Chapter 212: The truth is...

BONNIE

I should have looked away. I knew that. Some better version of me would have made a small, dignified noise and drifted back to the window, hands folded, mind already far from here. Instead I stood nailed to the floorboards, my mouth parched and my pulse thudding slow and foolish, watching him fold at the waist.

He rummaged through the stack of folded clothes like a man searching for socks, absent, unhurried, oblivious to the havoc he left behind. The light slid over him like water, tracing the long plane of his back, the subtle shift and roll of muscle beneath his skin, the narrowing of his waist, the deep line of his spine dipping into the small of his back, and then, the wickedly inviting curve below that I had no right to memorize. I swallowed. It didn’t help.

He found what he wanted. A pair of dark briefs. He straightened and stepped in.

They did not help.

They clung so low on his hips, so languid, so shamelessly casual, that the fabric only served to frame the precise line where his hipbones met his stomach. A strip of bare skin. The faint dark trail beneath his navel, leading down into everything I was forbidden to imagine, and imagining all the same. Everything, perfectly traced in cotton.

That was when I noticed I’d stopped breathing.

"You are staring again," he said without turning around.

"I am not."

"I can feel you through the bond."

"That is not fair."

"Neither is standing there looking like that."

He turned at last, with an infuriating sort of leisure, and I discovered that my imagination had been doing him a disservice. There was his bare chest, his damp hair curling slightly at the ends, and the afternoon sunlight spilling over his shoulders, tracing the contours of a body that seemed almost deliberately designed to make rational thought difficult.

His gaze settled on me.

I watched his eyes travel down the green dress, linger briefly at the hem, then climb back to my face. The corner of his mouth tilted, and something warm and wicked stirred in his expression.

"Although," he added, "I suppose I cannot complain."

I folded my arms, mostly because I needed to do something with my hands. "It is a dress."

"It is a very short dress."

"It is a practical dress, womanizer."

His eyebrows rose. "Womanizer?"

"Would you prefer shameless flirt?"

"I am the shameless one? I would prefer you to stop looking at me as though you are considering whether to tear my pants off."

My mouth fell open.

"I was doing no such thing!"

"Of course not." His smile widened, and the bond betrayed me with a sudden, treacherous warmth that had nothing to do with the fire. "You were merely admiring the view."

"I was looking at your face," I said, seizing the first defense that came to mind.

"Really?" He tilted his head. "Then why did you look away when I caught you staring at my hips?"

"I did not."

"You did. Then you looked at my chest, which is an interesting progression for someone who insists she is not staring."

"I was trying to establish whether you had any shame at all."

"And have you reached a conclusion?"

"Unfortunately, yes."

He laughed, low and thoroughly pleased with himself, before glancing down at my folded arms. "You know, Bonnie, if you wanted a closer look, you could simply ask."

"Ask you to put on a shirt?"

"Ask me to take my time getting dressed." His eyes gleamed. "Though, judging by the way you’re looking at me, I suspect you’d prefer I didn’t bother."

"But unlike you, I can be honest."

"What does that mean?"

"It means you are making my day very difficult." He took a step toward me, and I felt the heat of him across the space between us. "I would hate to be led into temptation before lunch, Bonnie. I am trying to be a gentleman."

"I am starting to think," I said, lifting my chin, "that you are doing this on purpose."

"Doing what?"

"Walking around like that. Dressing slowly. Standing in the sun."

"And if I am?" His eyes glittered. "Is it working?"

I did not answer. I crossed the floor instead, bare feet silent on the old boards, until I stood close enough that I could see every pore on his skin and the water still caught in his lashes. I looked up at him for a long moment. Then I snatched a shirt from the trunk and flung it hard against his chest.

He caught it against his ribs, laughing.

"Put it on," I said.

He pulled it over his head, still chuckling, and the white linen fell to his hips and finally did what the briefs had not. I let out a breath I had been holding for some time.

The laughter faded.

I stood there with my arms wrapped around myself, suddenly aware of how quiet the room had grown, and of the thing that had been sitting under my breastbone since yesterday like a stone swallowed whole. The fire popped. A wasp bumped against the window glass and fell away.

"Lysander."

He had caught the shift in my voice. His hands, which had been smoothing the shirt, stilled.

"I have been thinking about what I have been holding off from you all day," I said, "and I want to say it now. Before my nerves weaken. Before I start to overthink again."

"Bonnie." He stepped closer, gentle, but did not touch me. "If you are not ready for it, you can hold on to it. I told you I would wait. I meant it."

"I know you did." I shook my head. "And I do not think that is a smart choice."

His brows drew together.

"Fia and I talked about it. In the infirmary, before she left. She is right, and I hate that she is right." I made myself meet his eyes. "The longer you are in the dark, the more dangerous this becomes. For you. For everyone. I do not want to be the reason something horrible happens to you or anyone else."

He went rigid.

It was not dramatic. His face did not change much. But I felt it through the bond, like a hand pressed flat against a door, cold tension spreading, a sudden, watchful stillness that had nothing to do with the room. He lowered himself slowly onto the arm of one of the leather chairs, as though his legs had decided it for him.

"What does that mean?" His voice was very quiet. "Reason for what? What is coming?"

"I do not know." The words scraped. "That is the problem. I do not know, and I have been carrying around the one piece that might tell us."

I sat on the edge of the bed across from him and twisted my fingers together in my lap, the green skirt bunching under them.

"It is about the time I was being attacked in my dreams," I began. "You remember. When I woke up bleeding. It has stopped. Fia and I figured out a way to stop it. It took a lot out of me, and I hoped fixing it would be the end of it. It was not." I looked at my knuckles. "That same day, I discovered two things."

"What things?"

My throat closed. For a second, I thought I wouldn’t manage it. The fire burned very bright in the corner of my eye, and the sun lay in a long gold bar across the floor between his legs and my bare feet, and I thought of my mother on her knees in a kitchen, begging me to keep a secret.

I made myself breathe.

"The identity of my father," I said. "And why the goddess abandoned me."