Chapter 9: Friends, Cal?

The elders adjourned without a ruling, which meant Dunstan had let them.

By midnight I was in Darian's study, on the leather sofa, with my hand on his chest.

He lay with his head on a cushion and his boots on the floor and his shirt open.

Every time I lifted my palm, the burn came back.

I could see it in his jaw first, and then in his eyes, and then his hand would shoot out and catch my wrist.

So I stopped lifting it.

"Say if it gets worse," I said.

"It won't."

"You told the whole hall it was nothing."

"I'm an idiot." His voice was rough. "I also don't want you to move."

The fire crackled.

My palm rested over his heart, and it beat hard and fast against it.

His skin was hot and damp, and there was a long scar under my fingers that I had not known about.

"What's this?" I asked.

"A rogue. Two winters ago."

"You never told me."

"You were at the clinic that week. I didn't want you to come home to a hospital bed."

That was such a Darian answer that my throat tightened.

I looked at his face in the firelight.

He had been looking at me for a long time.

"Terms," he said quietly. "You said no touching."

"I know what I said."

"You've got your hand on me."

"It's medical."

"Is it?"

My mouth was dry.

I thought about the pantry, the shelf, his thumb on my knuckle.

I thought about the four days at the diner when I had lain on Mack's couch and told myself I did not miss the sound of his key in a lock.

"I don't know," I said.

He turned his head.

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