Nadia #2
“It can offer us most things,” he said, “if I’m willing to be Prince Lorenzo Veyne for an evening.”
“And are you?”
A faint, tired edge touched his mouth. “I am.”
“Then we get there before dark.”
For a moment, the only sound was the wind moving through the trees above us and the slow, wet crumble of earth somewhere below the broken road.
Whatever he found in my face didn't loosen the careful set of his shoulders, but something in him shifted. Possibly gratitude, or the closest Enzo could get to gratitude without throwing himself off the cliff after his horse just to avoid the indignity.
But he understood.
That was enough.
He stepped back first and went to Sugar. She watched him come with her ears half-pinned, her entire body arranged in the posture of an animal who had saved everyone’s life and was prepared to be insufferable about it forever.
Enzo ran a hand down her neck.
“Sugar,” he said quietly, “we’re about to ask a great deal of you. I am aware.”
Sugar pinned her ears the rest of the way.
This time, he did smile. Barely.
“Your objection has been noted.”
Then he turned to me. “Up you go.”
I went to put my foot in the stirrup, and Sugar—the worst horse in the world, the warhorse who’d spent a week trying to remove me from existence by any means available to her—stood perfectly still.
Enzo gave me a leg up.
His hands found my waist with the same practiced efficiency they always did. A task. A lift. Nothing more.
Except his mouth had been on mine ten minutes ago.
Except those same hands had held me through the night beneath a wool blanket in a cabin with the fire burning low while I slept against his chest like I had any right to be there.
Except I knew now what his restraint felt like when it broke.
He lifted me into the saddle, and I tried very hard not to think about any of that. I failed before he even let go. Then he swung up behind me.
I’d ridden in front of someone exactly never.
I’d ridden badly, painfully, and against my will, but always alone.
This was different. This was worse. This was Enzo settling behind me with the controlled precision of forced marches, battlefields, and whatever horrors came after, treating the whole thing like logistics while his body came around mine and made a liar out of every practical thought in my head.
His thighs bracketed mine. His chest settled against my back. One arm came around me for the reins. Not an embrace, technically. Which was exactly the sort of distinction cowards and emotionally repressed princes invented to sleep at night.
The line of him fit against me with unbearable accuracy.
The same accuracy as last night, when I’d fallen asleep in his lap. The same accuracy as the kiss, when his mouth had found mine on the broken edge of a road and every piece of me had answered before sense could intervene.
Now we were both fully dressed.
On a horse.
On a ruined road with the cliff still crumbling behind us, his blood rations gone, a village ahead, and a stepmother somewhere in the world who’d almost certainly arranged for the ground to open beneath his horse.
I would think about that last part later. I would think about all of it later.
“Walk on,” he said to Sugar, his voice low and close beside my ear.
And Sugar walked on.
The first hour was agony.
Not pain. Pain, I understood. Pain was simple.
Pain could be categorized, ignored, outlasted.
This wasn’t pain. This was Enzo’s breath warming the side of my neck every time he leaned forward to guide Sugar through a bad stretch of mud.
This was his arm hovering an inch above my hipbones, never touching unless the horse shifted, which meant of course Sugar shifted constantly because apparently the animal had chosen this moment to become an agent of divine cruelty.
This was his body holding itself away from mine with such brutal care that I could feel the effort of it.
And gods help me, the effort was worse.
Because it meant he remembered. It meant he was thinking about the kiss, too. About my hands in his coat. About his teeth at my lip. About the broken sound he’d made into my mouth before four centuries of discipline dragged him back by the throat.
Neither of us spoke about it.
We talked, eventually, about practical things, because practical things were safe and boring and didn’t involve the fact that every inch of his body behind mine was a threat to my sanity.
The road. Maeven’s Hollow. What we needed to acquire there.
Whether I had coin. Some. Whether he had coin.
Less than I did, thanks to the bulk of his purse currently lying at the bottom of a ravine with the grey.
Also gone: his sigil seals.
Which meant he had nothing on him to prove he was anyone but a very tall, very well-dressed vampire on a borrowed horse with a small, armed woman in front of him who was one small breath away from gutting anyone who looked at him funny like a fucking fish.
“I’ll be recognized,” he said. “Maeven’s Hollow isn’t far from the village we left yesterday morning. They know me.”
The first bit of good luck all damn day. “Then we won’t need coin.”
“I will not impose.”
“I will.” I kept my eyes on the road because looking anywhere else was dangerous. “If they don’t give us what we need, I have other ways to get it. I haven’t lived a hundred and sixty years on diplomacy alone.”
He went quiet behind me, and I felt even the smallest shift of him—the faint tightening of his thighs against the saddle, the careful adjustment of his breath before it touched my neck.
Then, very softly, against the side of my throat, he said, “I don’t think you understand how much you wouldn’t need to impose.”
I didn’t turn my head—couldn’t.
The angle was wrong, and his face was too close, and turning would’ve put my mouth near his jaw. His rain-cold, blood-warm, recently kissed jaw.
I wasn’t going to do that.
Not on a horse. Not on a broken road. Not in the middle of a kingdom that apparently wanted us both dead.
“I understand it just fine,” I said.
His breath moved over my skin. “Do you?”
Sugar chose that exact moment to step around a slick rut, and Enzo’s arm came fully around my waist.
Just for balance.
Just for a second.
Just long enough for his palm to flatten against my stomach and for every thought in my head to go silent.
Then he eased back.
“Apologies,” he murmured.
The word was perfectly polite.
The hand he removed from my body was not.
I stared at the road ahead and decided, with absolute certainty, that one of us wasn’t going to survive the next two hours.