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“That would be nice,” she agreed, and I led her to the couches, taking a seat opposite from her, watching her arrange the various layers of her skirt.
“My apologies, I didn’t mean to put you in a difficult position with Lady Natoi.”
She looked up from fiddling with her dress, allowing it to fall where it liked. “No apologies necessary. Lady Natoi can be… overbearing at times, but she means well.”
I stopped myself from rolling my eyes, not sure she believed her own words and was just trying to be polite or wondered if she was that naive. She didn’t strike me to be a naive person, but I didn’t know her that well yet.
“So your stay so far has been pleasant then?” I inquired, wondering why I was making such stupid small talk when a thousand other questions hovered on the tip of my tongue.
She sighed. “Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate everything your people and Lady Natoi have done for me, but…” She stopped, waited for my encouraging nod before she continued. “Going out to dinner every night with a different man, who looks so expectantly at me with such hope in his eyes that I’m his mekarry, is… disheartening.”
Exhausting, getting to me, too much, I filled in other words for her that I imagined lay on the tip of her tongue, but were left unspoken, just as another surge of anger flared through me at the thought that she was being paraded around like this. Had spent time with other males… talked to them, allowed them to… touch her?
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to complain… Your Royal… I mean Imperial Highness,” she corrected herself, after she must have noticed my darkening mood.
I needed to be more careful with her. She was extremely perceptive. Thankfully, my anger boiled only low so far. Not many other people had been able to recognize it at this stage, because I had become very adept at masking it.
“Please don’t apologize,” I repeated again, taking a deep breath to calm my temper down. “Your feelings are valid and to be expected. I just wasn’t aware that the sentinel guardians would parade you around like this. Are the other ladies like Lady Natoi?”
“Pretty much. They’re all very nice though,” she assured me again, and I began to suspect that she was trying to assure herself as much as me.
“I promise I will look into it and find a better way to arrange the meeting of possible mekarry bonds instead of having you and the others paraded like… livestock,” I offered.
“It hasn’t been that bad,” she tried, but I suspected it to be more of a polite objection than a real one. And there was that damned word again, polite. I wanted to have an honest conversation with her, not a polite one. Damnit.
I raised an eyebrow to encourage just that.
“Well, it can be tiring,” she admitted. Good. Finally.
After a moment’s hesitation and an encouraging nod from me, she continued, “It’s just all these men look at me with so much hope when I enter the room, waiting for… I don’t know, lightning to strike? How exactly does this mekarry bond work?”
How indeed? I wondered.
“I’m not quite certain either. For some, I’ve heard it’s like recognition when they meet, as if seeing someone they’ve known their entire lives, without knowing they existed. For others, it’s a strong sense of protectiveness, possessiveness.” I moved my hand through my hair, tried to remember what Garth, Xandros, and the other Pandraxians I met with who had found their mekarry bonds told me. “It’s not always instant, but it seems that a sense of something always accompanies the first meeting.”
“Something?” she asked innocently enough.
I nodded. “Vra, something that changes their…” Behavior, emotions, my mind supplied. Vra, go on, it challenged, and I nearly smirked. But then I realized that this was exactly what I was experiencing when I was with her. The sudden dampening of my flaring temper?
Heat broke out at my neck, so much so, small beads of sweat trickled down my back. Nocc, I thought, that can’t be. She can’t…
And yet.
Abruptly I rose. “I’m sorry, I forgot I need to… to…”
Confused, she looked up. I had every intention of asking her to leave, but those deep, dark sapphire eyes on me made it impossible to think, impossible to cut our visit short.
“How about a walk?” I asked instead.
“A walk sounds nice.” With difficulty, she arranged the many folds of her clothing so she wouldn’t trip over the hems, and got up from the couch.
What was I thinking? I couldn’t take her to the park or down the hallways. People would see us, stop, and… gossip. Damnit.
“Let me show you my private garden,” I compromised.
Gently, I placed my hand on the small of her back and guided her to another door that led toward a corridor and an elevator, taking us up to the top floor.
The garden here wasn’t as large as the park, but it was decently sized and high enough for the plants to get fresh air.
