A House of Cloaks & Daggers (The Gift War #1)

19. I’m Not a Water Faerie

Chapter nineteen

I’m Not a Water Faerie

A n hour or two passed, and I was still in the bath.

I’d made use of the tin of soap and jar of bubble bath that had appeared at my side. I had scrubbed my nails, washed my hair, and shaved my legs. My skin was pruning, but I had half a mind to remain in the water until I drowned from prolonged exposure to it. The enchanted House, to its credit, never let the bath go cold.

“Don’t you think the smell is gone yet?”

Wren’s voice came from the balcony.

I jolted upright, and my arms, which had been resting on the sides of the bathtub, fell into the water with an enormous splash. More water poured over the edges in small rolls as I brought my knees to my chest and checked to make sure the generous supply of bubbles hadn’t started to dissipate over anything important.

“What smell?” I hissed, shooting him a vicious look over my shoulder.

He was standing in the gap I had left between the doors—which I’d intended for the breeze, not burglars—with his arms crossed as he surveyed the overflow of bubbles and water leaking from the sides of the bathtub with visible distaste.

“You,” he answered simply, bringing his sinless gaze up to my face. “You’ve been in here for hours. Figured you must be self-conscious about your stink.”

I could have sworn the water in the bathtub began to boil alongside my internal rage. “You’re the one who made a bargain in order to keep my panties in your pocket,” I snapped, reaching for the bathrobe the House had brought for me earlier. It was sopping wet thanks to Wren’s intrusion, so I let it fall to the floor with a defeated slap and brought my arm back beneath the water to cover myself. “Obviously, I can’t smell that bad.”

Wren gave me a bewildered look and lifted a hand in the air. In the blink of an eye, he was holding a new bathrobe—this one in black. “Did I say I think you smell bad?” he asked, striding towards me with the robe in hand.

“It was implied.” I gave him a withering glare. “What are you doing here, anyway?”

He held the robe up by the shoulders for me, but he tugged it away as I reached for it. “I did knock,” he offered, “but you didn’t answer. I thought you might have drowned.”

I highly doubted he would care if I had.

“So, instead of coming in through the door like a normal person, you decided to jump onto the balcony?” I grabbed for the gown again, using the arm not fighting for its life to cover my breasts beneath the water, but he dangled it out of my reach. “Will you stop that?”

Wren shrugged. “The door was locked.” He brought the gown closer, then stepped back and gave me an exasperated look. “Would you just stand up and let me be a gentleman and help you?”

“You’re being a pervert.”

He frowned at that, then chose to ignore it. “You want me to put it down?” he questioned, nodding at the puddles of water on the edge of the bathtub and the floor. “You’ve flooded the bathroom.”

“So, magic it away!” I exclaimed.

“I’m not a water faerie.”

Against my better judgement, I groaned out of frustration. “You have the audacity to come in here without warning—”

“He told you he’d send someone—”

“He also locked me in here!”

“What?” Wren dropped the robe right over a wet patch along the edge of the bath. “You think we locked you in here?”

All of a sudden, I didn’t care that he was still standing a foot away from the tub or that the fresh robe was now soaking up bath water from the first one. I snatched it up and rose to my feet, putting it on backwards so that Wren didn’t see anything I really didn’t want him to see.

He didn’t look the least bit interested, though.

His eyes were an angry shade of gold as he glared at me. “The door was locked from the inside, you idiot .”

“What?”

“The House locked the door from the inside,” he repeated slowly, as if he were speaking with an illiterate child. “So that no one accidentally wanders in here.” He shook his head and turned away as I began to climb out of the bathtub. “None of the High King’s inner circle know that you’re here, and they’ve been canoodling all day, and High Fae don’t particularly care which room or what bed they go to when they—”

“I get it,” I interjected, my cheeks burning with every imaginable form of mortification.

Wren cut me a glance out of the corner of his eye. “I don’t think you do.” He took a deep breath and then aimed for the archway into the bedroom. “I came to take you to dinner. Clothes are in the wardrobe. I’ll be waiting in the hall.”

“I can find it myself,” I said impulsively. The heat colouring my cheeks flared, but Wren didn’t turn back to me.

He stalked out of the room, slamming the bedroom door shut behind him. The force was enough to send tremors through the floor, and I wondered absently if that caused any feelings of hurt to the House. However, a moment later, both the bathtub and the bathroom floor were magically dried.

Shock cleared the colour from my face, and I made an aggravated gesture at the floor. The House had witnessed the whole exchange with Wren and chose not to intervene until it wasn’t urgent anymore.

“Oh, thanks a lot,” I grumbled, tying the waist of my robe. “I was about to feel sorry for you, too.”

The enchanted House did not deign to respond in any form, and so I didn’t bother asking why it had locked the bedroom door for me but still allowed Wren passage through the balcony. I didn’t care. I didn’t even care how long I left him waiting for me out in the hall while I dried myself off and got dressed.

The only reason I was going downstairs at all was because I was starving.

And because maybe—hopefully—I had been wrong about the High King of Faerie in one way and right about him in another.