Page 88 of Bound

There would be someone, after all.

Someone to care about her. To think well of her.

He’d asked to take her home. He’d laughed at the suggestion of walking, the idea preposterous at such a distance. He’d carry her, he’d insisted, already reaching for her. She hadn’t wanted it, her stomach lurching at the prospect of a stranger touching her, holding her, but his smile was confident as he picked her up. Whispered that he was getting to touch his mate for the first time, and wasn’t that special?

She tried to smile. Tried to keep her manners when she felt little more than a queasy stomach and a prickle up and down her skin. Did it feel good? To be held?

In a way. Maybe. She didn’t know. It was enough to push through the fog of her grief, so perhaps she simply wasn’t able to interpret it correctly.

She’d had to direct him, of course. And he’d smile at her as she nudged him, and she supposed he was rather comely looking. Not that she’d really noticed anything like that before. There hadn’t been a point, after all.

Her mother had argued about it. That she could choose one of the foreign-folk to have as a husband, that she needn’t live out her days at home if she didn’t want to.

Wren had thought her silly. Absurd, even. Leave her mother? Everything they’d built for some stranger that didn’t mean anything to her yet?

Thorn had bellowed loudly when they landed, forelegs up on the fence which bowed under his weight. She’d attempted an introduction, but the stranger—the mate?—was thirsty and he wanted to see her home.

Pump water wasn’t enough, he said. Wasn’t there something else?

She’d offered tea instead, which he’d only accepted after he’d pried further about something fermented and bubbly—things she’d seen at the market but that Mama had never had coin enough for them to try. He kept smiling at her, and she found it horribly disconcerting.

He sat at the table without asking where he should, and a lump settled in her throat when she turned to find him in Mama’s chair.

She could have asked him to move.

Didn’t.

He put his arm about her waist when she brought the tea. Tugged so hard she almost fell into his lap, but kept her balance enough that she leaned against his side instead. “You’re prettier than I could have imagined.”

Her cheeks flushed, utterly unused to compliments from anyone unrelated to her.

His grip tightened about her, and that felt good, didn’t it? To be held and wanted, even if he was a little slow in letting her go to her own seat so she could sip her tea and make sense of the sudden change to... everything.

“We’ll have to sell here, of course,” he carried on, after he’d finished extolling how pleasing he found her physical appearance. “Find a good buyer. You’ll like my home better, in any case. One of the highest towers in the city. Nearly at the very top.” He glanced at her wings, and it was the first edge of a frown she’d seen from him. “There are stairs, don’t worry. You won’t be stuck in here. Not unless you’d like to be.” A smile. Too wide, and her stomach flipped a little. Was it unpleasant? She didn’t know. Maybe it was a spark of something. A glimmer of something other than the weight of everything pressing in on her.

But to sell her home? As if anyone would buy it. Choose to live out here. Perhaps one of the real farms. They’d plough over the pastures and extend their crops. Or expand the fences and fill them with hoards of hesper.

She didn’t want that.

It was small, and more work than she could handle all on her own, but it was hers.

He reached for her hand. Grasped it tightly. Brought it to his mouth where he placed a kiss upon the back of it. “You needn’t look so worried,” he assured her. “I’m going to take care of you.”

That would be nice. To not have to think so much. To worry over every little thing. He was... maybe not her mate, but she was his. Wasn’t she?

Did she want him to stay? He asked it, his hand on the door. It was getting late. He’d stayed a long while, plotting out a life that sounded... interesting. Fledglings. Festivals. His family was important, he said. She’d have a lot to learn, but she looked bright enough. New clothes. Maybe even dresses like the foreign women wore since they did not have to worry about their skirts fluttering about as they flew.

He liked that idea, his hand drifting to her hip. It was almost an embrace, she decided. Almost felt pleasant.

Did she want him to stay?

He asked it next to her ear. A breath of sound and steeped with something else that was wholly unfamiliar to her.

Stay? For what?

He did stay. She couldn’t remember nodding. Couldn’t remember saying much of anything at all. He did it for her. Complained a great deal, as well.

He liked to sit at the table. To watch her prepare meals, and smile, and tell her how nice this all was. Would be nicer still once they were situated in his home instead. There would be stone walls instead of wood. Tapestries would soften and warm it in the winters. Didn’t that sound nice?