears. “But thank you.”

Braum rolled his eyes.

Which brought back that horrid moment in the market. When he’d gripped her, his voice low, and belittled her.

She’d pushed it aside. Pushed it down and away because he was trying to make it up to her.

Her jaw set. She was dripping and needed a towel. Her overalls would stiffen and grow uncomfortable as they dried against her, and the cream shirt she wore beneath likely was not as modest as she’d hoped.

But she couldn’t bring herself to care.

Anger flared, hot and biting, and for one terrifying moment, she thought it would overflow. A gush of vitriol that would make him pick up his tools and leave and there would be no more meals beneath the tree, and...

That was more than fine.

“This is my home,” she reminded him. “These are my animals to care for, my land to work. You might think me incapable, might think me worse than a fledgling, but I am not. If I slip, if I splutter and embarrass myself, it is no one’s business but mine.”

She couldn’t look at him. Not when her heart raced, and she caught sight of Thorn’s posture turning defensive. His fur prickling and his posture dropping slightly lower, obviously uneasy with her tone.

Braum might have hurt her, but she did not want him savaged either.

She huffed. Turned to walk back toward her house with as much dignity as she could manage given the state of her.

She wished she could fly. To take to the sky and hide away in a tree somewhere until he’d gone and she could nurse her bruised pride in privacy.

But she couldn’t.

He reached out.